Update
Apologies for the long absence. I have been dealing with various personal matters, including mental and physical health issues for the past few months that have created obstacles to regular releases. Luckily, in a certain sense, they are not related to current events, but are concerns that flair up from time to time. As this is not a monetized newsletter, I have had to put it on the back burner as I dealt with more immediate issues. Luckily, I have still made progress on multiple projects, but haven’t been able to finish much up. That long promised issue on the peculiarities of our current oligarchs, and other problems, is coming along nicely with over 2000 words down in a better than rough draft form. To share a bit of my method, I tend to do an unusual amount of copy editing and a fair amount of revision while writing rather than as a process after a first pass. It makes my progress look slow at times, but it means once something is down I can get it out faster than if it was a plain rough draft. It has also helped me avoid and simplify the process of major revision. The smaller rewrites help me avoid having to do major ones.
I can share details of the fiction too, finally. It’s taken shape as a series of nested narratives tentatively titled “Meta-morphoses”. They’re variations on a theme making up a single story. It starts quietly and will be released in parts rather than a whole, but I’ll put up a warning now that it deals explicitly with pretty much every unpleasant topic under the sun at some point and is rather gory once it gets going. I have decided that the newsletter itself would be a bad format for long form fiction, even serialized, so it’ll arrive in your inboxes as some sort of downloadable file or link to one. Still working out the details, but the newsletter hasn’t been hijacked by some sort of spammer when you see that. I will also be sending newsletters about the intention and process of writing it if there is reader interest, along with standard issues. It’ll be attributed to the author Clay, which is the gestalt authorial entity for fiction over here at Semiurge. Unless everything here is the work of a single person, or at least not all the people that may be mentioned from time to time. It will never be clarified what the truth is, as all parties enjoy both privacy and obfuscation. And don’t feel the need to divulge identifying details to anyone but the taxman, frankly.
I would ask that — if you ever feel like I have successfully picked up the pace of release and have built up a sufficient archive — you share issues you have found interesting, or think other people you know would find interesting. I would like to grow this enough to consistently cover monthly costs through one time “donations” through something like Ko-fi. That’s as close as I will get to monetization. I will absolutely not be running ads or doing sponsored content at any point, and I strongly dislike gating content to entice recurring subscriptions. I won’t bring this sort of business up often, although I will send out an announcement when I feel justified in setting up a donation account. Right now there’s not many back issues and releases are too sporadic for me to feel comfortable doing that. Send me a message if you have any objections.
You’ll hear from me, with a proper issue, soon. Assuming I don’t keel over.
All the best,
Cass Andra