Well, it’s been a while.
Last post was *checks notes* holy shit in September. And that was basically saying the same kind of thing I’m doing now.
But after too many months of bad health (since July when I started this newsletter I’ve been bedridden with my back injury 3 times), I’m actually feeling really good right now. OK, I’ve still got a leftover toothache, but I can think clearly unlike most of last week.
Fun, right?
Today is honestly just me refusing to procrastinate more and get something out by my usual deadline. Skip the next section if you just want to know what’s going on with the newsletter.
An Update on My Life
Basically, aside from my chronic illnesses, things are going well. I’ve mostly settled into rhythms in my new place, my other paying work is flying along, and I’m finally healthy enough to walk around without a cane for the second time in six months.
I’m a bit behind on cleaning but catching up.
It’s all rather wonderfully low drama. A nice respite from the madness of the news and my continued political education. Whole mess there, not great.
We’ve also got some helpful backend tweaks on the newsletter that should make it better. I now have a PO box so if you want to send me mail I won’t find for a month or two you can look at the bottom of this email for it, lol. And I’m setting up a domain to send from rather than using the substack subdomain so fewer of these emails should get lost once we build up some domain reputation.
Novel Newsletterness: Where We Go From Here
In coming back to this and looking at what I’ve written, a few things are clear.
3x a week is WAY too much for me to comfortably do with my other writing work.
Hyper focusing on one topic at a time burned me out on Terence McKenna
I don’t want to be writing much on the weekends. I do need days off.
The previous posting schedule was really creating a hit on the quality of each post.
The idea of creating epic, in-depth master articles was very good but the idea of finishing them on a 1-2 month schedule was probably both foolish and unrealistic.
So, since we’re a month out from my 34th birthday, I figure we’re going to try a new schedule: Mondays and Thursdays, going out at 2 pm est. Starting tomorrow. We’ll reassess in early January.
I’m also trying to decide how I can combine actual accountability and making consistent progress towards these big articles while also reducing the focus on a single subject. Right now the big article on Terence’s Timewave has a lot of notes written towards it but no actual draft.
No need to fix the process right now, but some process is necessary.
For the most part, this newsletter has been me riffing on interesting topics I’ve found while researching the core question. Which has been fine, just hasn’t produced what I initially planned on making.
Oh, and, of course, I’m giving everyone another free month of the premium subscription.
Conclusion
For the next month, we’ll be doing Monday and Thursday updates going out at 2 pm est.
Tomorrow we’ll be talking about an important source text for Terence, Henry Munn’s The Mushrooms of Language.
Do you want to have a personal chat with me? I’m looking for people to email with so gmail gets nice and comfy with the new domain.