Assumed Audience: people interested in reading yet more things I write.

So I hopped onto the bandwagon that everyone else is in 2019—with the excuse that I’ve been thinking about it since late 2017!—and started an email newsletter: Across the Sundering Seas

One reason I’m interested in the email newsletter as a medium is because I think it can help with the assumed audience problem. A blog is written into the void, and has a certain kind of atemporality and acontextuality to it. Some readers follow along devotedly in their RSS readers; but equally someone may stumble on something I wrote half a decade ago. That is the beauty and wonder of blogs, and also their great challenge.

An email is a letter to an audience. Like a letter, you can respond, just by hitting the Reply button in your email client! But both of those benefits without the horrible-ness that is public comment threads, and with a much more direct kind of conversation. I can know you’re reading because you want to be, and I can write accordingly.

So here’s to seeing how this goes. I am excited to see how both this and my supporters-only podcast develop over the course of the year. You can read the first issue, subscribe, or just ignore this if newsletters aren’t your thing!