Happy Birthday

Celebrating one year Making by the Law in Which We're Made

Making by the Law in Which We’re Made turned one year old last Wednesday, on the 5th. On the same day, as if fate bound,

Mary Aragona

became my 100th subscriber. To celebrate it, I would like to take a step back and look at the year that has passed, and all the people I have met in this weird piece of internet called Substack.

So, without further ado, it is time for a re-introduction…

Prologue

Hi. My name is Gabriel.

As far back as memory carries me, I was always reading. Family folklore has that, as a small child, I was photographed in a stroller, reading a plastic kid’s book during the Rio de Janeiro Book Fair. A little older, I would often sit on the floor of stores with a book while my parents were shopping. In middle school, I made a point of pride in reading the original text of the classics when teachers assigned us abridged versions (one of which was a less than two hundred page compression of Les Misérables).

When I grew up — God, I miss being able to say that sentence — I wanted to be:

a) an astronaut;

b) a screenwriter;

I eventually discovered all the horrifying ways in which you can die in space, and also that screenwriters don’t have that much control over movies. So being a writer came in swiftly to replace these aspirations. A writer. I could get used to it. Someday.

That day came in ninth grade, the last year of middle school in Brazil. My friends and I would get in all kinds of weird discussions, and the topic that day was: if you could pick one creature from each mythology around the world to create a team, which would they be?

That was the base for Soren, a fantasy book about a mage, a harpy, a curupira¹, a Japanese ghost, a dwarf, and Krampus working together in the modern world. Though I sometimes cringe remembering a few passages — hey, fifteen-year-olds have a right to be awkward — I still love that book like my firstborn.

“It was our first real invention. It’s the one that started it all.”

---

I have not stopped writing since. But I did fall into the beginner's trap: being unable to finish a new work. Meanwhile, though fiction is, and will always be, my first love, I had a lot of opinions on works of art I read or saw. Opinions that some people close to me thought were interesting. Of course they would think so — but complete strangers on the internet? That’s another bar to clear.

Then, my brother introduced me to Substack. With rare exceptions, I was not (am not) active on social media. But I gave it a shot, because the worst that could happen was no one noticing me, and then I would go on with my life. However, I think we all know how these things are:

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. […] You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

J. R. R. Tolkien

The Plot

It started on February 5th, when I released three posts: The Moment Walter White Became the Dark Lord, Why Galadriel Is the Greatest of All Elves, and The Warlord Chronicles — King Arthur and How to Guide Your Life.

My readership more than doubled in the first month — that is, it went from five to twelve readers, at which point I ran out of family and friends to emotionally blackmail. After that, my subscriber count grew slowly and steadily. On July 11th, I finally reached twenty-five. My first milestone! So, of course, I made a note about it.

Then this happened:

In one day I gained ten new subscribers. Before the end of the month, I had reached fifty. This may look like nothing when we have people making six figures from their publications, but for a beginner, it feels like going viral. Better than going viral. It feels like finding a road after being lost in the woods.

In the next months, readership kept growing. As I type this, we’re at one hundred and one subscribers. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Now I would like to take a moment and look back on the people I have discovered in my time here.

The Characters

The Brothers Krynn

Of course, I could not start with anyone else. As mentioned above, their single note catapulted Making by the Law out of the twenty-subscriber limbo. And I am not the only one: I constantly see the Brothers giving shout-outs and uplifting other writers. To have that kind of help from a, compared to me, big publication is not something one forgets. I may not agree with everything they write (c’mon, man. Give Martin a break), but their generosity and spirit of community are something we could all learn from.

Patrick Lawrence

Dear Patrick, I hate you.

Dude waltz into my platform, starts writing in my niche, STEALS MY POST, and has the audacity to grow much faster than I do.

He is also one of the best Tolkien writers on this platform, a sharp but generous mind, and a man I feel I would be friends with if we met in real life. Whatever success he has now, he deserves it doubled and tripled.

Eric Falden

&

Clifford Stumme

The Loremasters of the Inklingsphere, these two are the cool kids at school when it comes to Tolkien. If memory serves me, I was first introduced to Eric through a discussion about The Children of Húrin (one of my least favorite parts of the Silmarillion), shortly before he made a post about it that had me reconsidering my stance on the story. Meanwhile, my first interaction with Clifford came when I left a giant comment in one of his posts, about the difference between science fiction and fantasy. Their four-part exploration of On Fairy Stories, that often quoted (not necessarily often read) text, is peak nerdy Substack.

Eugene Terekhin

When it comes to Tolkien, Lewis, and Chesterton, Terekhin makes us all look amateurish. His style makes reason beautiful. It is the kind of effect one can hope to achieve on his best post — but he does it weekly.

Phisto Sobanii

I don’t know if I agree with… well, with anything Phisto has ever said, ever. But The Partisan’s post are filled with real passion, and his notes make my feed more interesting. So here’s to teacher Sobanii.

A Convict's Perspective

I miss Coleman.

The Portuguese Lady

I’ll resist the urge to make jokes about stolen gold and the Great Meme War of 2015. Because in reality, meeting another lusophone here in Substack was meeting a familiar face in a foreign land — a sentiment that grew when I began reading her publication, Triton’s Well. Given how much of Brazilian folk culture came from Portugal, diving into their stories and legends was like finding a photo of your great-grandfather — you realize where your features, which seemed inevitable, come from. She’s an underrated writer, and anyone interested in European legends should enjoy her work.

Ted Gioia

Mr. Gioia probably doesn’t think of himself as a celebrity, but that is what he looks like from down here. The Honest Broker was one of the first publications I subscribed to, and it is still one of the best. I find myself often quoting him when talking about the state of modern media. But though I am sure these are his most popular essays, his best ones (as often is the case) come when he writes about what he enjoys, without having to worry about the impending doomsday of American culture. His book Music to Raise the Dead, published chapter by chapter on Substack, was one of the most fun reads I've had in a while.

Mary Catelli

,

Richard Bryant

, &

Blake Hart

These three all have great publications in their own right. I have come to recognize them in my comment section, always generous, always insightful.

There is

Robert Walrod

, who recommended me The Discarded Image.

DW Dixon ⚙️⚙️

, with whom I shared a discussion on Brazilian history once. Palindrome Hannah, non-palindrome Hanna, neither-palindrome-nor-Hannah

Kathrine Elaine

.

Zeta Ferrer

, who I’m glad to have back on Substack. There are probably many more I’m forgetting.

And of course, there is my friends and family, who were my first subscribers, even though they neither knew what a “Substack” was, nor cared about Lord of the Rings.

Thank you, everyone.

---

Epilogue

Since these two milestones — my one hundredth subscriber and the one-year anniversary of Making by the Law — came on the same day, I might as well add a third one:

Making by the Law in Which We’re Made is officially going paid.

If you enjoy my writing and would like to support an independent artist, consider subscribing or updating your subscriptions for just 5 dollars a month.

Don’t worry, I won’t use the line of it costs less than a latte.

Going forward into 2025, I want to go back to the basics, but also expand into new territory: further up and further in, as someone once said. I want to re-read The Chronicles of Narnia, and finally make peace with The Last Battle. I also want to meet new authors — the Le Guins and the Pullmans — and see how they compare and contrast with Tolkien and Lewis.

Whether you are an old subscriber or a newcomer, or even just a virtual passerby, I’ll be glad to have you on this journey.

Happy birthday to You and I, reader. Here’s for another year.

1. A curupira is a kind of Brazilian goblin with feet turned backwards and hair on fire. He also has OCD like a vampire. Brazil is a weird place.