Why subscribe?
Weekly, most likely on Fridays, I’ll send out an email summing up all of the week’s new posts, so you don’t miss any. Call it a “newsletter” if you want. This is in lieu of bombarding subscribers with impersonal automatic emails every time I post — which especially makes sense since many if not most of my posts would be too long for emails anyway. (If enough subscribers object to that decision because they’d actually prefer to be bombarded with daily emails, I may consider, um, reconsidering. But at this point, I figure they might rather I minimize being a pest.)
While Poplar Mucilage will always feature free posts (probably the majority of them), I’ll also be limiting select ones to paid subscribers. Which is only fair seeing how they’re pitching in monetarily to support my incorrigible writing habit (a generosity I’m especially grateful for since I recently lost my main source of income, one big reason I decided to start Substacking in the first place.) And while I absolutely welcome all subscribers, paid and unpaid, you can ensure you’ll be able to read everything I write by signing up to contribute $5 a month, or $50 a year. That’s less per month than eight small Hass avocados, at least here in Austin. Maybe even fewer where you are. And less per year than (checks grocery receipt) 26 tins of Crown Prince anchovies! (For now, I have no plan to offer “founding subscriptions,” in part because I have no idea what founding subscriptions are. I’m glad you all found me, regardless.)
Stay up-to-date
A typical week of Poplar Mucilage posts looks something like: Sunday (free) — A Blindfold Test where I write about 25 songs, most of which I don’t recognize when I’m hearing or writing about them; Monday (free) — A music-related post not otherwise assigned to any particular day; Tuesday (paid) — A post, often with an introductory essay of a few thousand words, about my 150 favorite albums released within some particular year; Wednesday (free) — A post about some random topic other than music; Thursday (paid) — Another miscellaneous music post, often list- oriented in some way other than the “150 Albums a Year” way; Friday (free) — A post delving into the very earliest discussion of some musical genre within the New York Times (or something along those general lines I haven’t figured out yet); Saturday (free) — A prehistoric writing sample dating back to when I was in college or high school.
Of course, at times, timelier posts might urgently require more immediate posting, thus throwing that schedule out of whack — or maybe necessitating more than one post in a single day, even. And other posts might not fit at all within the schematic as it now stands, so I’ll have to figure out when to run them, and will. For instance, sometime soon I should probably compose a public post explaining who I am and why I’m here and why this blog exists in the first place, and why you should care if it does. As of now, I’ve been totally procrastinating about that one. But I’ll get to it, eventually.
Join the crew
Write comments on posts, and maybe you’ll even get into conversations and stuff. No idea why Substack equates this with “joining the crew,” but they said it, I didn’t.
To learn more about the tech platform that powers this publication, visit Substack.com.
