Are You Living in the Real World? — mnchrm vol. lxviii
mnchrm — lxviii — 200915
Are You Living in the Real World?
(Am I?)
Hello, friends!
I'm Ian Battaglia, a writer and photographer based out of Chicago; and this is my newsletter. If you're not sure why you're getting this and you don't want to be, please click the link at the bottom of this page to unsubscribe; no hard feelings, and I promise it's a painless unsubscribe. If you like this letter, I'd love for you to forward or share it with a friend, or send the link to the archive.
So, a strange thing happened. I'm not even really sure where to start with this, so I'll start at the top.
Despite being a voracious reader as a kid and having taken pride in my English course placement, I didn't start writing until college. While attending film school, one of the first courses I took was a screenwriting course, and something about it just clicked with me.
Like the realization I'd made just months prior to that, thinking, oh yeah, people work on movies for a living—it suddenly occurred to me that people wrote professionally, too. Not just journalists and screenwriters, but people write. Something about it seemed so romantic, even moreso than being on set. This sounds sort of odd to admit, maybe this is really obvious, but I swear it somehow wasn't something I'd thought about too seriously before then.
I think around this time I was also discovering the wide expanse of weird fiction on the internet. Writers like Uel Aramchek, Ritter Coldriss, and T.R. Darling opened my eyes to a totally new world of stories, ones where 140 characters (remember the Twitter character limit?) could be more evocative than an entire novel, and microfiction could present an entirely new reality. I wanted in.
Before I ever wrote anything professionally, I posted all of my writing to a blog. This has long been called monochromatic, and came to house tons of essays and short stories; over a novel's worth of words in time. At one time I was posting both an essay and a story to the blog each week. The stories I wrote around this time are extremely reminiscent (read: knock-offs) of the work of writers like Uel and Coldriss, and the half-baked essays were often inspired by the blogs I followed back then like David Cain's Raptitude.
Eventually, after migrating the blog from different hosts and to different URLs, I wanted to write more professionally. I started pitching pieces that would have been essays, and stopped writing fiction to focus on a novel manuscript. The short fiction I did write I sent out to literary magazines, and started racking up rejections. As such, the blog laid dormant. I'd post a new essay every once and a while, and some of the last pieces I wrote (like on how computers are depressing, or the state of narrative in video games) are pieces I'm still proud of. I kept meaning to write a new piece, to get back into it, but instead, it just sat.
Actually, in many ways, this newsletter is the next version of the blog. I write pieces about things that interest me, which are largely the same set of topics that I wrote about before. If you're new, you can check the archive.
But the blog itself sat quiet.
Until:
Sunday, I went in to the latest version of the blog, hoping to update my writing portfolio with the complete and up-to-date list of all the bylines I've accumulated. Despite having a newsletter tab on the site, which lead to an embedded block allowing you to subscribe, I realized I had also told Ghost, my blog host, to collect email addresses. It did this using a form on the bottom of the homepage, and a small pop-up in the corner that appeared occasionally.
Having forgotten this, I clicked on the "subscribers" page in the admin's part of the site.
And there, I found 3200 email addresses.
I sort of sat in silence for a while, scrolling up and down this list. Is it all bots? How could this many people have even seen my blog over two years, let alone entered their emails?
Assuming this was largely incorrect, I ran the list through a service to verify email addresses. And that's what I'm left with: over 1900 new subscribers.
To put that into context, this newsletter has had 70 subscribers more or less for the past year. 18 newsletters, sent out over nearly 12 months, and continually hovering around 70 people. Which only makes 1900 seem even less likely.
I'm really not sure what to think. I'm sort of in disbelief. But I decided to add the new verified list. So, welcome.
As I said at the top, if you were added in error, please unsubscribe at the bottom, and you'll be instantly removed.
I've never sent this newsletter to more than even a hundred people, so the over 2000 I'm sending this to (ostensibly?) is surreal to say the least. I don't really know what to make of it.
Maybe you all are real people who liked my blog and wanted to be kept up to date. Maybe I'm just yelling into the void more than ever and about to receive 2000 bounced emails and be relegated to the shadow realm forever. Hard to say!
So, a primer. I'm Ian. I went to film school and have worked in cinema production since, in production and post production. I'm a writer, and editor at The Chicago Review of Books. I've had pieces appear in a few publications, but I'm still at the outset of my writing journey (I hope!)
I'm also a photographer, and the blog's old URL now houses my photography portfolio. My focus is mainly in street photography, but you can see I take photos across a few different genres.
Lately, I've been sending out Monochromatic Aberration (this newsletter) bi-weekly, but I've been thinking about trying to kick it up to weekly. I primarily write about writing and photography, though there's small essays, loose thoughts, and collected links of things I find interesting in here, too. These usually go out on Sunday or Monday.
It's sort of like an expanded version of my Twitter feed, which is where you should go if you want to keep in touch between letters.
Finally, I've got a Patreon for more in-depth writing. Lately, this has been in the form of educational photography content, though I also write critically about the anime I'm watching, and a few other topics. (Signing up also gets you a bunch of high-res phone wallpapers made from my photos. There's some desktop ones, too.)
I just posted a video to Patreon where I work through editing photos from a weekend camping trip from import to export. It's really interesting (imo!) if you like videos of process as much as I do.
Anyways, I just wanted to say welcome to the new subscribers, give the uninterested a chance to unsubscribe, and sort of see if this is real or not. As always:
Stay strong, fight on.
From Chicago with love.
Your faithful commander,
— I