Welcome to the February update post, I have a few updates to talk about including Substack chat, pledge subscriptions, and the upload schedule for new posts.
Substack Chat
I have enabled chat for this Substack publication. It is available to all my subscribers using the Substack mobile app.
This is a conversation space in the Substack app that I set up exclusively for my readers — kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post short prompts, thoughts, and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.
To join our chat, you’ll need to download the Substack app, now available for both iOS and Android. Chats are sent via the app, not email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens.
How to get started
Download the app by clicking this link or the button below. Substack Chat is now available on both iOS and Android.
Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.
That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.
Pledge Subscriptions
I don’t plan to ever put my posts behind a paywall - I believe information should be free. However, at some point in the future, I may enable subscriptions for people who wish to support my work. All posts would remain free, but there may be some benefits to subscribing beyond my gratitude, such as exclusive Q&As and other chat threads. Substack has a feature that lets you pledge a subscription - this essentially means you would like to subscribe once I’ve enabled subscriptions and it’s a great way for me to gauge interest in setting up paid subscriptions. I’ve enabled pledges and once I’ve been uploading consistently for a while I will use the number of pledges to gauge interest in setting up paid subscriptions. Of course, uploading consistently is something I haven’t been doing which brings us to…
My Planned Upload Schedule
I find the best way to actually get stuff done is to set obtainable deadlines and then consistently meet those deadlines. I’m naturally the procrastinating type, so I often do stuff just before the deadline (most of my University work, outside of major projects, was done one or two nights before the due date), but I always get it done and the output is almost always high-quality.
So, to meet my writing goals, I decided to publish a few short-term obtainable deadlines for DITD articles. I plan to publish 1 non-deep dive article per month, starting in April until the end of summer (which in this case I’m considering as August, for a minimum of 6 articles). Once I get to the end of August, I will re-evaluate and publish an updated upload schedule. Along with this, I want to publish at least 1 full-length deep dive by the end of the year. This will likely be a deep dive on prions, as this is the deep dive I have the closest to being complete, at about 1/2 way finished.
With that, I will hopefully have something published for you by the end of next month. In the meantime, feel free to join our chat discussions.
And if you have not yet, I recommend subscribing so you will get the next post in your inbox once it’s published.