How About This - month 1 recap

In which the author looks at a return to electronic publishing

You can’t find a lot of my older content on the Web because I nuked it. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

A month ago I started How About This as a chance to stretch my writing muscles in a way I hadn’t since 2010 when I was publishing at Thoughtwrestling and Broadcasting Brain, places that no longer exist on the Web¹. I also didn’t want to be dependent on Twitter as my only online outlet. So back I returned to longform writing online. I still have a lot to say but I want to find my way through this more organically than previous attempts. Also, I hope to post less inane content² that I did all of those years ago.

Of the 10 or so posts I published in May 2022, the Side Quests post was my favorite one to write - I didn’t intend to use Star Wars at all when I first thought about side quests but it just happened and it was fun. Side quests are still something to manage carefully, especially if you have a mortgage and dependents, but honestly, variety keeps you from going insane.³

However, the Seahaven post, referencing The Truman Show, is probably the most meaningful post to me. The idea that we really do live in an artificial world where What You See is not always What You Get and that interiors often don’t match exteriors still haunts me to this day. You may have mixed feelings about Jim Carrey but you’ve got to love Truman, the ultimate innocent.

As for the newsletter itself, I do have a number⁴ of subscribers⁵, which is encouraging.

So where do we go from here?

• For starters, more of the same musings and dissections of moments and ideas that I’ve shared with you so far. Coming up with topics doesn’t seem to be a problem yet!

• I want to start sharing thoughts on science fiction/fantasy and popular culture, so expect to start seeing some of that.⁶

• I’m really interested in how people gain, store and use knowledge, so expect to see some writing about that. Notebooks will undoubtedly be mentioned.

• Interviews: yes, more than just me rambling! I’ve started to reach out to a few people based in Atlantic Canada⁷ and I hope to publish the first E-mail interview soon. I’m looking at interesting/creative/quirky people as interview subjects. Who knows, maybe I might ask you?

• Speaking of Atlantic Canada: I live in the province of New Brunswick, immediately to the east of the state of Maine⁸ (USA). New Brunswick is on the surface a bit boring but when you probe a bit deeper you definitely notice that New Brunswick is not all the same, even forgetting the fact that we are an officially bilingual provinces: English and French. For one thing, I would argue that parts of New Brunswick are tremendously influenced by our proximity to Maine, which is not often acknowledged. I have some THOUGHTS about this, I have always lived in some part of New Brunswick⁹.

• This bullet point reserved for anything I haven’t thought of yet.

To close, thanks for coming along on this journey with me. I’m not quite sure where this is going but I do feel it’s going somewhere, which is good.

All I can say for certain is that you’ll see the next edition of How About This much sooner than you’ll see George R. R. Martin publish The Winds of Winter¹⁰. Until next time, watch out for dragons¹¹.

1. I do have at least one blog still out there, although it’s quite dormant; maybe I’ll mention it again in a future post.

2. Or at least differently inane; change is important.

3. Feel free to call me out on this, I am not a mental health professional. But you might be wrong. Wait, you’re not supposed to tell the reader they’re wrong ::thinks furiously:: But perhaps you should reconsider?

4. Definitely non-zero.

5. I haven’t resorted to begging people to subscribe but who can predict the future? And if I could, would I still be writing this newsletter? Ah, mystery.

6. Books, movies, TV shows (my preferred medium at this point), possibly comic books, other websites, even games.

7. Atlantic Canada is composed of four Canadian provinces: Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Some people call us No Funswick. Obviously there’s some material to be mined here. Also, for some reason Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are also grouped together under the name Maritime Provinces. No one really knows why anymore.

8. I know you probably know what and where Maine is but future generations might not and you’ve got to think ahead in this game.

9. I always feel compelled to scream “NOT THE CITY IN NEW JERSEY!!!”

10. I really don’t think GRRM will finish the A Song of Ice and Fire series, by the way. I no longer care if he does. And this is from a fan who started reading before the second book in the series was published.

11. Dragons are whatever you want them to be, they’re tricky like that.