Strange Animals: Finalé? Reboot?
Hey, folks! It’s been a while since I’ve written you here in newsletter-land. And it’s my fault, of course.
But I come to you with joyous news, or a good news/bad news scenario, depending on how you look at it.
You see, this is the final Strange Animals missive.
(Dun-dun-DAAAAAAAAAH! Read on.)
I painted myself into a corner with this newsletter. It was originally started to promote my lettering career, and to do a mental download every few weeks.
During the pandemic, though, I saw the proliferation of newsletters, and the flood of them in my inbox made me feel like my newsletter shouldn’t be so frequent, and it should always be of some value to the readers. So I’d make sure that along with news, there’d be one essay of some kind with every newsletter.
A fine goal, but there were two problems with this.
- I can’t always tell what will be of value to my newsletter readers.*
- Everything I wanted to write without fretting too much about, I ended up writing on my blog.**
* As every writer has discovered, sometimes a piece you’ve dashed off in an hour will engender heartfelt thanks, and something you laboured on for weeks will land to crickets.
** My logic was that if you're visiting me, you’d allow me self-indulgences that you wouldn’t want in your inbox, see?
So by the middle of this year, I’d reached a point where I was sending these out every few months or even less, and there was barely any “news” to the newsletter.
On the other hand, last week, I realised that I had been posting weekly “Status Updates” to my blog very regularly, which were, if I thought about it even for a second, just … bloody newsletters. They’ve been fun to write, because they are a weekly download of whatever I’d been watching/reading/thinking, and people like them, because they’re unfussy and approachable.
And rather than sending them to my ~1,000 existing newsletter subscribers, I’ve been sending them to a much smaller (but growing healthily, thankyouverymuch) readership on my blog.
Here’s my latest Status Update (Week 41), for example, in which I talk about a few announcements, the Shortbox Comics Fair, my friend Pranav’s cooking project, the idea of boredom/slowness in entertainment, and the movie The Outwaters. Quite a bit of a stuff, as you’ll realise.
Going backwards, some of the previous ones, if you’d like a taste:
- Week 40, with a drawing, some thoughts about films, and a bit about the Meta-Myanmar connection and net neutrality in India.
- Week 39, with bits about Michael Gambon and the one film that’s freaked me out – Incantation.
- Week 38, where I talked about the process for Juni Ba and my Harley Quinn story, the book Last Days, and about rereading Clive Barker’s The Books of Blood.
I have also been writing smaller blogposts such as:
- This post on James Tynion IV and Joshua Hixson’s The Deviant.
- This little review of one of my favourite films of the year, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.
- This essay on Immersive Non-Fiction.
If you like what you read up there, you’re going to be very happy with this next step.
Here’s what’s going to happen – I’m going to merge my blog and my newsletter. You don’t have to change any settings if you follow just one of those, but now you won’t have to go to two places to follow my writing.
If you follow my blog via RSS feed or by visiting adityab.net directly, nothing changes for you at all.
The newsletter audience, on the other hand, will now get my Status Update posts, which will lead you to everything else I’ve posted on my blog during the week.
Additionally, once in a while, if I feel like I’ve written a nice topical essay, I’ll push that to you as well. (Essentially, the update portion and essay portions of my existing newsletter are now independent.)
And finally, if you feel like commenting on any of these publicly, you can comment on the relevant blogpost. (I still welcome email responses, of course. They always make my day.)
Based on this summary, and after checking out the posts above, if this sounds like a good idea to you, you don’t have to do anything. Starting this weekend, you’ll start getting the Status Updates.
If, on the other hand, you’ve been a fan of Strange Animals, and you have no interest in whatever balderdash this might turn out to be, feel free to unsubscribe below. No harm, no foul, it’s been a pleasure having you here so far.
In sum, Strange Animals is dead, long live …?
We’ll find out.
(I have four days to come up with a new name.)