Blimey, tempus continues to fugit, dunnit?
I’m working on moving this blog to be self-hosted rather than wordpress.com – although the PHP shenanigans last week slightly weakened my resolve. I want a bit more control, to simplify some things and add some plugins & features that would otherwise mean paying WP a bit more.
One of the new features will be the return of a subscription deal, what we used to call “micropatronage” before the world got patreonized and substackified.
During just about a year of extended paternity and sick leave, I’ve been thinking about how to best ask for money to help support my work. I have a few followers on Substack from when I wrote there a couple of times, but I think I’d rather deal with the hassle of running my own thing than deal with the hassle of being on someone else’s platform.
Above all, I just don’t believe that the model of getting people to pay me to send them more emails is a good fit.
Long-time readers and supporters will remember my experiments with micropatronage back around the time of C4CC. We’ve all come a long way from there.
In particular, for me, having a family again means that I don’t have the luxury of pushing my finances to the absolute bottom just to see what happens. I also am more interested now in how to extend to an audience beyond the folk who’ve known me for years, those who already trust that I’m offering something of value even it looks a bit weird.
Extending the audience means working harder at making the value more explicit and tangible. I also now know that I have ADHD and and am clearer about what that means regarding long-term commitments to regular activity in exchange for cash. The things I deliver for a subscription need to be much more mutable than things I’ve promised to produce in the past – but at the same time, I don’t think that making vague promises and then trying to present what I produce in a clever way that fits those promises is the way to go either. It all has to be more honest than that.
So what am I actually going to be doing?
I chose to use the phrase “Regrowing a Living Culture” to describe the Coffee Mornings at Essex Hall (and now also online). Giving the barest thought to this subject once a week has been a really interesting way of framing what we’re doing and what I’ve been doing in similar gatherings before. It’s not really surprising given that I’m sure that Dougald’s experience of Tuttle helped contribute to his thinking when he started using the phrase to describe some of his work. So I’m going to be basing my writing and thinking more explicitly around that from now on.
I’m flirting with the idea of some sort of new Social Art/Living Culture residency somewhere (it needs to be easily commutable from here in the South West of Surrey). I have some models in mind to help make community-based spaces work better with their communities in a self-supporting way and I’d really like some places to try things out and some sort of stipend to make sure I can keep my focus in the right place.
I’m also going to be releasing more stuff – I’ve got some musical ideas bubbling up from being a new dad; I’m also sketching out some more long-form writing about the way things seem to be around here and how we might make things better together; and I am in the process of organising my digital and physical archives to make them more available for collaborative fun.
And then I’m also refreshing all my web offerings to give a clearer, joined-up picture of where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing in the last thirty-odd (wow!) years of being on the web.
So that’s what you’ll be supporting with your fiver a month.
More directly, you’ll get something in the post on (or about) each of the old English Quarter Days: Lady Day, Midsummer, Michaelmas, and Christmas. The first mailing is in the works to be distributed at Christmas 2026 (probably the week after, yeah?).
I’m thinking of it as a newsletter. I’ve been asked “Oh you mean you’re making a zine?” Well it’s zine-like. But to this old git, the z-word has connotations that I don’t really identify with. When you get it, you might well go “Oh yeah, it is just a zine, why was he being so weird about it?” I suppose I didn’t think I’d be launching a zine in my sixties – humour me, I might get used to the idea of calling it that.
And if you really don’t want to have something in the post, it will be PDF-able, but the point is more that I make something with my hands and you get to hold it in yours (and yes, yes, international shenanigans about taxes and customs declarations etc, I know, but we’ll work that out, it’ll be part of the fun!).
It’s nearly there, just a few more tweaks to make before I switch it all over, but take this as the softest pre-launch kind of announcement.
