Hi y’all.
I won’t bury the lede – I’m changing some things in my writing business, and one of them is how and where I blog. This will make a few changes, mostly minor, for the regular readers of this blog.
In the early days of blogging (say, 2003, which is when I came on the scene) it was a fun way to document things online – thoughts, expressions, what we had for supper, things we wanted to remember, and ways to show who you were, in the hope that someone, anyone, out there would see you, and wave their hand, and say, “Me too, friend. Me too.”
These days we tend to do that on Social Media. It’s a bargain we have made with the Social Media companies, where they provide an easy way to post our thoughts, pictures, and memories and have the potential to be seen by lots of people, and in exchange, they make money off those thoughts, pictures, and memories.
I can write a heart-felt memory about my father, and Facebook can decide to put it next to an ad for sex toys or – and I get no say about that, or any share of the revenue from it. Further, they can decide to hide that story from people if they choose, or decide I shouldn’t be allowed to post it. And should Facebook ever shut down, that writing is now gone forever.
I’m no longer willing to keep up my end of the bargain.
So I’m changing where and how I share that writing – both the fun things and the short thoughts as well as the stories and essays.
I’m leaving this blog up, and shall for the foreseeable future, as an archive of sorts. Going foreword, I shall be blogging on my very stripped down new blog at hughlh.com.
This will be an old-school sort of blog, with short posts (like you would post on Facebook), quotes I like, links I want to highlight and promote, and occasional short stories.
Long essays (say, anything over 1000 words) are written weekly and sent to people who support me financially as part of my Membership Team. It’s a lot of work to write an essay or story – I choose to no longer do that work for free.
How this will affect you
Several hundred of you already get an email from WordPress when I make an update on this blog. Since the number of posts will increase, I thought it wasn’t fair to inundate you with an email every time I post something: Instead, beginning the 4th of January, you can expect to get an email on Saturday morning with a link to everything I have written on the blog that week.
If you still subscribe via RSS (bless you!), the new RSS feed is https://www.hughlh.com/feed
As always, I’m grateful anyone wants to read anything I’ve written. Thank you for doing so, and allowing my words in your life.