It's been almost two years since I've written an entry in this newsletter, despite it supposedly being weekly. In no small part, that owes to the fact that in 2023, I contracted COVID for the first time, and have since suffered immensely from long COVID symptoms. Learning to write, make art, and to put words out into the world with long COVID has also meant learning how my new body works, what it's limits are, and how to safely work within those limits while continuing to expand my limits in other ways.

Part of that has also been my recent experimentation in mesoblogging, using shorter-form text posts to keep writing as a practice. That too has been difficult, though, due to my setting a goal of posting a new mesoblog entry each day. Negotiating that with long COVID limits, writing classes, developing out personal writing projects, and the day-to-day rhythm of life in anticiation of and now in the reality of fascism all conspire to make daily schedules harder.

In parallel to the above, less than two weeks into the new Trump administration it has become appalingly clear that survival is going to be a long, hard slog, at least for the forseeable future. Survival is resistance, and that's critical in its own right, but survival is also the whole point of the thing: I have a right to exist, as do you. We resist fascism by surviving, and because fascism threatens our survival. Long, hard slog though it might be, the daily work of surviving is blessed, wonderful work. As the cliche goes, this is a marathon, not a sprint. For most of the first Trump administration, our family whiteboard had a single phrase written on the top: "survival is measured in days, not hours."

All this adds up to that I have learned that my previous structure of daily and weekly posts and paid subscriptions is not sustainable for me, my long COVID, and my other healthcare needs. Moreover, asking for a subscription is wildly hubristic when so many independent journalists and so many writers depend on their subscriptions for a living.

My fundamental goal with asking for subscriptions has not been to solicit donations, but to seek fair compensation for the labor I put into my words, and to in turn help enable financial independence from tech as an industry. My writing, however, is not limited to this newsletter; it is also expressed through micro- and mesoblogging, and I hope to soon complement that with shorter one-off self-published stories. Pursuing that broader goal by using the subscription model fundamentally limits, however, not only the form of my writing, but also the content. Every major payment processor that is feasible for me to use bans, for instance, sexual content under the same provisions as illegal materials. It is inescapable both that sexual content is, at its core, part of the human experience, and that there is a growing movement to label all queer existence as pornographic. Insofar as creation is an expression of humanity and resiliance in the face of fascism, even outright porn is a part of creation and should not be walled-off categorically.

Finally, I want whatever words that I share with the world to be as broadly accessible as possible. In an advertising and surveillence–driven world, that largely means that paywalls and the like are infeasible. Putting everything together, the most reasonable approach I have found to pursuing my own financial independence while also creating under the constraints of long COVID is to publish everything that I am able to for free, with no paywalls, with a link set up to allow readers to pay what they want for my labor — compensation, not donation. While that model isn't feasible for longer-form writing such as novellas, nor for work subject to traditional publication, I believe that at least for now, it's the right model for me to create art in a way that values my own creative labor.

For now, I'll be using my Ko-fi page for my pay-what-you-want model, please feel free to drop by there if my writing has been helpful to you! Thank you so much for your support.