a writer's notebook
I am not clicking through on the fucker, but somebody needs a pay raise for this work of genius presented as a spam email header:
Adults born before 1970 infected with “mind assassins” (startling brain fog discovery)
INFECTED WITH MIND ASSASSINS, you guys
Comments closedGod damn.
From MY FAVORITE THING IS MONSTERS, just an amazing act of artistic courage in visual narrative. What a wonderful book.
Comments closedCrepuscular crepitations, entirely fitting my mood today.
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This image by Anna Malina has fascinated me for days, because it captures so much space around a story idea I’ve been mulling for weeks. I love it. Click through here for the original post and links to her IG, YT, website and shop.
Comments closedSince we’re apparently doing Hailstorms In May out here on the Thames Delta, here’s some appropriately chilly music.
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See anything you like?
This is me starting to log for myself a thing I’ve found myself doing. Which started when I began to discover that things I wanted to see were not on streaming, or had been taken off streaming, and were getting harder and less reliable to purchase digitally. At which point, I figured that relying on digital services for these things was becoming really pretty stupid.
So I’m rebuilding a physical library. Trying to gather my old DVDs from wherever in the house they got scattered to, and buying new ones. These are just a few recent arrivals and rescues. MY WRONGS, at the bottom, I bought on release from Warp. A few of these are replacing old VHS copies I never previously got around to upgrading, like, obviously, the Quatermass pieces. I only have TURIN HORSE on digital, so this is my backup for that. Ben Rivers put TWO YEARS AT SEA up on YouTube at 360p, but, like I said…
Had to track down ARTEMIS 81 on Ebay. Still bothered by how the BBC somehow didn’t notice there is not actually an apostrophe in the title.
Anyway. This is a thing I do now instead of social media and the internet. It gives me pleasure and it’s making me learn.
One CommentI am really busy today with boring infrastructure stuff like drains and pipes and water where it shouldn’t be, but I had to stop for four and a half minutes to listen to this. I love it.
A newsletter (just the term we’ve got) can be many different things. There’s no One Way to do them. If there were, every newsletter would be a Goop-style jumpstation of artfully decorated links, because it’s so hugely successful. That is not for me. I dislike Goop for many reasons, not the least of which is that the newsletter has no actual content, only links out to their website. I still like a newsletter to be, in some form, a letter, which means there has to be significant fields of actual writing in it.
That said: I have ideal situations I want to work towards, and the thinking-this-through of it is why I started this blogchain in the first place, to get my thinking out in front of me where I can see it.
I daydream of the newsletter as small magazine. I’ve long been fascinated by the phenomenon of writers who run journals. Also, I like the idea of not having to write every damn thing in the newsletter every week. And when I look at this, the first thing I think of is Kieron Gillen running a contents list at the top of each of his newsletters:
It would give me pleasure to… have a logo, hahah. It would give me pleasure to be organised enough to start off with a short list of contents for a short magazine-like newsletter. Even though the newsletter, because it scrolls, presents as a single page – which also puts me in mind of a broadside sheet.
As previously noted – 22,000 readers. Also £200 a month in costs, likely to go up next year. I don’t have a war chest in place for such a thing, and newsletters are tough to tastefully monetise. I use Amazon Affiliate links, which knocks out maybe a quarter of the associated costs, and I’m even conflicted about them. But I daydream. And it leads me to think about the various moving parts of the newsletter.
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