Letter From the Editor

A Sixty Day Report

Hello, and thanks for taking the time. You are witnessing a labor of love. There are few freelance budgets and little opportunity to do the kind of writing I love and yet to do any writing at all one needs a brand. Brand? We’re Sew:YKnot?!

It’s taken from a story I heard about Bob Dylan from Joe Henry that revolves around his appearance on Dharma & Greg. TL;DR – Dylan explained he did the show because there was no reason not to, and in opposition to other times when the choices were freighted with expectations, with none here, he figured, “Why not?”

Every endeavor we undertake is a balance of hopes and realities. The reality is there’s very little I do well, cosmically speaking, and my only desire for the time I have left is to get better at the one thing I do passably well. I have no children, no job, (finished book still with the editor) and I am divorced, in a state where I have but acquaintances. Having something to invest in that you do well, even if it goes unpaid is a mitzvah of its own.

So. Sow. Sew. I wrote that in my first post. It’s sort of an inherent but not implicit tautology – a lone wolf writer alone in a familiar place (I lived here in the '90s) trying to find and foster community, comity and connection, to do build something by giving of himself with but the flicker of a hope that it might brighten someone else’s day. You do what you can do. We live for ourselves in lives measured by others. A lot goes into those measurements.

Sew:YKnot? has been extant for 60 days, though a little longer perhaps if you count the soft launch. We’ve published close to 50 pieces (49 to be exact). This is sort of my report to the board, such as it is. A state of the union, two months in, and you, are my union board. Welcome!

I spent most of the first two months just writing. I took two months beforehand to build a block of writing I could lean on the first three months of so (10 weeks if I’m being honest) and I’ve burnt through that while I built out a workflow. Nobody does several longform pieces a week because even if you don’t report them out, taking in the information, synthesize it and turn it around is in the best circumstances a day-long endeavor. (At some point – when workflow is better tamed – we expect to add more reported content.)

It became clear as things went along that all 10-20 minute pieces was going to be a challenge. So we’re going to spend the next couple months trying to find shorter pieces we’re comfortable with. I see people with their 600-800 word pieces and it just feels unsatisfying. The same way sports writeups after the game often felt insufficient and led to me writing 2K-4K postgame Cavs pieces.

Nobody wants to pay for that but they’ll pay for Stephen Smith? Such a travesty. (And, obviously, there are people paying for that now, if not when I was doing it ten years ago. So perhaps that’s the lesson here.)

It also became a little frustrating putting in the work and nobody reading it. I had thought/hoped that I could commit to the process. I am writing each day about stuff I care about instead of spending all day every day trying to find stories to cold pitch editors who won’t even reply to your pitches. (Tell me I’m not making the better choice with my time!) But it’s hard to work hard and nobody even looks. So I have been trying to do more marketing, as just about every creative says.

To that end, I invested in an artist to draw up the “cover” or landing picture and t-shirt logo for the site. As a person always deeply into music there is a sense that an album cover says something about the band. Whether it says what they mean is always the challenge, but in any case, anything would be an improvement over my un- or semi- branded brand. Once that is done, we expect to invest in stickers and t-shirts. I’d really like to hit local area with something to get people to check out the calendar which I hope to be a flagship effort.

The calendar is an evolving thing, and the effort it takes to write 75 or so previews is staggering. I am just building the infrastructure of links and a format. I’ve also still got to tweak the calendar I posted Friday with a couple more little things (create/trim live music / art-fairs copy). So developing that work flow is a big thing, and that means getting a bit more ahead before that final week comes.

On the positive side, last month proved I could definitely report out a story every day and feel comfortable in the process and if not always enthused about the result, comfortable with the arc of quality. Nobody has their best stuff every outing, it’s about doing your best, moving on, and going back out there. Embracing the process not the emotions about the process.

So, in the immediate future – probably the next two weeks – we will premier our new “cover” and t-shirt logo. This was solicited. I hope my best friend who came up with the idea for the cover and encouraged me to undertake this will weigh in with her own design at some point, but she has a very full life that makes me look like a punter so I accept whatever she can offer.

In the next two months, watch for some different features as we try some new things out and see what I can do that we enjoy in the 500 – 1500 word range, like our UNSUNG series. We already do a local artist/cd release, a song and an album of the month. I would like to do an established artist feature for the month (someone coming to town), but not sure if I can muster the time for an interview just this moment that’s not a podcast (more on that in a moment).

Trying to walk before I run since I tend to take big bites and talk with my mouth full. We have some thought of making Colin Blunstone & the Zombies, who are here Sept. 15, our first UNSUNG artist feature of the month, and maybe keying that to a podcast interview and a career feature, dropping consecutive days.

Two shorter feature idea is an explainer of some sort called Tell Me Something I Don’t Know, and Box Opener, which would explore something – a subculture/phenomena, tool/place, person/idea – about which I am deeply unfamiliar but other people seem to be hip to. This is my sort of nod to Nathan for You. As with everything here, my process is driven by filling holes or vacuums in my own knowledge consumption experience.

Also looking at something like Monthly Callback, which would rerun an old longtform story.

Still not sure how comfortable I am with doing an essay every day of the week. Frankly, I just don’t think people should have that many unmoored opinions, or, maybe more precisely, nobody needs to share that many unmoored opinions. Have them, fine, but why share them. At the same time, I recognized it wasn’t so easy as it looked and has me thinking I need to read more essays so I can develop more comfort/facility both with the writing and idea creation.

This is another place where we will be looking for a repeating feature/idea that can share a Monday or Friday with the essay. In general I need to be looking harder for MN stories that have larger footprints, like the soccer story that talks about how womens sports is a media cash play, though I feel I might have pushed to hard with the headline, which might have worked better 15 years ago.

Finally, we are going to get back on the podcast train. We inaugurated the site with two podcasts with David Dondero and Dave Berri. We want to do more, but ran into issues lining people up. That’s why we started with just two/month, but it appears that might’ve been overly ambitious given my paucity of recording skills. I just need to get more reps to be comfortable editing and capable of doing it quicker.

But we’ll be back with the Sew:YKnot? (“S:YK?”?) podcast this month, with interviews with producer Bryan DeMaio and visual artist/musician Tim Fite. We got so busy with the workflow that it was hard to get ahead on the podcasts. Hopefully we can stay ahead this month and build this out more smoothly.

On the other hand, fits & starts is normal growth, and, in my mind, a little discomfort is part of any growth process. Your warts are out there for everyone to see. Newsflash: Our human warts are too, we just (gradually) learn to obsess less about those.

I would also like to express some excitement about the Dropping Science, our new monthly science writing roundup. We got the Replication Crisis onto Reddit and it was a huge story. Marketing, again, is something we are still working to do better. Artists are always – appropriately – more interested in what they’re working on than marketing the thing they made yesterday. It’s a challenge, and, ideally, at some point you hire people for that.

The beauty of starting small is you get to sweat the little details before the bigger ones arrive. Nobody starts off expecting to play Madison Square Gardens, but each small step leads to the next. What else are you gonna do? Sew:YKnot?

Thanks again for the effort and your time, Your Faithful Content Farmer/Editor.