51 - A peek behind the curtain
A year is coming up for this newsletter- I’ve nearly written the full 52!
I don’t know what’s to come in the future - I’m hoping you’ll be able to help me by filling out a short survey:
Click here - should only take about 5 minutes!
I wanted to give you a peek behind the curtain about the process for how I write the newsletter. A bit navel-gazing, I know, but I’ll be back with better content soon :)
Next week, I’ll share back some commentary from the survey, as well as some of the analytics data from my posts!
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What’s the writing process?
I like to break things up so that I do less, more often. I read somewhere that you have different modes of creation - one where you’re in a more brainstorm-y mode, and one where you’re actually implementing the ideas you’ve had. So what I’ve done is:
a. IDEA: I keep a list on my phone which has a list of things that I want to write about. Often they’re just questions, or topics that I want to write about.
b. OUTLINE: When I have time, I write up a bunch of outlines. It’s always easier to write things up when you have something to start with; get over the ‘blank screen’ lack of ideas when you need to turn the creative juices on. Here’s an example:
c. WRITING: Usually on Monday or Tuesday night, I’ll write up the post itself. This takes a lot less time than if I have to sit and write on the actual night itself. This is the fun part! I usually have a backlog that I schedule, so that I don’t have to be worried about missing any weeks. And it’s worked for (at least) 51 posts so far!
d. EDITING: My initial view was that people would read this on the way to work, on their phones. So, I usually send a draft to my phone to read it so that I can see what it would look like, and try to work out if there are any wording or grammar issues. Hopefully you haven’t found any? :D
I know that most people might be using email clients now though since we’re all in quarantine, so that’s what the survey is for!
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What do I write with?
Typora - One of the things that I wanted to learn during this process was a new “language” - in this case, I wanted to learn Markdown. It’s a way of using plain-text to format text. E.g. if you want to italicise something, you use asterisks: like * this *. A similar language called LaTeX is used form mathematical / scientific papers, which I’ve used to format reports for in university, except it’s more complex (using syntax like \b or \table to define formatting).
Anyway, Typora allows you to write in Markdown, but previews it in the editor e.g. how it’ll look. This makes it much easier to use. I can also attach image links, gifs, and URLs to make this whole thing media-rich! Yumm.
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How do I publish things?
Buttondown - When I did my research, I was looking at TinyLetter, which is a personal newsletter service that was part of the popular email marketing platform MailChimp. At the time, it looked like TinyLetter was shutting down, so I wanted to take a chance on a more indie newsletter service. It also supported Markdown, so it was perfect. It handles everything in terms of design of the newsletter, the email it’s sent out from, the scheduling, the subscriber list - all of it is simple, so I just have to focus on writing.
Every time I’ve had an issue (e.g. when something wasn’t sent out on time, or pictures weren’t uploaded) the dev has been happy to help, and quick to reply. It’s just one guy, so I’m pretty impressed he’s been doing all this by himself!
Thank you for staying with me for all this time - it’s been a really fun year, and I hope there’ll be a lot more!
Chat soon :)
✔️ Real Life Recommendations
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Netflix Party - I’m sure you’ll have heard of this already if you have Netflix, but it’s a way to sync up your screen with other people so that you can watch things together. It’s been fun to use to shit-talk movies as you watch, I’ve been having a lot of fun with it!
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Bass and Flinders Orient Gin - look, I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel - since Lockdown 2.0, there’s not a lot of new things these days! I will say that this has been helping - even though the naming is a little weird. The flavours are actually really nice - jujubes, mandarin and Sichuan pepper come together in a really nice way. Slightly bitter, tangy, but sweet with the addition of strawberry gum. Really lovely!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Writing is the most important skill for the future - one person’s view, yes, but it has good points around the fact that writing is thinking. Wish I knew this when I was at school…
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This Word Does Not Exist - using GPT-2 (a machine intelligence algorithm based on language models) to create new words with associated definitions.
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Lots of Things Happening At Once - we’re in a really uncertain period and it’s very tempting to latch on to simplistic, causal stories. However, usually it’s because a lot of things are happening at once that leads to the overall situation / collapse. Thinking broader means that you’re less likely to become stubborn about a view and forget to change your mind.