A Change of Address

For a while now I’ve been keeping two houses and doing neither of them justice. That ends today.

From here on, my writing lives at Field Notes by Luke on Substack. The nature essays, the conservation arguments, the pieces on craft and independent publishing, and yes — the cryptids and the folklore and the things people swear they saw on a back road at dusk. All of it, in one place, arriving in your inbox the moment it’s finished.

This blog isn’t being deleted. The archive stays exactly where it is, and I’ll still post here when something genuinely suits the format. But if you want the work — the real work, as it appears — Substack is where to find me.

Why

Partly it’s the reason any writer eventually chooses one desk over two. Split your output across platforms and you don’t get twice the readership; you get half the writing.

But mostly it’s this: readers have been telling me for months that emails they signed up for never arrived, that comments disappeared, that they’d assumed I’d stopped writing altogether. That’s a poor arrangement for everybody, and no amount of tinkering has fixed it. Substack does one thing and does it plainly. I write, and it lands with you. There is no feed deciding whether you’ve earned it this week.

What’s waiting

Most of it is free. Sign up, pay nothing, and you’ll get the essays and field pieces as they publish — more of them than you’ve been getting here, and more ambitious. Substack is where I’ve decided to stop playing safe. The research goes deeper, the arguments have edges, and I’m rather less interested in being agreeable than I used to be.

There’s also a paid side, and it’s worth explaining what it actually is, because it isn’t a tip jar.

The Reyes Files is a monthly serialised novel-in-episodes. Marcus “Red” Reyes is a former Army combat tracker who works the cases nobody files properly — the animal that shouldn’t be in that county, the death that got written up as an accident because the alternative was unwriteable. There is nothing supernatural in it. Everything is treated as a biological problem, tracked and solved with real fieldcraft, because that’s the only version of this I have any interest in writing.

The pilot episode is free to read in full. Go and see whether it’s for you before you spend a penny.

Paid subscribers get every episode, the full back catalogue, and the run of the archive. Founding members also get the year’s episodes as a printed paperback, which I post out myself.

What I’m asking

Just this: come with me.

If you’ve been reading here for years, you’re the reason any of this works, and I’d rather not lose you to a platform’s bad plumbing. It takes about fifteen seconds and costs nothing.

Subscribe to Field Notes by Luke →

I’ll keep a light going here. But the writing has moved, and I’d like you there when the next one lands.

— Luke