Testing, testing...is this thing on?
No, really, is it?
Hello, and welcome to the first tentative installment of the all-new Erin Endeavor, now powered by Buttondown.Email.
I had intended to relaunch this baby with a bang not long after the last email I sent from the Substack version, but instead I've been battling the tag-team combination of disability and summer heat while trying to get Buttondown to accept an upload of my Substack archives. Each time I tried, the uploading-in-process popup simply spun around indefinitely until something interrupted it, leaving me to wonder if it was not working at all or if it simply took so many hours to finish the process for some reason.
At this point, with a bit of a clearer head I have accepted that it is time to contact tech support. Hopefully together we'll be able to get my archives restored here so I can finish winding down the Substack page.
But that's (quite literally) yesterday's news. The point of moving is moving and now that I'm writing my first Buttondown update I'm wishing I had not waited to get old business sorted before starting new business.
My plans for this newsletter are largely the same as the last incarnation, albeit perhaps a bit more wide-ranging. I did occasionally use the old Erin Endeavor for personal updates or things relating to my hobbies such as game design, but I often got self-conscious about not delivering the news analysis I felt like people were here for.
But I've come to understand that most newsletter subscribers don't read every newsletter as it arrives anyway, and the people who do read them voraciously would probably like to read more of them.
I've been doing some soul-searching and self-inventory lately, about the arc of my career and whether it's running out of steam. I've had a tremendous run in terms of being able to make a living as a disabled self-employed writer who spends too much time on the internet, and I think three components of that success have been the acknowledgment that it might not last forever, the willingness to experiment and try new things, and the decision that I would write for myself first and trust that the market of people who want to read the sorts of things I want to write would find me.
Well, the rise of algorithmic social media and the decline of indie ad networks like Project Wonderful have somewhat hampered the third point, but I think that leaves me with little choice but to embrace the first two: try new things and acknowledge that they might not work in the end, and that there will be an end, because all things end.
It's been years since I blogged regularly. Basically since the end of Google Reader made stand-alone personal blogs a dying breed, I only used my blog on my personal website for long-form writing when a particular issue struck me. I think the lack of a personal outlet has hampered my other writing, though, as I tend to find that the words I want to write won't flow when I'm not also writing the words I need to write.
So while nothing about this experiment is set in stone, in the immediate future you can expect a bit more bloggy writing on here than I've done in a long time: more personal, more introspective, more day-to-day slice of life stuff.
And on the subject of this being an experiment, let me close this first email on the new platform by emphasizing that it's also new to me. One of the things that slowed down my relaunch efforts was a crushing awareness that I knew how Substack worked (more or less) and that I don't yet know how this works, beyond the bare fact that I can use it to send newsletters. I guess I'll learn by doing... sure, it's a bit different, but we can figure it out together.