Thursday! Between the Zines: A Newsletter By Any Other Name...
V4, I24
Way back in the fall of 2020, I thought it’d be a great idea to write a newsletter. I had stuff I wanted to share — poems and stories and little bits of lore and creepy monsterlogues — and my web site just wasn’t cutting it. Nobody visited. Well, not nobody. Almost nobody1. A newsletter seemed the best way to find my kind of people, or people who’d think I was their kind of writer. Either way, it was newsletter time! I had an idea for what I wanted to do, but I needed a name for it. It didn’t take me long to come up with Thursday!, which I chose, not because it had anything to do with my writing or me or anything in particular, but because it sounded cool. The only problem2 was, according the advice I’d read from various newsletter experts, Thursday wasn’t a very good day to send out a newsletter. Wednesday was better, but Wednesday! didn’t sound nearly as cool a name as Thursday! as a newsletter name3. So, I decided that my newsletter would be called Thursday! but go out on Wednesday and if that was odd, well, it wasn’t any more odd than I am. The oddness suited me4.
That’s how Thursday! began — whim upon whim that became almost 3 1/2 years of weekly whims and weirdness. The newsletter has changed little by little as I’ve sharpened what I want it to do and what I most want to share from my creative heart. It started out as a “here’s a thing of mine plus a lot of other stuff I think it cool” kind of thing, but that wasn’t right. I spent way too much time digging up other people’s stuff and not nearly as much time sharing what I really wanted to share. There is, of course, a selfish streak in my newsletter. I want you to see what I’ve done. I want you to read my poems and get lost in my stories. Eventually, I want you to send me a few bucks here and there so I can write and share even more. The longer I’ve written Thursday!, the more I’ve sharpened it so that it does those things better. It’s not perfect yet, and may never be so, but every week it gets better, sharper, and more cool.
I like cool, by the way. So do you, which is why you’re here.
Now, we’re about to get even more cool because I’m changing something else. I’m changing the name of this newsletter. See, even though Thursday! is a perfectly cromulent name for a newsletter, it doesn’t exactly explain what it (and I) am about here. In High-Falutin’ Newsletter and Marketing Guru Expert terms, the name of the newsletter makes it hard to discover5. That is, if someone sees “Thursday!” in a list of newsletters, they won’t have much idea what it’s about, not will that word alone make anyone particularly curious enough to find out. That’s a problem for me because I want my newsletter to reach more people who will be interested enough to read it regularly. That starts with curiosity.
Okay, okay. I’m rambling6. Here’s the deal. I needed a better name. Turns out, I had a better name (see the last footnote). I fiddled with it a bit to come up with something I think describes what I’m doing here better than what I had before. Ready? Here goes.
Mild Shenanigans: A Weekly Zine of Weird and Whimsy.
I’m already excited to try it out, starting next week. There should be some new graphics, which I’m hoping to have by then, though my art skills may slow that process down a bit. I also have some stuff to fix like the “About” page, which is currently as generic as it gets. I think there are a couple other things I can do like an author biography and some better organization so you can more easily find certain stories or poems that go together. I’ll hammer those out over the next week or so, too, so that Mild Shenanigans can be the sort of thing you’d be proud to share with your friends and family and literary agents and book publishers and Hollywood filmmakers. You know. Like you do.
So there it is. Hold on tight; shenanigans are coming. Officially.
Mildly.
Oh, hey! Before we go, how about a story? I tried out a different voice that I think suits the narrator better. I’m not sure I got it right. Let me know, okay?
A Memory of Coffee Among the Asteroids
No fooling. The most popular story/poem on my site right now has a total of 130 unique hits. No other had as many as a hundred.
Well, not the only problem, but a big one.
The exclamation point was important and necessary, too, even if it made punctuating sentences way more difficult. I figured if it was good enough for Jeopardy!, it was certainly good enough for me.
It still does. I’m sure you’ve noticed.
Have you ever noticed you can’t be Low-Falutin’ or Medium-Falutin’?
Aaaand I just deleted three paragraphs of history about a thing I used to do on Facebook Live called “Mild Shenanigans with Jimmie Bise” and how I used to do a couple audio podcasts, one of which I did live on Twitch before it was ever Twitch. Good grief!