State of the Newsletter

The thing I was working on for this weekend was a stand-alone but it's becoming a three-parter. It happens; my brain is a more complicated place than it needs to be, and so one thing connects to another thing which connects to ten other things, and before you know it I have to go on 1 or 15 long runs to sort it all out. What that means is that instead of a too-long piece you're going to get the quarterly shake of the tip jar a little early.

Some of you are new to this place and some of you are old to it. It's probably worth a reminder either way. I'm a writer. I wrote a novel called The Revisionaries and I write this newsletter called The Reframe, and I compiled some of the pieces I wrote in this very space into a book about life in an age of rising fascism and the tools we might utilize to combat it, which is called Very Fine People. (And if you've read Very Fine People and enjoyed it, why not leave a quick rating or review on Amazon or Goodreads? It would help bunches.)

I write a piece every week, and sometimes it goes pretty long, but at least you've got a week to read it before there's another one. Mostly the pieces are about culture and politics in the United States, and sometimes it's a short story, and sometimes it's about the TV show LOST, which is a weird thing to do, I do it anyway, partly because I love that show, and partly because writing about LOST gets into how I think about narrative, especially the sorts of complex narratives that interest me.

I work hard on this stuff. This isn't a brag; I'm sure you work hard too. But I do, and a lot of people find a lot of value in it, and tell me that I put language to concepts they've been struggling with, which helps them understand those concepts better. So, every 3 months, I ask you for money for the work, provided you are one of those who find value in what I do, and provided you can afford it.

I think paying artists is a good thing to do. More and more, human creativity and particularly human art is something that corporations are trying to cut out of their bottom line, presuming that they can replace it with plagiarism machines. The days of writers being able to make a decent living from the publishing industry may be over; in any case, its fading fast. We already have "brands" where a writer with a huge profile shops out work based on plot prompts to humans ghosting under the brand to the specifications of a style bible. These brand-factories' output is not all that interesting to me artistically but it is hugely popular, so maybe that is the direction of the industry.

My paying patrons give me hope that there is another way forward for writers, and so I'm grateful beyond belief not only for the payment, but for the hope.

Despite the fact that I think it's good to make my writing free, I also think it's good to make my writing free. I've had people cancel because they can't afford it, and it is a big relief to me that they are able to do so without losing any access to the work. And this is possible because people who can afford to pay do, which suggests a new emerging model for creatives and audiences to find and support one another.

Anyway, if you don't pay yet and you'd like to, here are some pretty buttons. "Upgrade Your Subscription" will take you to the main sign-up page. "Pay-What-You-Want" will give you discount codes and more information about the different levels, and more of my thinking about why somebody would pay for a free newsletter.

What I'd like to do now is give you a few hundred words of my thoughts around where the newsletter is and where it's going, which you can read if you are interested, and then we can wrap up and go get pizza or something.

It's been about 9 months since I moved the whole operation off of Substack and onto Ghost. I'm going to be candid with you: This was a big pain in the ass. It was a lot of work and in some ways continues to be work. It also may or may not have cost me—Ghost is a very good platform, but Substack is extremely good at connecting people and writers, and it's where most writers and readers still are. I suspect it has slowed growth; in any event, growth has slowed, and for whatever reason, most of the people who stopped paying and told me it was because they would no longer support Substack didn't start supporting me again in that way when I left Substack behind.

I'm not regretful. First, I'm not owed any support from anybody; I think the support received here works best as a gift freely given. Also, and significantly, Substack did have a Nazi problem and still does, and while that's unfortunately true of many platforms, that was the one that I was monetizing on, so that was the one I felt compelled to leave. Furthermore, Substack's business practices and their response to that issue convinced me that this problem is ongoing and unsustainable. Even if I'm wrong about all that, one of the conclusions of Very Fine People is that we are each responsible for paying the costs that come to us for the brokenness we see, and if this was a cost, then I'm pleased to have paid it.

That's where we are. As for where we're going, it depends.

A significant number of you signed up for Founding Member status in order to support the publication of Very Fine People. (Now that the newsletter is pretty well founded, this is more of a Patron level, and once I get around to figuring out how to change product names, "Patron level" is probably what I'll call it.) Anyway, this is a level that comes with a free book and a shout out in the acknowledgement section of any book published during that time. Without this support (and without many of you suggesting you'd like to see such a book) it's safe to say that Very Fine People wouldn't ever have happened.

Renewal from that drive is coming up in a couple of months. I'm quite curious to know how many of you Patrons/Founding Members that came in the door to support VFP will renew for another year. If you do, then sometime next year I think it will be time for me to see if this readership wants to see another book of essays come out in late 2025/early 2026, and this time I'm thinking that Patrons should get to vote on which essays to include.

So, if you're a Patron, and you'd like to see such a thing (or if you'd just like to go on supporting me in that way), renewing is going to be the way to vote for that.

If you're not a Patron, and you'd like to see such a thing (or if you'd like to become a patron), upgrading or joining at that level is going to be the way to vote for that.

And of course any support you can provide—if you find value, and you can afford to—is a welcome and hopeful thing to do.

Either way, I'm going to keep writing once a week for as long as people are reading. And I'm hoping to focus on writing a second novel sometime very soon. We'll see how that goes.

Maybe I should publish it here. Hey, that's a thought. Hit the comments. Let me know what you'd like to see. More essays, more books, more LOST, more fiction? or something totally different? I'd love to know.

OK time to go take a long run and untangle all the thoughts in my head.

Hell, I might be working on a four-parter.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People, which is available in the exact same places. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast, produced by Osiris Media, which goes in your ears. As the bombshells of his daily fears explode, he tries to trace them to his youth.