Newsletters and I – My Writing Life

I fail at Newsletters. I fail so epically that it is almost visible from orbit. I have been planning newsletters for years. There is still no newsletter. I have a few draught newsletters on my laptop that have never been sent out. I’ve plans for Mrs Tuesday’s household hints with lists and copies of ancient housekeeping manuals that are currently going nowhere. The biggest obstacle is that legally I need to include a physical address in my newsletter and it can’t be a post box.

If anyone pays the slightest attention to me, they almost certainly can find me. I have a habit of wearing my heart on my sleeve and saying what’s going through my mind at the time. This has got me into so much trouble at times, but it means that you can pick up all sorts of details about me. However I don’t quite feel comfortable putting my home address down, and while you can pay to have a physical address somewhere, it’s a little more money than I want to spend, at least until I earn a little more from my writing.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and when I found out about Substack, it seemed like the answer. Anyone who wishes can set up a Substack account for free. There are paid for subscriptions, but I’m not going there. I may later, I’m not ruling it out, but I’m not currently comfortable with it. If you subscribe to me on there Lyssa Medana’s Writing (it is such an unoriginal title but I couldn’t think of anything else at the time) then whenever I post something on there, you will get an email letting you know. It’s like a newsletter, but not a newsletter and I’ll take it.

There are two main downsides to this. The first is that there will probably be something like a chatty bit like this most weeks, or maybe two or three times a month and it may feel like spam. The other main downside is that apparently you can do podcasts through there, I am very good at talking indeed. I’m not very good at shutting up, however, and I lose the thread a lot. My train of thought often leaves the station without me. Me having access to the chance to talk without interruption is not necessarily a good thing. By the way, it looks like there are a lot of interesting writers and accounts on there to browse.

There are some instalments of Invitation Accepted on there at the moment, but they are likely to go. I may well be sharing the fiction I post freely on here on other sites but I’m working that out. As I went to link to my account on Substack, I realised that there were still references to books published by Three Furies Press which no longer exist. And that made me realise that I have a lot of places where I need to go and edit. I’m still finding it a little hard.

I was looking on Unsplash for pics to represent the notes I’m currently taking, then remembered the pic above. I was trying to sort out the blog and found over 170 stories on here. Around eight, I think, made it to Whisper in the Shadows (I added some new stuff, of course). As I work out what I’m going to do now and what direction I’m going, the stories will be a little reduced and there may be other stuff going on. I’ll share when I work it out myself.

As I have mentioned a few times over the last month or so, Dark Picture, Under Dark Hills, and all the stories that aren’t really speculative fiction, such as those found under At the Fireside will be taken down on April 30th. Dark Picture and Under Dark Hills will eventually find their way into ebooks, but I don’t know when that will happen.

There are likely to be a few posts like this over the next few months as I work out what I’m doing, make mistakes, try and correct them and generally dither. I hope that you can bear with me, and I would love to hear from you. What do you like? What gets on your nerves? What do you want to know?

I hope to hear from you. Thank you for reading.