This spaghetti might not stick to the proverbial wall, but I’m slinging it anyway. And I’m telling anybody that’ll listen.
Old dog: new tricks?
So often at Fragments, the image has been the story; the memory; the point of the couple of paragraphs that were the usual word-limit of a post reader’s dwell time. “Images in Words and Pixels” has been my blog sub-title since 2002.
And this makes my AHA from less than an hour ago the more shocking. Perhaps you should sit down.
The Options:
I propose that, going forward whilst hoping to sustain some wee readership at both Fragments (here) and at Substack I can use them differently. And here is what I imagine:
Substack posts will be more intentional and planned and may contain multiple images per post. Those bits will be more natural history, cosmology, and ecology-driven. This is a “newsletter” that I PUSH into subscribers’ mailboxes. I don’t like PUSH. But I’d be happy to have you subscribe there, as content will often be stand-alone and not referenced from Fragments.
Fragments will mostly be for more spontaneous journaling from top of mind (but with heart) and will only occasionally contain images. Getting optimized “featured photo” images into a WordPress blog still is just too high friction for spontaneity.
I like the blog relationship with readers in that no reader is forced to delete a post shoved into their mailbox. They (you?) only come to Fragments if they are DRAWN to visit. They come to look over my shoulder as I write, think, and tell tall tales and speculate, wonder and wander all over the map.
This change of use would allow me the lowest possible resistance so that a post might be only a single paragraph added to my Commonplace Book that is held by this blog.
I need less production here, more product. This writing space is for my purposes and benefit, as always; but I’m glad you got my back.
Future posts to the blog here may still contain an image or two from time to time, but I think they will not DRIVE the content as they have in the past. We’ll see.
Man. Look at me doing this without a net. Wil E Coyote style.
