The newsletter is dead, long live the newsletter!

Tinyletter, the (e-)newsletter platform I was using was murdered by Mailchimp, and perhaps slowly killed by this newsletter platform, Substack, too.

Black and white film photo of a car driving through fog in southern lutruwita/Tasmania. By me.

I took my cat, Chicken, for a walk tonight. I strapped her harness on and she wandered around my front yard, sniffing. Eventually she and I had a disagreement – she wanted to go under the fence and out to the road, whereas I did not. She’s quite stubborn and was refusing to move for some time. But I can also be stubborn (she must have inherited her stubbornness from me) and so I waited on my hands and knees, crouched under the wattle tree, branches sticking into my back. Eventually she came to the conclusion that she didn’t actually like it out on the other side of the fence and absolutely wanted to go home. So she sighed (yes, Chicken my cat can sigh), and turned around and led me back home.

Anyway, all of that is neither here nor there, because I have been dragged here onto Substack because Mailchimp had been letting me know, for months now, that they’re closing Tinyletter down and that I (and everyone else using that platform) are no longer welcome and could I please leave? I’m upsetting the children.

Sometimes, when the option to choose the new home for my newsletter is the seemingly only option, I just go with it.

So, welcome to my new home, feel free to look around, help yourself to a glass of wine or organic cloudy apple juice. The toilet is just down that hallway.

Hopefully I’ll write a few more newsletters this year – once a month isn’t that ambitious, is it? It’ll either be short vignettes of something I saw and experienced, or very short stories that I don’t really know what to do with. Generally all of my newsletters are funny-ish. And a film photo that I have taken that may or may not relate somehow to the content that I’ve written.

As always, feel free to let someone know they should subscribe to my newsletter if you feel so moved to. Or if my very occasional newsletter brings you no joy, and you feel it clogs up not only your inbox, but also echoes in your brain then you’re welcome to unsubscribe. But because this platform is new to me, you’ll have to find your own way to the ‘unsubscribe’ button.