Yesterday's newsletter is below. For the RSS massive. I wrote it, re-read it and realised it's basically just news about me, that could only be of interest to me. So that's why it's called Entirely Like A Blog Post...
"You've probably been worried all to hell, unhinged with panic and doubt. For this newsletter is a week late and your world has been turned upside down.
Maybe.
It's a week late because I've started doing an occasional column for Wired.
(I say 'occasional' because that was how Greg, my esteemed editor, described it in a recent tweet. When we chatted about it before I started it was going to be fortnightly. I think he's hedging his bets, we shall see. I'm going to write something fortnightly anyway. Whether they publish it...)
And that fortnight clashes with the fortnight I've been doing this, so I've nudged this off a week to give myself a regular weekly deadline.
I like that; a weekly deadline. I wrote a weekly column for Campaign for years and years and I used to like the shape it gave the week. The thinking, noticing and note-taking during the week, the head-down panic for an hour on Sunday. The relief when you've hit send. I was pretty good at hitting deadlines, I think because I'm more anxious about punctuality than I am about writerly merit. Presumably if I'd been more like Dorothy Parker I would have written better stuff but I would have annoyed more editors. Clear the bar. That's my motto.
(In fact I once wrote something for Wired about of 'weeks' as a concept. I was reminded of it by this marvellous tweet from Susie Dent:
"I love the old markers of time. To go with ‘fortnight’ (fourteen nights), English once had the lovely ‘sennight’ (seven nights) for a week, too. ‘Yestreen’ meant ‘last evening’, ‘ere-yesterday’ was the day before yesterday, and ‘overmorrow’ the day after tomorrow."
The plan for Wired is to do something I've always wanted to do; to review the internet like people review TV or art or theatre. To write about it like it's not new. I'm not quite sure what that means but I'm very keen to find out.
(There are currently 429 of you. 429 is the HTTP response status code for Too Many Requests. One of many HTTP response status codes that feel like they would be useful in ordinary life.)"