The state of the newsletter

It's been a little while since I've been able to sit down and put together what I call a roundup email, and I realized that on October 19th, this newsletter will celebrate its 6th anniversary. I did a double-take: I've been writing this for a lot longer than I thought, and it's a good opportunity to look back on those six years and muse on how this newsletter started out and how it's changed – how I've changed.

Newsletters had always been a thing, but around 2018, they were starting to get some attention as a new delivery method for writers. Most authors that I followed had a newsletter, but they were rarely used for anything other than "I've got a book coming out" and those sorts of updates. Social media decimated the blogging community with its pithier updates and rapid-fire pace, and as places like Twitter grew more contentious and toxic, a bunch of writers and entrepreneurs latched onto the idea that this older form of communication was better.

In my announcement post, I cited Eliot Peper's newsletter as a good guiding example: in our conversations, he talked about how it was a good way to connect with readers. I was looking for a better way to talk online: I'd just purged my timeline of Tweets, and was looking for another place to place articles that didn't quite hit The Verge's bar for coverage: the more wonky, in-depth stuff about science fiction and fantasy fandom that I got yelled at for writing about.

When I left The Verge in 2019 and ended up freelancing and writing a book, the newsletter became a lifeline: I rethought how I'd be covering things, and decided to implement a roundup that would serve as a sort of catch-up to the firehose of SF/F news that was taking place day in and day out. For dedicated subscribers, I released some more news-oriented commentaries, and used it as a way to talk about more cosplay stuff.

What's been interesting, looking back, at how my views on covering the news has changed the longer I've been out of a newsroom. In many cases, looking back, I was covering stuff that was interesting, but really only in a larger context; incremental stories that I was essentially writing with the expectation of having a trail of coverage that would pay off down the road with some larger piece, or I'd be commenting on a news event and... essentially just adding my voice to the others that were talking about it, sometimes without really adding anything to the story. Most of all, I've found that it's easy to set out with a plan: write X items on Y timeline. That structure can be good, but as with my attitude towards genre boundaries, I've found it useful to discard them when the time is right. Ultimately, my attitude towards posting is: write what I find interesting, and tell people why that's the case. It seems to have worked so far.

Along the way, TO has undergone its own transformations. When I started it in 2018, it was on TinyLetter (RIP) under the title Wordplay, which was pretty much just words on a page, without too much in the way of images or frills. It worked pretty well for what it did, and I ended up with a couple of hundred subscribers, some of whom are still here. From there, I jumped to Substack as that platform was making waves about being the next big thing in newsletters, and somewhere along the way retitled it to the overly bland "Reading List", in part because my reliable freelance income writing up monthly book lists had dried up when the pandemic squashed freelance budgets. I eventually bumped myself off of Substack a couple of years ago after having some concerns over their moderation and content policies, and ended up here on Ghost.

I'm happy with were TO has landed: I'm able to write some in-depth things that aren't necessarily tied to the news cycle, review books that I find interesting and worth sharing, and type up the occasional news piece when I find things that I think folks will enjoy – some habits are hard to break. A lot of these changes have gotten me closer to the core of what I'm most interested in: reading and writing, and sharing things with the folks who share those interests.

Most of all, I'm pleased at the community that I've been able to build up around this, either through the folks who've responded to issues, left comments, or who take part in the slack community. It's grown from a modest couple of hundred people to around 2,600. Some of you are here for the book recommendations or reviews, and you've patiently followed along as I've gone off on tangents about Vermont history or some other thing that's caught my attention. At the very least, I hope that you've found it interesting and enriching.

Currently Reading

I was talking with a friend last night about what's on my TBR pile, and it's a hefty stack. At the top of the list (ie, what's in my work bag right now) are two books. The first is The Mountain Crown by Karin Lowachee. Karin's one of my favorite authors, and I've been looking forward to this ever since I interviewed her about it earlier this year. It's really excellent, and I've been gripped from the first couple of pages.

The second is The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire by Chris Kampshall, a book tailor-made for me if ever there was one. It's a really engrossing in-universe history of the Star Wars franchise, and it's one of those books that really provides a lot of context for how all of the various puzzle pieces fit together in a cohesive whole. I'm loving every page.

A couple of books that I've finished recently:

• American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond by Jeremy Dauber. I enjoyed his book American Comics: A History and this was an another neat overview that looks at the horror genre and how it intersects and draws inspiration from the real world.
• Agony Hill by Sarah Stewart Taylor. A comfortable mystery set in Vermont in 1965: a new detective has to solve a case about a farmer who died in a barn fire, and things get a little complicated. This was a fun, light read, perfect for late summer in Vermont.
• A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places by Christopher Brown. This is a phenomenal book of nature writing, exploring the boundaries of the natural world and our destructive tendencies. It’s a wonderful mix of history, observation and memoir and I can’t recommend it enough.

Further Reading

I mentioned that it's been a bit of a while since I've done a roundup: a linkdump of a whole bunch of prior TO articles, and other things that I've found interesting to read:

• A brilliant light in the dark. My review of Lev Grossman's The Bright Sword.
• Ben Cooper costumes. One of the things that I focused on for Cosplay: A History was the history of Halloween. Over on the Chicago Tribune, Christopher Borrelli has a neat overview of the story of Ben Cooper costumes.
• Book lists. August's first and second lists, September's first and second lists, October
• Changing collections. This was a piece I wrote for VHS about how the organization (and museums!) have changed how we've collected items over the years.
• Comic collection. If you were a comics fan in Vermont, you'll likely have heard about Christine Farrell. She owned Quarterstaff Games and Earth Prime Comics in Burlington, and reportedly had one of the largest and most complete collections of DC comic books in existence. I missed the news that she died earlier this year, and now, her collection is going up for auction.
• Electric State. I'm a big fan of Simon Stalenhag's work, and enjoyed his book The Electric State when it came out a bunch of years ago. It's being turned into a movie, and Vanity Fair's Anthony Breznican has a first look at it. It's slated to come out in 2025.
• For Democracy! A piece I wrote about the popularity of Helldiver 2 and the cosplayers who're suiting up in armor that the game's soldiers wear.
• Green Mountain Book Festival Auction! This is something that I'm involved in closer to home: I'm on the board of directors for the Green Mountain Book Festival! We're preparing to hold this year's festival in November, and we're kicking off now with a silent auction with a bunch of cool prizes, including a signed copy of Cosplay: A History! Bidding ends November 1st.
• How Dark Matter went from graphic novel to Syfy hit. This was a reprint of an article I wrote for Barnes & Noble a bunch of years ago, re-edited, updated, and brought back in time for a recent anniversary of the show's passing.
• Judging covers. A look at cover art, minimalism and why some books get new covers every couple of years.
• Last Dangerous Visions. Rolling Stone's Jason Sheehan takes a look at the story of the long-overdue anthology from the late Harlan Ellison.
• Orbital Horror Story . My review of Adam Higginbotham's book about the Challenger disaster, Challenger.
• Paper Grinder. A look into what goes into publishing a book at a historical society. Also, here's an interview that I conducted with Kevin for VHS.
• Survival of the Fittest. My review of the new James S.A. Corey novel, The Mercy of Gods, which I really enjoyed earlier this summer.
• Swinging for the fences. A look back on Star Wars: The Acolyte and why it worked and didn't work for me. This one struck a nerve on Facebook. 🙄
• The Temporary Resurrection of Omni Magazine. This was a piece that I'd noodled with for a couple of years before finally getting the time to finish it and send it off. I need to do more of these in-depth, reported pieces, because they're fun to assemble.
• Timothy Zahn's Conqueror's Trilogy is just as good as his Thrawn novels. Another Barnes & Noble reprint, timed to the 30th anniversary of these books.
• Trinity's Endgame. My review of Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War: A Scenario, which was a pretty terrifying read. As an aside, here's another nuclear story, one that I wrote for VHS's member magazine, History Connections: Front Lines in the Cold War.
• Undoing Extinction. My review of Ray Nayler's novella Tusks of Extinction, which was an excellent science fiction thriller.