Buncha New Subscribers
I opened this newsletter up to my immediate family yesterday, after testing it on my mother two days ago and finding she returned sufficient praise.
Inevitably when I start doing a thing, I start fast, and then risk getting a bit caught up thinking about what it is that I’m doing. This can gum up the process when it happens prematurely, so I try to resist thinking much about structure and purpose and long term objectives and let the project take shape.
But I can’t help thinking a bit more about what it is I’m doing since there are about 5 new folks for whom this is pretty much the first newsletter they’re going to get and who know me pretty well.
So, here’s a bit of meta newsletter, about this newsletter and about my writing history the past while.
I stopped writing entirely a bit ago when I started to realize that my writing was not being received well by my spouse. Or, I realized I was no longer writing, and I when I tried to understand why, I realized it was because my writing impulses felt stifled by dangers I felt in my relationship. In some relationships, you can’t understand why the problems are there, and you realize you’re years down the road of trying to solve those problems by trying to change things even if it doesn’t make sense or you haven't consciously processed the danger/problem. This was that sort of relationship in all ways.
Now I’m about 2.5 years through the divorce process I expect to take 5 years to settle (though could have a divorce certificate by end of this year, I think), and yeah, over 300 pages of my blogs, online commentary, and various nonsensical drafts, sketches, comics, and such have been scrutinized by a judge out of context. Okay, whatever. The principal claim is that they represent some kind of “discovery” that I’m a weirdo on the part of the ex. This from a person who I met at a writing conference while I was writing about porn, and to whom I sent a not particularly academic essay about porn three days after meeting her in 2010. So, this claim of being all surprised by the things I was writing about is a bunch of nonsense, but family court is highly nonsensical, so it’s been a very successful attack. Even if some women aren’t believed by society, it’s harder to believe that a woman is lying and manipulating intentionally than it is to believe that a man might be a little wacky. The latter feels like a crime of a tolerable/punishable nature; the former feels beyond what we want to believe people are capable of and leaves us not really knowing how to think about the world. So, family court prefers to believe I’m wacky, because if I'm not, she's a psychopath.
March 4 2020 we signed a court type thing that reduces nonsense to some degree, thus paving the way for me to continue to write. A couple weeks later my friend Josh suggested I write a newsletter and turned me onto this simple platform that makes it easier to do, Tiny Letter. I realized when he suggested this that the March 4 Armistice enabled this to occur for the first time in years.
I figured I’d do it occasionally, but then I realized I could do it every day with a little bit of effort.
I usually write these on my phone in about 20 min to 1 hour, so they aren’t marvels of structure, tone, and significance, but, I’m treating this a bit like a daily drill. Sometimes I write three or four quickly and then I have material to pull from in the early AM on a bad day. Though generally what happens with those is I look at them later, use a bit of them to build from, and re-write some new stuff the day of.
Here’s the essential rules of the project:
I’m going to send
a thing,
daily
with words in it,
in the Morning-ish,
for a while
You can feel free to tell me how much you enjoyed it as regularly as you see fit! This helps me maintain the idea that one of my favorite writers, Jonathon Franzen, describes as one of his rules for writing. It’s one I believe in.
The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
So, if you're my adversary, and if you're not my friend, than this isn't for you, and it never was.
Earlier newsletters are available chronologically at this messy link:
https://tinyletter.com/danceattakjg/archive?page=1&recs=100&sort=asc