Watching the Writer Work, Day 1

Hello, I’m Tomas “ProfessorTom” Gallucci. If you’re wondering why I’m called ProfessorTom, I covered that in a blog post entitled What’s in a Name?; I’d be delighted if you checked it out.

I feel compelled to use the cliché of the first man on television: he said it didn’t matter what he did because no one had ever been on television before. Well, I can’t say that I’m the first to write a newsletter, but this is the first email newsletter I’ve written, so we’re in this together.

Building Watching the Writer Work

As most of you know, I was part of an email newsletter challenge this past week. Unfortunately, give some recent life events, it was a bit much for me to try to do each of the exercises every day. As a consequence, I think I missed out on a lot of feedback from the rest of the class and likewise, I think I missed out on understanding what newsletters most of my fellow classmates were creating. As such, I haven’t subscribed to as many newsletters as I could nor did I pick up as may subscribers as I could. As a friend said to me recently, “There’s a cost to everything.”

While I had built part of this newsletter, I wound up spending most of the weekend refining the newsletter such as it currently is. I choose Beehiiv over ConvertKit because I read reports that ConverKit was censorious during the long-lasting bug. I hadn’t heard of Beehiiv until right before I signed up for the newsletter challenge. We’ll see how well it works for our needs.

About That Current Event…

I’m attempting to try to support myself on my words alone as I was recently deprived of my main source of income. I have to really put my head down and make my writing work.

Consequently, the newsletter challenge couldn’t have come at a better time.

I’ve known for years I needed to build an email list, but I never attempted it until now. Previously, I had tried to compare features and figure out which service was the best and got lost in not understanding what the features were or did. I still don’t, but the newsletter challenge helped me answer some questions and made me realize I needed to pick a platform, use it, see what I did or didn’t like about it and then consider if I should go through the pain of moving to and learning a platform or staying with the devil I knew.

Only One Post?

So, for the entirety of last week, I only managed to squeeze out one blog post, The missing five seconds of the movie Sully…that would be impossible to put in the film. Part of the reason that I only managed one post was that I was using last week to decompress. lick my wounds and regroup.

The other reason that I only wrote and published one post is that I wanted to include a link to the sign up page for this newsletter in the Call to Action section of the blog post. I wanted to wait because I sent a link to the post to someone I mentioned in the post and linked to their online presence. I sent them a link because I was curious what their history with the subject matter was and I also hoped that if they responded publicly, they would link back to my post.

There was no response as I was going to press with this edition of the newsletter.

I didn’t and don’t expect an immediate response as he is a busy, globetrotting man. Ergo it’s too early to be disappointed.

This Week’s Writing

I’ve got several ideas for blog posts that I want to work on this week.

I’m considering bringing back the Better Every Day series.I’ve considered batch wring those posts. I don’t know if I would want to try to bang out a full week’s worth on Sunday. I do know that the reason I didn’t keep the series running for long is that I missed a day in the chain. So, I think if I’m going to start again, I should have a few in the can so if I miss a day or two of writing, I will still have content scheduled to go out.

I have a piece that could take a day or two of research and possibly another day or two to write. I’ve watched 15-20 hours of content on the topic and I now have the documents necessary to piece together the story and tell it cogently. but I suspect it will be a longer and possibly even a multi-part piece. I will be extremely proud if I execute this piece the way I have it planned in my head.

There are many other ideas for pieces, but aside from mentioning that I plan on writing about Sound of Metal, doing a proper review of Oppenheimer, possibly a review of Killers of the Flower Moon, I won’t try to front load the week.Instead, I’d rather underpromise and over deliver.

Completing the Feedback Loop

Do you do any writing over the weekend? If you were a fellow student in the email newsletter challenge, what changes do you still want to make to your newsletter? How many emails have you written for your newsletter thus far?

I can’t wait to hear your replies and answer your questions!

P. S. I’m not sure what will happen if you reply to this email. If you do reply, let me know if you hit the reply button in your email client. I think I have set up the reply-to email correctly, but if I haven’t you can reach me at [email protected]

Until next time,

Tomas “ProfessorTom” Gallucci