Celebrating 2 Years on Substack and a Special Offer

Some Fun Facts and some new things from the past 12 months.

Mar 18, 2026

Hey Readers,

This month I’m celebrating my 2nd Year Anniversary on Substack!

🥳 🎉 🎈 🥂 🍻 👏 🎊 🙌

Thanks to all my subscribers and faithful readers! Your support of this space means so much to me.

To commemorate this occasion, I’ll be posting some archived posts from my early days on this platform. The one below is from Spring of 2024.

I’m also offering a limited-time discount on my paid features of Quiet Zeal. I’m reducing my price to $50/year. This offer will be available until April 15, 2026. (If you jumped in before this discount, don’t worry, I’ll make sure you get the extra Founding Member Features and perks!)

The paid version of Quiet Zeal includes the paywalled features of my Moments of Pause posts as well as weekly installments of Touching Infinity, my serialized fantasy novel. You can find the introduction, including my fun video trailer here.)

Two Whole Years?

Two years ago I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing with Substack, but I knew I wanted to write about being a highly sensitive introvert and celebrating small moments. That vision has not changed, but I did refine it a bit. You can read more on my updated About page:

Two years ago, Notes were just getting started on Substack. Before that, people found each other organically through searches, recommendations and by exploring each other’s newsletters. I miss those days. But it’s also been fun to enjoy the new Substack features including the multi-media and layout options.

What I did this past year:

I learned from several sources that it’s a good practice to give your newsletter a refresh because the Substack platform, along with our own visions as writers, changes frequently.

Besides updating my About Page, I revised my Hero post to function as an index to my whole website. I also revised my short description, bio, welcome emails and welcome page.

I also updated and lightened my profile picture, enlarged and added shadows to my wordmark.

Profile pictures - Both are from the same photo shoot, but the 2nd is more accurate for how I look now.

I kept my logo the same, but sharpened the butterfly for my Home Page cover.

Cover Image3.jpg — Current Home Page cover

I spent much of the summer revising and setting up my chapters of Touching Infinity in a new Fiction section. I also recorded the audio version and located or created photos and original artwork for each chapter.

I studied how tiers are set up on Substack, did a bunch of research about collecting payments, and officially launched my paid features in December 2025. I also created a few special offers.

Several groups I really enjoyed:

Call for Heroines - I participated in Lisa-Marie Cabrelli’s course, a unique life purpose quest for 40+ women based on the story structure of the heroine’s journey in fiction writing.

Highly Sensitive Woman - Andy Smit leads excellent workshops that help highly sensitive women navigate their Substack journeys.

Soul Minimalist - Emily P. Freeman - Multi-book author, podcast speaker. Her main focus, among many, is helping people overcome decision fatigue. I highly recommend her books - The Next Write Thing and How to Walk into a Room.

Writers at Work - My second year with Sarah Fay. She teaches great writing tips and has her finger on the pulse of everything Substack.

Meeting In Person:

Back in February I met with 4 other Substack writers from Minnesota at a local restaurant. We had some great discussions about writing, publishing, our varied histories in the Twin Cities, and how we were dealing with ICE. Thanks Cindy Ojczyk for organizing this.

Here are the new people that I met:

Cindy Ojczyk - Like People Like Pets - multi-talented author and memoirist who writes excellent insights about pets and people.

Mary Roblyn - Writer Interrupted - Well-written stories of grief and loss, sometimes with a dash of humor. She’s also a fellow Minnesotan who happens to live in the neighborhood where I grew up.

Jeanne Grant - A Good Spot - Sharing her dream of caring for animals in a nurturing environment.

Colleen Burns Durda - This Side of the Couch - writes about mental healthcare from the patient’s perspective.

Some Fun Facts:

2026: According to my current stats, Quiet Zeal is read across 35 US states and 15 countries. This was a slight increase from last year with 33 US states and 13 countries.

Blog Post Stats

In total, since January of 2025 I’ve published 30 posts.

5 of them were reprints or revised articles from my old blog.

15 were fiction chapters.

3 posts included videos.

I wrote one series.

The average length of my non-fiction Pause posts has been 1096 words.

The average length of my first five published fiction posts is 3260 words.

From the Archives

Below is one of my earliest posts from 2024. Enjoy!

Special thanks again to my faithful Quiet Zeal Readers.
You know who you are.