I’m starting a weekly(ish) email newsletter called Ultra Magic. Don’t like newsletters? That’s OK, everything I write in the newsletter will appear on this blog, so if you use an RSS reader to follow this blog (or you just type in the URL, like a savage), I salute you and I promise it’ll keep working.
The truth is, I would like more people to read what I write – partly because it’d encourage me to write more regularly – and I don’t think that the way I write online is compatible with that goal. Yes, I share my blog posts on Twitter, and sometimes they’re retweeted and far reach beyond my own followers, but Twitter remains a fundamentally ephemeral medium, and I get the nagging feeling that even people who follow me invariably don’t see my blog post-tweets.
Not that I imagine all ~5000 of my Twitter followers would care to read all of my posts! But a newsletter would at least offer a new way for people to keep up to date with everything I write here (excluding all the automated podcast posts, don’t worry!).
It’d also let me experiment with different kinds of writing. I’ve backed myself into a more formal, impersonal style lately which has made it difficult to summon the energy to write. I could just change this, but there’s a reason why a lot of writers enjoy email newsletters – it’s a way to loosen up and be a bit more conversational than in a blog publication.
So that’s what I’m aiming for with this newsletter: writing more, and writing more freely. If that sounds good, please sign up, and let me know what you think!
