I posted a “Hello World” on this blog eighteen months ago (almost exactly). I’m finally ready to post a sequel.
“Write more” and “write in public” have been goals of mine for a long time. I’ve tinkered with my blog, I’ve thought about writing, I’ve done a lot of work except for the kind of work that matters, which is actually write and publish. This post is me taking a concrete step in the right direction. I am writing, and I am publishing.
In the summer of 2024 I started an email newsletter. Many people I respect have email newsletters and publish regularly, without fail. I’ve called my newsletter Rarefied Err, and it’s available here. If you look at the archive you’ll notice that it’s not in much better shape than this blog - there’s an introduction and a single “real” post, published five months ago.
I was proud of myself for getting that real post out the door and into the world (into people’s email inboxes). It’s the first post in a series. That was the intent, anyway. I’ve drafted a few of the followup posts but have yet to publish them.
When I shared that I was starting a newsletter, I was really flattered by the positive reception - almost forty people subscribed after I shared it on LinkedIn. What I hadn’t expected was the pressure I would feel as a result, knowing that when I hit “Publish” on the newsletter posts, they’d get placed directly into the inboxes of my friends and colleagues. People I respect. People whose time I don’t want to waste.
For the last five months, even as I have (truly) written more, privately, I haven’t published anything I’ve written. This post is me making an attempt to change this. Unlike the newsletter, this blog “goes to” no one - if you find it, you can read it, but I’m not “pushing” new posts to anyone. That fact helps me feel less pressure about quality, novelty, frequency, whatever.
I intend to keep the email newsletter. I would like to experiment with using both blog and newsletter - I like the idea of writing blog posts as a low-stakes way to put some thoughts out into the world and develop my opinion on a topic, and then later write and publish a more substantial newsletter issue based on blog posts. Maybe I will find that I don’t need both, or maybe I will find that I want to keep them more separate from one another.
But today, I publish something, and that feels good.