Today I turn 44, and I’m returning to one of my most enduring birthday traditions: posting god-awful birthday selfies designed to worry my Mother about the kinds of content that gets put up on the internet.
It’s the first of these that I’ve done in a log while, largely because 2019 and 2020 where incredibly shit years for birthday celebrations. In 2019, I spent the day sitting vigil while my father passed away and my sister prepared for cancer surgery. I had plans to try and reclaim the day with happier memories in 2020, just so I didn’t spend the run-up to each birthday getting lost in memories and grief, but 2020 delivered us a global pandemic and the first wave of Australian lockdowns in March, so it proved to be the exact opposite of what I was hoping for.
Still, it’s another year, eh? And this year I’m going in with a plan. While I normally avoid having any expectations or desires around my birthday, this year I’ve given myself a present.
More specifically, I’ve started a Patreon to fun the creation of non-fiction content here, in my newsletter, and in a suite of other spaces.
Once upon a time, I would devote about eight to ten hours a week to producing free stuff about writing, publishing, pop culture, and more. It wasn’t always the most efficient form of self-promotion as an author, but I enjoyed it and people found a lot of useful stuff amid my weekly burble.But when you publish other people, and they’re trusting you to do right by the books you’ve contracted, inefficient-but-fun takes a back seat.
Over the past year regular readers have mitigated that by throwing some cash into a digital tipjar, but I’m hitting a place where I wanted something a little more formal and predictable. Craig Mod has probably the best take on fan-supported writing that I’ve seen, referring to it as implicit and durable permission machines. They free creators to go take chances on weird, commercially weak projects that still have a lot of value.
And when I sat down earlier this year, pondering what I really wanted for my birthday this year, that’s exactly the thing that appealed to me: permission. Permission to do the kind of writing I really enjoy, which is rougher and weirder and not-likely-to-be-paid-for in any other way. And the kind of writing I’m not going to be able to justify devoting the time to unless there’s a payment attached (even if said payment is small and token — it shows interest in a world where free writing gets less and less feedback).
If you’ve got a few bucks to spare, and you’d like to see me do more work in this space, join up and be part of the advisory board who gets to weigh in on future directions, rough drafts, and early research. More details here: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5686487
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