Welcome and other miscellany

Had a few quick little odds and ends to cover with you fine people.

Welcome to recent arrivals
I noticed a flurry of new free subscribers joined our little community here last weekend. First, welcome. I’m glad you’re here and hope you’ll find reason to stay. While I can’t guarantee satisfaction, at minimum, you won’t have overpaid.

On that note, if you find yourself enjoying this feed, upgrading to a paid subscription helps keep it afloat. Your support does more than you know, and I would be truly grateful to have it.

Giving readers a ‘skip’ button
I’ve heard from a few readers that they sometimes feel like they can’t keep up with my posts here and are then ‘behind’ in reading. For folks with paid subscriptions, that can then feel like they aren’t making use of something they paid for…

I ENTIRELY get that feeling. Truth be told, I felt that way about the first two newsletters I subscribed to here.

First, let me relieve some of the pressure there hopefully:

I don’t at all expect every entry to be read by every subscriber nor do I think they should be.

In fact, while this may be counterintuitive, I think the opposite. I like writing about a variety of things. None will likely appeal to all. All will hopefully appeal to some.

1. I want to deliver enough that appeals to people for it to be worth the few bucks a month a subscription costs; and

2. I want people to be able to easily identify things they like while freely skipping things that aren’t of interest.

Skipping things you don’t want to read isn’t making poor use of a subscription; it’s getting the enjoyment you want out of it.

When pieces show up in your inbox, reading the ones that are interesting and skipping the ones that aren’t actually helps me.

“Uhh… did you just say that not reading what you write helps you?”

Yes. And it does. One of the things that I am struggling with in having a number of series underway or cooked up is not wanting to overwhelm people. It neither feels good nor helps me to send more than people want to receive or read. The friction is that series really need some frequency - at least at first - to get underway.

So, I’m caught between wanting to have more ‘space’ to publish and not wanting to over-email people.

I’m hoping that Substack will eventually roll out a feature that solves that problem directly. A lot of email newsletters allow readers to manage what they receive and don’t. I’d love to have that capability so people could just opt out entirely of series or topics they aren’t interested in.

In the absence of that capability, the best partial solution is for me to give a cue right in the title of the piece about the type of piece it is. My hope in doing that is that it will make it easy for readers to readily spot things they like and things they want to skip.

That idea was one of the drivers behind moving toward a model where pieces generally roll up under some named series or topic. The Owner’s Manual… The Hotel… The Human Experience… Once we get a little farther into each, my hope is that each will have a readership and each will have a skippership.

If people are finding value overall while deliberately skipping some things entirely, things are working well.

So, seriously, skipping is encouraged. Read what you like. Skip what you don’t. Delve into only the things that interest you. That, to me, is being a great subscriber. And as a writer, that is being an ideal reader. I want people to enjoy reading things I write. One way to help make that possible is to actively enable and encourage people to read only the things that they’ll enjoy.

On that note, I have a piece poised to post immediately after this one. It is the first piece being posted under The Human Experience heading.

The Human Experience
This new category will feature stories about 1) my own life, my relationship with my son, being a father, etc.; as well as 2) the lives of other people I meet or come to know. Most of what I posted my first couple months here would have fallen into this category.

Today’s post is about me and my son.

Note: I absolutely hate The Human Experience as a name but don’t have a better one. If you have any ideas, I’m all ears.

A backlog gets backloggier
One last note on what’s up ahead and what’s way behind… or what I’m way behind on… I have a backlog of pieces I had intended to already have up by now. The wrap-up of my beta-reading series to paid subscribers. A longer piece. The first installment of Psycholitics. They are all still, sadly, in the queue.

Unfortunately, my son broke his three-year COVID-free streak last week, so things have been a tad… chaotic. Thankfully, he is recovering well after an alarming onset. So, things are returning to less harried for me. I apologize for the backlog and am doing my best to work through it.

Okay, that’s all I have for you for today.

Keep an eye out for The Human Experience. The topic runs deep for me. Hope you enjoy it.