Hi readers,
Some time back (a year ago?!) I quietly turned off the subscription billing for this newsletter, knowing I would be posting irregularly as I worked a greater-than-full-time number of hours. I wanted to let you know I’ll be writing more in the next few months, and turning billing back on in one week—Friday, May 3rd. If you signed up for a paid subscription, this may be a moment where you want to revisit your subscription and determine whether you’re where you want to be for billing. Turning on the paywall allows me to keep more posts out of the view of any random web searcher, but this also means free subscribers will see less of my posts.
A big thank you to all of you who have subscribed and given me your financial support. In cycles like my current one, where I am cobbling together contract work, it means a lot to me.
At an earlier stage of my life, I hoped to make a living at writing. Working as a writer is a challenging proposition in any era, but my colleagues and I came of age at a moment when the internet was busily kicking the legs out from under various rickety publishing institutions. Online outlets like Salon, where I published my first article out of college, expected you to write for reputation and no pay. The boys who got invited to high-powered tech conferences enthused about how the internet was going to kill the monopoly media and we’d all get paid with micropayments, but to the extent that ever happened it took years, still underpaid creators, and at its worst… author gestures wearily at cryptocurrencies again. And the internet kept kicking until journalism and publishing lay bleeding from a half-dozen deep wounds, and jackals came round to tear scraps off the carcass of truth.
I digress. For years, I kept a blog for no payment. So to be able to finally put out a tip jar, and have people fill it with more than just likes, retweets, and whuffie is reassuring in ways that aren’t just financial. It’s a nod to a more optimistic moment in internet history. And it’s recognition that when I spend time sitting at a keyboard, it is work, that takes a toll on the human body. So again, thank you.