In terms of blog post categories, you know. Tryna be more playful, off-the-cuff.
Do you like it? Is this fun for you too, when I engineer the appearance of insouciance? How bout when I make it meta? There's always more where that came from, I could talk in circles all night.
get it how you live
or live till you get it
get it in
— Clipping
Hello. Recently:
- Tasty chunk of neo-folklore that I've been working on (like a See's Candies type of chunk! one of those chocolate-walnut-toffee morsels)
Whatever finds its way to Elkatron is consumed. She feasts on the serpents of kings and the kings of serpents.
Okay, not a very chocolate-walnut-toffee quote, but there are homier bits in there too! Emailed this story when I posted it, so maybe you already saw, but OTOH maybe you didn't. I neither expect nor encourage you to open every single edition — guard your attention! — thus I do think it's worth mentioning again. Anyway...
- "Was the Web a Better Place Before Social Media?" In which OG blogger Bob Sassone argues that yes it was and I take the other side.
- Two 🔐 behind-the-scenes posts about future installments:
Sonya Mann
Sonya Mann
Regarding member perks, if you signed up for a yearly subscription back when I was using Gumroad, it has definitely expired now, and did not auto-renew. When I moved your balance over to Ghost, on my end that entailed manually prorating via a different Stripe account, because Gumroad handles Stripe on the users' behalf, whereas Ghost is designed for a fully independent Stripe account. So your card info etc. stayed with the Gumroad-facilitated Stripe account.
Which I'm kinda fine with because it mildly skeeves me out that annual accounts auto-renew at all? Feels like an abuse of trust? However, current Sonya Supposedly annual subscriptions do, because that's the revenue-maxing move so nearly all publishing infrastructure treats it as a no-brainer. I have mixed feelings. Like... maximizing revenue sure sounds great! And it's not as if subscribers don't know that auto-renewal will charge them again in a year.
Making tactically momentous decisions about bullshit minutia, what I like to call "configuration hell," feels like a good 50% of running a business. It's amazing how many such issues crop up. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to structure my creative impulses in a way that is logistically feasible to deliver to people, and honestly the whole thing is a work in progress. Ideally you see this as a feature rather than a bug — come along for the ride, baby 😘 Don't get me wrong, I'm having a blast! Because of the challenge, not despite it.
On that note, I've received a few questions about how my venture is faring. Recently I passed one year of pursuing Sonya Supposedly full-time. Well, I still haven't mastered explaining my "job" to my parents' friends... nor most of my own, tbh. Not least because it's constantly in flux! "Indie publishing" is the closest I've gotten to a quick summary. I should just tell people I'm a writer, no further details, and they will correctly conclude that I'm leaning on family money lol. Clearly I feel some type of way about it — mainly that I'm honor-bound to avoid misleading by omission.
Another of the many quandaries on which I vacillate: how much financial privacy, versus transparency, is prudent? The tl;dr is that my characteristic luck has extended my runway beyond what I initially expected. However... is it luck, precisely? The safety net that I rely on is a big reason why my parents, and their parents before them, were driven to earn and grow their financial resources. From their vantage point, it ain't luck, it's savvy planning and diligent follow-through. So... idk.
I don't really believe in just desserts, good or bad, at least not the human conception of them. The only true justice is God's justice, and our facsimiles can but grope at the ultimate. Do I "deserve" my advantages? Nah, probably not. But I have them regardless, and they're not available to anyone who isn't me (or my sister). My conclusion is half amor fati, half noblesse oblige. I am determined to pay it forward when I can.
Leaving aside the legitimacy of generational wealth, I've needed the extra time — am using it now — because product-market fit is elusive, the very lack of it so tantalizing... That's okay; I always meta-know that my ambition outstrips what I can realistically accomplish. However, the quality and magnitude of final output is still substantially affected by my excitement (or not) for a potential result that I've envisioned. So the bigger I dream, the more I can get done, at least up to a point. The scope I initially hoped for usually turns out to be naive (at best). So it's natural that I had silly expectations going into this, 100%, but I was aware that unknown unknowns are, uh, unknown.
I remain stupendously grateful to be able to experiment for a little while longer. I do need to fully pull my own weight financially at some point in the near-ish future, but the exact deadline keeps getting kicked down the road. Currently I have until late summer / early fall to start freaking out about cashflow, but who knows. I'll keep y'all posted as things play out.
Here's the obligatory plug: If you value my voice being independent, please help me keep it that way. (Provided you can comfortably afford it! Some parasociality in our dynamic is inevitable, but if my presence is ever creating stress in your life, that's too much. Ugh I feel ridiculously self-important spelling this out but also what if???? Being in the public eye, even on a relatively small scale, is very weird. Hard to understand unless you've experienced it yourself.)
Subscribing temporarily is welcome, e.g. canceling after three months. I won't be offended — it's completely normal, expected, and even encouraged behavior. Okay, while I'm being all open and shit: I might be momentarily disappointed that I didn't charm you into sticking around, but my crybaby ego will be assuaged once I remember how many times I have donated to someone's Patreon or whatever for a few months, because spending money is never infinite but it's nice to chip in a bit when someone's art matters to you. I have a straightforward financial incentive here, where you signing up for a limited time is strictly superior to you never signing up at all. So I intentionally ward against summoning resentment!
There ya go, today's requisite batch of neuroses laid bare. What else... I'm dabbling in the cryptocurrency industry again, consulting / collaborating with a startup that I think is very promising. Hope to share more details soon, since I'm sure many of you will be interested in the project. Plus the links that I've collected since the last Ideograph.
Won't jinx myself by guessing how soon, but hey, keep an eye out. L8r.
