👋 Welcome!

Do you love music? 🎶 Yeah!

What about memoir? ✍️ That too!

Have you ever noticed sometimes the perfect song seems to come on 🔀 to almost supernaturally ✨ soundtrack what’s going on in your life???

Yes?! OK, then this Substack 💌 is for you!

Shuffle Synchronicities is a spirited mix of music & memoir where we…

Shuffle 🔀 playlists, then write ✍️ & podcast 🎙️ about how the songs 🎶 seem to Synchronize with life ✨

Volume 1

Was featured on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour 🎙 near the end of its run of 365 daily posts 🗓

It included guest post collaborations 🙏

With everyone from Rolling Stone and Pitchfork music journalists 📝 to indie film directors 🎬, Astrologers ♈️, a Rabbi ✡️, art-rappers 🎤, mental health therapists/advocates 🧠 and a micro-niche-famous meme admin📱, as well as of course many fellow writers and readers in the Substack community 🤓

Such as…

• Rollie Pemberton (Cadence Weapon)

• Ray Padgett (Flagging Down The Double E’s)

• Caroline Rothstein

• Chris Cole

• Annie Rauwerda (@depthsofwikipedia)

• Paul Wilner

• Joey Power

• Dimitri Karakostas (@theworstpoet)

• Kiana Fitzgerald

• Jay Michaelson

• Bridey Elliott (Warty Roses)

• Leon Langford

• Leryl Joseph

• Cornell Sanner (Surfboard C)

• Kerem Sanga

• Jesse Raub (Good Ones)

• Andrew Womack

• Scott Frey (Sub Pub)

• Barrington Smith-Seetachit

• Rachel Lang

• Ethan Lipsitz

• Dave Dorsey

• Sean O’Neill

• Tim Dillinger (God’s Music Is My Life)

• Darnell Lamont Walker

• Jennifer Lee O’Brien (post emosh)

• Christopher Von Roy (The World According to Von Roy)

• Wayne Robins (Critical Conditions)

• Crash Barbosa

• Frederick Woodruff (WOODRUFF)

• Dan Marshall (Peter Pan Man Dan)

• Kellee Brewer Stall

• ?

• Dave Hunter (The Whalespout)

• Shayna Goodman (Blow Up Your Life)

• Eli Enis (Endless Scroll)

• Brian Dyko

• Jackson Bliss (Mixtape)

• Ila Parvaz (URF Tone)

• Alice Johnson Boher

• My Godson’s Father

• Matt Chambless

• Melanie Zoey Weinstein (feral masochism)

• Christopher Von Roy again (The World According to Von Roy)

• Rosecrans Baldwin (Meditations in an Emergency)

• Rebecca Davey (Observables)

• Jesse Meadows (Sluggish)

• Swarnali Mukherjee (Berkana)

Volume 2

Will focus on collaboration with others 🙏

Will open up the format to Podcasts🎙️ with live-Shuffles and resulting Podscripts🎙️📇

And will experiment with the practice of Post-Memoir 🧼🗣

Who am I?

Published by The New Yorker & McSweeney 🎩

Now mostly DIY 👨‍🔧

Self-published books 📚 featured in The New York Times 📰

And one that Wikipedia lists as perhaps the longest sentence 📜 in the English language🏅

Besides a shoutout on NPR 🎙, Shuffle Synchronicities was in the top 25 of its paid Substack category 📈 throughout the year of Volume 1 👏

Find more ‘me’ and ‘non-me’ things at my 🔗🌴

What are the Benefits of a Paid Subscription?

Since Volume 2 will focus on collaboration with others 🙏

After getting things up and running again 😅…

The guest posts will always be for Free Subscribers 🤗

While new solo posts will perhaps become for the Paid Subscribers 🤷

Paid Subscribers 💃🏿🕺 will receive an exclusive Substack thread with advice on How To Develop Our Own Shufflemancy Practice 🔮🫵😚

Founding Subscribers 🦸‍♀️🦸🏿‍♂️ will have the opportunity to book sessions to practice 🔀 Shuffling for ✨ Synchronicities together 🫂

NOTE:

Free and Paid Subscriber benefits are the same at the moment 🤫 but…

Paid Subscriptions help Volume 2 return to the top 25 in its category so others can discover the power of the 🔀✨! Also, much of the $ goes to collaborators like podcast guests & guest posters. So, you’d be a 😇

Hope you consider it 🤗!!!

Can We Guest Post?

Yes, please❗️❗️❗️

Any writer, on Substack or not; all people, whether ‘writers’ or not; are welcome to guest post 👐

Just like how Shuffle Synchronicities is post-music-criticism 🧐 in that there is no review of music as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ 🫶 there is also no editing of submissions 🤝

The only guideline is a shuffled-to-song is the starting point 😘

Contributors are gifted 🎁 Paid Subscriber status/benefits and perhaps more…

AKA every guest poster in Volume 1 was paid at least some 💸 ;)

If interested in collaborating in the format, email me 👍

EMAIL ShuffleSynchronicities@gmail.com

Podcasts 🎙 & Podscripts 🎙📇

As mentioned above we’re also introducing Podcasts

The first one is with Kiana Fitzgerald!

And Podscripts™️

The first one of those will be with Ray Padgett!

Also Now Includes A sub-Substack

Shuffle Synchroncities now includes a sub-Substack:

Seriocomics is a weekly enthusiasm for a work of graphic literature 🖌️📒 that's partly serious partly comic 🎭

This author, under our given name, i.e. reverse nom de plume, is working toward finishing a first graphic novel currently titled:

SHOULD WE, um, BUY A GUN?

A Romantic Seriocomic

About a newlywed couple who get mugged at gunpoint causing them to question their future together

Works of graphic literature enthused so far include:

ALL YOUR RACIAL PROBLEMS WILL SOON END written and drawn by Charles Johnson (published by New York Review Comics)

RADIUM GIRLS written and drawn by Cy (published by Glénat Editions & Iron Circus Comics)

"SMAHTGUY: The Life and Times of Barney Frank" written and drawn by Eric Orner (Published by Metropolitan & Henry Holt Books)

Lastly

The archive of Volume 1 was going to be for Paid Subscribers 🔐

Then while writing this About Page there was a Shuffle 🔀 for a Synchronicity ✨

Based on the intention for an insight into this choice 🤔

Which got no joke/no lie 😮

“Price Tag” by Jessie J, B.o.B

With lyrics like:

Seems like everybody's got a price
I wonder how they sleep at night
When the sale comes first and the truth comes second

And:

It's not about the money, money, money
We don't need your money, money, money
We just wanna make the world dance
Forget about the price tag

🤯

It seems quite clear what the Shuffle Spirits 😇🥰 are telling us

🆓