Out now! A witchy project in pod form

"Not Right Now" coming atcha

If you don’t know much about me, I’m a freelance writer, a Substack publisher, and an irritable mother. One of the work things I do is serve as managing editor of Inbox Collective, which I, biased, think is a great resource for other active/aspiring newsletter writers out there.

For an Inbox Collective story on how newsletter creators named their publications, I contacted Quinn Emmett of Important, Not Important to hear how he named that particular baby. Important, Not Important is full of pithy, actionable ways to improve this planet. Quinn has 3 kids (at one point, 3 under 3), so he doesn’t have time to mess around.

He answered my question but then proposed, “This is random, but one pretty open question I get requests to write/talk about…a lot…is parenting in this climate/health/AI era. If you ever want to shoot the shit in a real raw, informal way, I think it’d be fun. There’s a huge appetite for it, with so many parents going ‘what the fuck am I supposed to tell/teach these kids about XYZ.’”

That was in October, and since then, somehow (thanks mostly to him and his amazing producer/editor, Willow Beck), we launched a whole podcast, lol. I think it’s one of those situations where you’re supposed to be doing 12 other tasks, and the pressure squeezes out a diamond of a whole other thing. You can give the premiere a spin 📢 here📢, find it on any mainstream podcast platform, and read Quinn’s pod origin story here.

The podcast is brand new and still in its fourth trimester: learning to focus its eyes, discern day from night, and keep its meals down. We’ve banked a few episodes coming down the pike but it will inevitably get even stronger, smarter, cuter, more personable and interesting as it learns more about the world (IE, we hear from listeners and bring in some more experts and topics.) It will be a lot more fun than figuring out how to live and raise okay-ish people in 2025 and onward.

Why did we name it Not Right Now? We have five kids between the two of us, so it took a lot of time to figure out how to name this new project; we were well into recording before we even had a title. It was hard to find a name that conveyed something kinda snarky, kinda ‘in these times,’ something that conveyed parenting but didn’t need to be on the nose about parenting. Some of our rejected ideas included:

• Screaming in the Shower

• It’s Giving Family: Raising Kids in the Weirdest Timeline

• Parenting Through It: Surviving The Timeline We Never Asked For

• CTRL+ALT+PARENT: Millennials Winging It Through The End Times

• Raising Humans in Beta

• Grown-ish Problems: When Lazy And Entitled Had Kids Of Their Own

• pArents & kIds

• Not Regular Parents

• A Millennium Apart

• Human Children in Robot Times

• The Kids Are Alright...Right? Parenting Through Late-Stage Everything

• How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” Keeping up with offline children in online times.

I think Quinn suggested “Not Right Now” after one of those parenting moments we have every day, where you are elbows deep in the dishes at 7:50 AM and trying to remember to pack the kids’ shoes and where the snow boots are and thinking about the work day ahead, trying to remember to email the kids’ teacher and put the sports schedule on the Google calendar and contemplating how to fight fascism in some tiny way before bedtime and also what’s for dinner and then your kid asks you if you can search up what year Kendrick Lamar graduated from 8th grade.

“Not Right Now” can apply to so many things on any given day to any given parent—or human—from the big to the small, to the tragic to the mundane, from the insurmountable to the so-surmountable-it’s-stupid-to-even-do-so-why-bother. We talked about making “Not Right Now” knob tags to hang from our doors when we want to be left alone, but we also said we know that they’d go unheeded, so maybe it’s just the thought that counts. That sort of thing.

Anyway! If you’re driving around, folding laundry, doing dishes, meal prepping, walking the dog, or are hiding from your kids in the bathroom and are Not Right Now-curious, 🗣️give it a listen🗣️ and maybe hang out with us. My philosophy for this newsletter also applies to the pod: I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m making this up as I go along. I think it applies to parenting, too.

Extra special thanks to Evil Witch Kristen Cox—whose work as a graphic designer I know of thanks to her engagement with our classified ads—for designing our semi-apocalyptic, semi-TGIF logo. She was an absolute pro to work with, and I recommend the hell out of her if you need some work like that done.

Thanks for your time, witches! (This will not replace or change the newsletter, so you still get your regular inbox stories, jokes, questions, rants, memes, and gifs.

~Claire

---

End credits

Thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. Here’s what the newsletter is typically all about if you’re new to it. The archives live here. Here’s the ol’ subscribe button if you’ve been meaning to get all the extra special paid-subscriber-only material/and or just support this work:

---

One witchy thing