The Mail in the Coffin
Well, we’ve reached the end of the Windbag Mails newsletter service. I think we accomplished something really great here — if by “great” you mean “sporadic to the point of uselessness.” Still, I beat my goal of 30 subscribers, so I’m chalking it up as a win.
Anyway, here’s the deal: I liked the newsletter format for about five minutes, since I felt like it was free-form enough to give me the excuse to write about whatever I felt like during what I predicted would be a very difficult year for me, but then (and I’m not joking about this), all I felt like writing about last year was board games. And despite people tacitly agreeing to receive whatever random word diarrhea spewed forth from my mind, my specific and [predictably] long-winded ramblings about board games still seemed like a bridge to far. (Yes my board game writings are public; no I will not link them.)
Plus, over the last year, Substack has made some very public and deliberate editorial decisions around the type of authors it wants to promote as the tentpoles of its platform (writers who I assume would never mix metaphors so egregiously). At the beginning, I viewed Substack as a neutral platform that would deliver my words into inboxes rather than cataloguing them on a blog, whereas now I feel like it’s the kind of place where writers go when they have 300,000 followers on Twitter and view a professional editor making a suggestion as an outrageous violation of their civil rights.
I’ve already migrated one post over to the blog, which may or may not be getting more active with each passing day. I will probably leave the others here, as a reminder to myself of where my head was at during a very peculiar moment in time last year. In the meantime, I invite you to check out www.windbagmiles.com (in case you forgot), since I’m committing to writing at least one new post every eighteen months. I even dressed it up a little, since Wordpress introduced a new minimalist theme that’s even more minimal than the previous minimalist theme I was using. If you’re keeping count, this is the sixth incarnation of the site, and the minimalistest yet.
As always, thanks for subscribing, and for reading the newsletter (assuming you actually read it and didn’t just auto-delete). Hopefully I’ll see you over at Windbag Miles or on whatever self-sabotaging new platform I decide to migrate to next.