Don’t I know that finishing is hard? There’s always a crisis. Something more urgent. Something that gets in the way of finishing. If writing is easy for me, finishing is hard. Finishing is what I procrastinate on. It’s what I put off. I don’t send it off. I don’t publish. It’s publishing that is brutal. I’ve long had a writing habit, but not a publishing one. But if writing is the accumulation of small acts, publishing can be the same?
With this newsletter, I will publish, in instalments, in serialized form a draft of a book. My inspiration? Dickens’s 19th-century serialized novel’s. Dicken’s wrote novels in instalments. Anna Gibson, Adam Grener, and Frankie Goodenough describe how difficult is us to imagine reading a novel in short instalments, each month, over a year or two. But, the serial form shaped Dickens’s practice—he wrote to deadline, finishing each just as it came out. It wasn’t abnormal. Rosamund Bartlett’s brilliant biography of Tolstoy (Tolstoy: A Russian Life) describes how Tolstoy had a similar practice with his novels. He published War and Peace in instalments. And then, he edited it into a revised manuscript. In the podcast Serial, journalist Sarah Koenig and her producer Julie Snyder finished episodes of their hugely successful true-crime podcast weekly, just in time, as came out.
Letters from the Future was born out of a series of short letters I co-edited and published on the the New Brunswick Media co-op’s website in the summer of 2018. I edited a letter a week over the summer. Later, I continued, with co-editors, to turn them into a book. We solicited, edited, revised, and published a letter a week. It was a book, in serial form.
The challenge with tackling an academic book, is where to publish. Finding a place to publish feels like a reason to stop. So, why not self-publish? Editors and peer-reviewers improve the work. And, it’s harder to publish if a draft is already published online. So how do you solve that publishing conundrum? How do you publish, in a serialized way, that doesn’t live online forever?
Craig Mod stumbled on a solution: the pop-up newsletter. Mod moved to Japan in his 20s, and has made a career writing, photographing, and self-publishing on his website. He’s well know for taking long walks, writing about them, and making beautiful books. Mod’s most recent book, a memoir, Things Become Other Things began as a newsletter, written daily, 30 to 40 miles at a time, over a month-long 300 mile walk on a peninsula in Japan. Mod photographed, took notes, dictated into his iPhone, and each evening, spent hours working the material up into daily pop-up newsletter. While it became, over many more years, a book, it began as a temporary and impermanent newsletter. A pop-up newsletter.
Mod calls pop-up newsletters the greatest newsletters because they don’t life permanently online. They’re not archived. They are temporary. He describes the genre to John Gruber (00:14:22):
If I do a big walk and I’d make a newsletter out of that, that doesn’t need to be archived online because ideally I’m going to take that. I’m going to collate it. I’m going to edit it. I’m going to squeeze it. I’m going to take the best of it. I’m going to put the best version of whatever that was into a book and I’m going to distribute thousands of books around the world. And then that’s the archive.
Pop-up newsletters are e-mailed, they’re not published on the web, and are only available to subscribers. The archive comes later, as a book.
Mod advices:
Set a limit of three to six months and pick a frequency — perhaps once or twice weekly? — and a word limit — maybe 500 words? (something you can’t shirk away from, that you could refine in an hour if hard pressed) — and stick to your rules like a madperson.
My rules for this book, a serialized, pop-up newsletter?
789 words, daily, for a month.
Why seven hundred and eighty nine words? The number is in a silly sequence: seven, eight, nine. 789 is the highest consecutive digit number under 1,000. It just feels good. It’s why my friend drives at 123 km/h on the highway. It’s a number I can hit, daily, without too much effort. It’s arbitrary. Silly. But, it’s also longer than 500 words. More achievable than 1,000.
Why a month? It’s the summer, a month is doable, and will be over before academic chores begin.
789 Serialized is a book, serialized daily over a month, in instalments of 789 words published as a pop-up newsletter.