Autumn in the Garden? Some thoughts on the future of this publication.
This publication may be changing. Into what, I don't yet know.
I’m thinking about changing this publication. Into what, I haven’t yet decided, and I’m not even sure I should change anything, so it’s quite possible that I’ll decide not to. But lately, particularly since the leaves have been turning and the season decaying into the inevitable approach of winter, I’ve felt a bit stuck, a bit frustrated at what I’ve been able to do here over the last (almost) four years. You might say that it’s autumn in the Garden. And in certain corners of my mind too. That’s not necessarily bad. Fall is my favorite season, despite its overtones of decay, beautiful as it often is. I feel out-of-touch, behind the curve, but at the same time I’m less and less interested in understanding or knowing what “the curve” is.
For those of you who don’t know, the Garden of Memory is about the third or fourth iteration of what I still refer to, perhaps anachronistically, as a blog. The very first article I ever posted here, on January 20, 2023, describes the progression and explains why I started it. This publication is run on the platform Ghost.io, which was hot at that time, late 2022 and early 2023, as an alternative to Substack. The business model of both of those platforms was, and still is, to develop a direct connection with readers by sending what are essentially blog articles directly to the email inboxes of people who affirmatively choose to subscribe. The carrot that both Substack and Ghost.io dangle most frequently is the idea of a paid premium tier, where subscribers who really like to read your stuff will pay directly for special material that the more casual readers cannot get at the free level. Often marketing materials for these platforms will name-drop an author, who makes $X,000 a month from their subscriptions. And shouldn’t you join too?
