Mappy New Year

Where did we come from, where will we go?

I’ve decided to stop doing annual roundups. They were an artifact of an era of blogging and indiscriminate textuality that is now dying. I’ve decided the thing to do now is more consciously track and surface the evolving narrative and thematic throughlines in my writing. I made a map of my writing journey over the last ~20 years to start to do that, and make sense of how I ended up with a newsletter (re)named Contraptions in November 2024. It’s a real contraption! See how much sense you can make of it :) The main river on top is my recently retired Ribbonfarm Wordpress blog. If you’re reading this, you’re in the highlight box in the middle-right, 2019-now, on Substack.

If you’ve only been reading me on Substack, you only have a vague sense of the highlight box (I’m working on a more detailed map of that box). If you’ve been reading me for more than 5 years, you’ve probably seen bits and pieces of the messy backstory from the previous 15 years. If you’re one of those long-suffering readers who’s been with me since the beginning, and read >30% of what I’ve written, thank you for putting up with my mess. You’re a saint. A masochist, but a saint.

Obviously, the 20 years of baggage (and ~2+ million words) represented on this map isn’t going to disappear just because I have a new name and overarching theme. But I do want to be mindful and conscious of how it shapes the future. Ideally, I’d like to leverage my writerly past without being bound by it.

In 2025, there are going to be continuing changes to this newsletter (which I’ve been telegraphing for the last couple of months), as I complete the pivot from “Ribbonfarm Studio” to “Contraptions.” Part of the reason for making the map is that a long history of writing creates a lot of inertial momentum. You can’t pivot 2 million words worth of textual baggage on a dime, though maybe LLMs will change that in the future. A map helps me see where I’m coming from, and where I’m going. Which threads to let go of, and which ones to hold on to.

On a more concrete note, I’m going to quit doing serialized projects and stick to stand-alone posts, which will hew more closely to the contraptions theme. My dad’s been telling me to “focus” all my life, and in my 50s, I’m going to try and follow his advice. Also, serials and discursive wandering don’t really work well on Substack and I don’t want to fight the medium. I’ll either retire current serial projects or fork them off to finish as offline book projects.

I’m also going to raise the price of the newsletter to a tbd level in about a month 💀💀. If you’re a current paid subscriber, or subscribe before January 26, you will be able to lock in the current rate for as long you remain subscribed 🥳, but if you wait, or capriciously unsubscribe and resubscribe, inflation will get you 💀.

I’ll rewrite the About page with new rules of engagement in the next month or so.

Anyway, we’ll hopefully go interesting places next year, and hopefully it will help to know where we’re coming from. Don’t worry if 80% of this map makes no sense to you. Just know that there are dungeon dimensions lurking under all my projects, where monsters and other ancient slightly evil things illegibly lurk. We’ll be making up contraptions to tame some of those monsters in future years.

Anyway, a happy, mappy new year. In 2025, we’ll make a fresh start, with freshly repacked baggage. Don’t forget to bring your towel.