In the post that I put up last month, I mentioned that I want to get away from social media over the course of the next few months and have this blog be my online home instead. My last month has been spent moving and getting settled in a new place and I haven’t found time to post since, but now that I’m mostly settled, I hope to be more active around here (and less active around Twitter and especially Facebook, but more on that next time).

I’ve set up a typewriter in my new place in a room with no electricity except the light and central air, and I’ve been locking myself in there for at least an hour a day, plugging away at a few new projects. Things are moving along.

One thing I always wanted to do but never quite managed was a small sort of “members only” group that I could send stuff out to that I didn’t necessarily want to plaster all over the place. I kind of tried to do it a few years ago on Patreon doing monthly short stories, but took it down after a while for various reasons, and I’m thinking I’ll get back to it now as a free newsletter.

Back in the Patreon days I used to send out a short story a month to fans, but I don’t think I move at the pace to be able to pull that off these days. I might have a short story to send once in a while, but other times perhaps I’ll just send a rant about something that’s on my mind, and other times an excerpt from a new work in progress, others a motivational speech, others a poem, whatever I feel like at the moment. Especially in the first few months, I suspect I’ll experiment with it a bit.

For now, I took a short story, a dark and somber little thing called Lying Here with You, which has never been published anywhere else, and made it a sign-up bonus. At the bottom of this post is a box where you can sign up for the newsletter. When you fill in your info, you’ll be emailed a link to the story and be able to read it immediately. Then, on or near the first of each month starting in May, you’ll get an email with whatever I decided to send to subscribers that month. I’ll play with it, see what I enjoy and what you enjoy, and we’ll see where it goes. Feel free to give feedback on what you’d like to see from me.

In the meantime, this is just a quick post to say that the blog is back in business. I perhaps spoke a little soon when I said it in the post last month, but I’m going to try to get myself in the habit of at least one post a week here (in addition to the monthly newsletter), and as I do that, I hope to turn social media into mostly, then entirely, unmonitored accounts that just send traffic to this blog, hopefully even deleting them entirely before the end of the year. And then I’ll just be here. Hope you’ll come around and say hi.

Sign up for the newsletter below to read the new short story.