🎵 Housekeeping 🎵

I don’t want to do emails like this too often, since they can feel like filler, even if they offer a well-deserved break to your poor newsletterer. But now, after 30 days of nonstop writering and, more important, readering, I figured we’ve all earned that break. So, here’s how things have gone so far:

When I started out, the overarching goal was to make myself write, and write I did! The Beehiiv interface won’t tally up the number of words I’ve published, but I estimate it’s between 45,000 and 50,000, which unreliable Internet sources tell me is about the length of Fahrenheit 451, The Awakening, and The Great Gatsby. That’s a whole bunch of words, even if they are unlikely to be taught in high school English classes¹.

And those words even got mostly read! There are 162 of you subscribers now, and Beehiiv tells me that “Trying!” has an overall open rate of 67.44%. For those of you who don’t spend your time thinking about Internet metrics and have no idea if 67.44% is any good, let alone what an open rate is, let’s just say: The number of people who received my emails and opened them is really, really, really good. Of course, it’s also possible that the changes Apple and other companies have made to how email apps work means that a goodly portion of those opens may have been bots, and that almost no one has read any of my emails, including this one. If you’re a human reading this, I say: Thank you! If you’re a bot: 01001110 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101110 01101110 01100001 00100000 01100111 01101001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110101 01110000 00101100 00100000 01101110 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101110 01101110 01100001 00100000 01101100 01100101 01110100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100100 01101111 01110111 01101110.

The most popular email so far has been Travel Is Not a Political Act. If you haven’t read it, go check it out! My own personal favorite was yesterday’s, which was all about absurdism and finally discussed the dude who tops every email, Sisyphus. Go read it if you haven’t already.

So far, I’ve been using Dall•e to generate the Sisyphus images, and well, there’s a whole lot to say there: In fact, you should expect a full-on essay about AI this week. But for now, let’s just say that the images are entertaining. Also: I’m going to switch AI providers every month, to see how they all work and how they’re stylistically different, so the Dall•e image you see up top is the final one. Up next may be Midjourney, but I haven’t decided yet. Anyway, to celebrate Dall•e’s work, here’s a selection of Sisyphus images I posted to Instagram:

When I launched this project, I hoped to do 30 days of daily emails. Having achieved that, I’m going to try to make to 100 days! That’ll take us into early February, at which point I’ll take a week or so off, and then get back into it at the ever-so-slightly-reduced pace of five days a week. That’s the plan, anyway. I hope you’ll stick around to see how it turns out!

Geez, I’m really burying the lede here: I’m going to start producing quarterly print editions of “Trying!” Each one will have a guest editor² who’ll select a bunch of the “best” essays, and a guest art director³ to turn this into something really neat—something that may be more than just a physical archive of the work. I honestly don’t know what this will be, but it should be amusing to figure out!

I’m doing this because digital work is by nature fragile. Beehiiv could get bought up or shut down tomorrow, and all this writing could go poof! And that would be sad, not just for me but for the whole world.

Plus, this is a vanity project, and there’s nothing vainer than enshrining one’s own work in bound ink-and-paper volumes. I’m essentially required to do this. I’m not required to try to make the print edition cool, but I will do that anyway!

With any luck, I’ll have the first one ready to go in a couple of weeks via some print-on-demand system. These will get sent free to paying subscribers, so now’s the time to upgrade your subscription. (They start at just $1/month!) You’ll also be able to just, like, buy them, and I bet they will make excellent stocking stuffers for miserable college students. Soon I’ll figure out some way for non-paying subscribers to earn them by getting other people to subscribe to Trying!, but that’s a Beehiiv skill I haven’t learned just yet. Which brings me to…

As I may have mentioned eight or nine times already, my need for attention is bottomless. Which means I want more than just you reading this thing. (Don’t worry: I still love you best of all!) I’ve been diligently posting these to social media, but you know how that goes. And I’ve been hitting up other Beehiiv newsletters via their Boosts system.

But I want to keep this thing expanding, and I have this weird faith that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, more people out there who want to read an unending flow of essays about failure, death, cooking, travel, anger, failure, and death. How do I find them? And how do I get YOU to help me find them? I really do want suggestions here! I’ve got a lot of fun pieces planned for the coming months, including some that involve ACTUAL REPORTING. Crazy, I know, but if I’m going to go against the cultural tides, then I’m going all the fucking way. 🪨🪨🪨