There’s a particular kind of clarity that only comes after you’ve been doing something the hard way for long enough.
You don’t notice it while it’s happening. You’re too busy figuring out plugins and category IDs and whether your featured image is the right aspect ratio and why the block editor just ate the last three paragraphs you wrote. You tell yourself this is just part of it. This is what having a real blog looks like.
And then one day you sit down to write something that matters to you — something personal and a little raw and maybe even important — and you realize you’ve spent forty-five minutes on formatting and approximately eleven minutes on the actual words.
That’s the moment.
I built this space on WordPress because I wanted ownership. Control. The ability to make it mine in ways that a platform couldn’t take away. And those things are real. WordPress delivered them. I’m not here to throw shade at a tool that did exactly what it promised.
But here’s what I didn’t fully account for: I am a writer. Not a webmaster. Not a developer. Not someone who should have strong opinions about DNS settings or plugin conflicts or whether the mobile version of my site is rendering correctly on a Samsung Galaxy S22.
I have opinions about words. About stories. About the particular kind of honesty that only happens when you stop performing and just tell the truth.
WordPress is a fantastic platform for people who want to build a website that also has a blog. Substack is a platform built for people who want to write, full stop. And somewhere along the way I forgot which one I actually am.
So here’s what’s changing. All of it.
Mugwump Ramblings. Wayfinder. Thrive. The whole operation is moving to Substack. Every vertical, every category, every post I write from here on out — it’s all happening there.
No more block editor. No more plugin drama. No more spending a Tuesday afternoon troubleshooting why my featured image looks fine on desktop and completely unhinged on mobile. Just writing. Actual writing. The kind where the only thing standing between a thought and a published post is whether I have something worth saying.
And honestly? I almost always have something worth saying. Right?! You know I’m right … lol.
Substack does something WordPress never quite cracked for me: it makes the relationship between writer and reader feel like a relationship. Notes. Replies. The sense that we’re in a conversation rather than me shouting into a website and hoping the algorithm decides to tell you about it. You’ll get the posts in your inbox like letters. You can write back. We can actually talk.
That’s the version of this I’ve wanted all along.
So what happens to randyscobey.com?
It becomes what it probably should have been for a while now — an archive and a home base. The memoir page stays. The about page stays. The years of posts stay, exactly where they are, not going anywhere. But the living, breathing, weekly writing? That’s moving to Substack, effective immediately.
Come find me there. Subscribe. Tell a friend. Bring snacks.
The duckknuckles are migrating, and there’s plenty of room.
If you’ve been reading here — thank you. For the hard posts and the funny ones and the ones where I clearly had no idea how it was going to end when I started typing. You showed up anyway. That’s not nothing.
Now come with me. The next chapter’s already started.
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