July 8, 2021

Notes from a transitional period.

So, the move to Buttondown is now finished. Mostly finished.

There’s some things like pictures not loading that I’m going to see if they can be fixed, as the image files were included in my archive download.

And now that it’s accomplished, I’m realizing there will always be some odd artifacts involved in picking up an archive of content produced on (and in some ways for) one platform and plunking them down into another. The old posts contain frequent references to the newsletter being a Substack, as well as links to subscribe to the Substack. It might be worth going through them a few at a time to prune the links; probably not worth worrying about the weirdness of having posts about my then-upcoming move to Buttondown on Buttondown.

Having accomplished this, I’m not sure it needed doing. My content isn’t episodic or numbered. If I wanted to have my archives all readable on a non-substack platform, I could have created another newsletter for it. I still might do that, ultimately, just to get a clean division between “this happened on Substack and is mirrored here” and “this is my current newsletter”.

The thing I noted in my first Buttondown email about the importance of blogging to my writing process wound up being a bit prophetic as I followed it up that same day with a news analysis piece. Yesterday I didn’t find the focus to blog on here and I also didn’t find the focus to send anything else; it could be that I simply lacked focus, but I don’t think I had the wherewithal to write about politics before I wrote my bloggy piece on Tuesday.

Focus is hard to come by these days. Summer heat and humidity play havoc with my disability, taking up ever more of my already scant stores of energy and focus to deal with.

As I put it on Twitter:

And also separately we’ve got some distracting doings around the house. Contractors are coming in to take a look at our basement, a damp, unfinished thing that we refer to as the murderbasement, to see what can be done about making it less damp, what maybe needs to be done to repair damage due to historical dampness, and how much all of that might cost.

I don’t expect an email newsletter to pay for foundation repair, obviously, but the impending financial crunch just added to the pressure to get out of the fatigue malaise and depression enough to do the sorts of things that people send me money for again.

On the topic of money… if you’re already paying a subscription via Substack, for now I leave it up to you whether it’s worth the time and effort to end that subscription there and subscribe over here instead. The money comes to me either way; I am divesting myself from Substack but I’m not about to tell you what to do with your money, especially when you’re utlimately paying it to me.

A point will come when I shut down my Substack account entirely, which may force the issue, but I’m not ready to do that yet and I’ll try to give plenty of warning before I do.

If you do buy a subscription over here, please note the following things:

1. You name your price. The default value in the price box (which you can delete and edit) is $25, as of the time I write this, but that’s an arbitrary number of a “”shoot your shot” variety. I like to experiment and see what works best; my operating theory right now is that it’s psychologically easier for someone to mentally bargain a number down than up.

2. It does not, at this time, give you access to any special exclusive or premium content. I’m a big believer in what I think of as the “freeware” or “public television” model of content production. I think the best way to get readers as a relative unknown is for people to read and circulate my work, and the best way to get paying readers is to have a lot of readers. If you do subscribe, you are not just paying to support my decadent, gay, foundation-repairing lifestyle, you are paying to help keep my content coming and readily available to readers like you.

Oh, and one more note on Buttondown in particular: This platform does not currently have any comment functionality, but replies to the newsletter do come to me. No promises in this area but I am interested in exploring a bit of a “reader mailbag” type deal. If you do reply to my newsletters via email, please let me know if you’d be cool with having your email quoted/excerpted and answered in public, and what name you’d like attached to it.

As I figure more of this place out, I’ll see about appending some instructions about that to the end of the newsletters.