Author: Warren Ellis

The moving parts of the newsletter. Or, at least, my newsletter.

I got into the habit, some years ago, of breaking it into sections. At one point, it was a ten-section operation, and I had the ten pieces listed on a piece of paper taped to my office wall. Right now, due to pressure of time, it’s around seven sections, sitting as a template in Campaign Monitor.

It’s a fluid thing right now, decided by time as much as mood. On occasion I throw the template out and just write one or two long rants and call it done. But, at the moment, it breaks down into:

• Intro. “Hello from out here on the Thames Delta.”
• News. If I have any. Which, these days, I tend not to have too much of, because most of my work is in television, on long production schedules, where announcements and updates are controlled by the studio or network.
• “Feature.” Space for a complete thought, or a long piece of rambling writing, or a book review, or, if I’m very lucky, somebody else would like the space to say something. Tends to get thrown overboard these days.
• The template currently has a space for WORKSPACES, where I convince creative comrades to show me a photo or two of their current workspace and a hundred words or so about it. Have not been too successful at this of late.
• THE NEWS. A very new section, which, for four weeks, will feature a new piece of art by digital artist Lordess Foudre. It’s a space I’d like to continue after Lordess finishes up. It’s nice to be able to put new artists in front of 22,000 people.
• SPEKTRMODULE: the title of my ambient podcast that I never get time to do any more, a point in the newsletter where I link to new music I like.
• Repeating section where I introduce myself, run a short bio, personal links, built into template.
• Outro, where I thank you for reading and try to make you feel better about having wasted all that time on the above.

As you can see, unless I can convince someone to do WORKSPACES or THE NEWS, it’s all me. (I’ve almost given up on persuading anyone to make use of the Feature space.)

In times past, I could use Feature to do a recurring THREE QUESTIONS section where I ask a creative comrade, imaginatively, three questions. I never seem to have the personal bandwidth to get that done, these days, and everybody is very busy anyway.

Now, here’s a question: do people sign up for the newsletter for me, or for the things I bring them? Because I think it’s the latter, and I think it ties into thinking over the previous 10/15 years about Attention Economy and Agalmic Economy.