A Brief Thank You
and a little experiment
La Niña is really testing the limits of my bucket collection (two buckets). The reason I even have two buckets in the first place is not because I am well-prepared but because I am disorganised and bought two mops and two buckets within six months of each other, forgetting about the first. This is just scene-setting, by the way. Picture it: I’m sitting in my damp apartment listening to the tunk tunk tunk of water drop from the ceiling on the day Sydney surpassed its wettest year in all its recorded history (from 1858) with 2200mm of rain so far and 86 days left before 2022 can be buried in the Gregorian boneyard of time itself and let me tell you, when that day comes, I will rejoice. Not that arbitary cut-off dates in the calendar represent significant tonal shifts in real life, of course, but we evolved to observe patterns and by God I am going to pretend some of them are shit out of luck. How many Sydney Harbours is 2200mm? Couldn’t tell you, but looking at my balcony it seems to be at least one.
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I promise I won’t normally be cluttering up your inbox with two newsletters in a week. Not in this economy! But I was caught somewhat by surprise, on account of how lovely everyone has been after my last update. Here and elsewhere. It’s no small thing to have a place where you can experiment with writing, have some fun and build a little community at the same time and I am very grateful for that opportunity.
As a result of that post, a few of you asked when I was going to rollout a paid subscription option which, in my head, was going to be later this month or November but then I panicked and thought, if someone has asked for it now maybe I should have done it now so I did it now and then a few of you actually paid for one of those subs — within literal seconds, actually — and I realised I didn’t have any subscriber-only content, nor did I get to fully understand how it all works before doing that. Which made me feel bad! Sad trombone.
Something I learned, for example, is that I can’t make the monthly plan any less than US$5. That’s the minimum monthly amount Substack, this platform, allows. And yes, that is five dollars in United States of America curreny which, according to the current exchange rate, is worth approximately a studio apartment in Sydney. You’re all probably far more financially literate than I am, but if that caught anyone off guard I am very sorry. Money is tight for a lot of people right now and that stuff matters. If you’d like a refund, let me know. I’m sure between us we can figure out how to do that.
As I start to collect myself a little bit, I will be producing more content; some of which will be behind a paywall, but for the most part nothing about this newsletter will change. If you subscribe in any capacity, paid or otherwise, I am stoked that you’re here. Now, a little experiment with that paywall.