Tag Archives: plain text and the truth

Time to come clean.

I’ve spent a year and a half building an email list and have NO IDEA WHAT TO DO with it. Self-promotion? Professional insights? Cute check-ins heavy with emojis??? Cropped graphics, woozles & weazles, embedded streaming from my desk and it all made me narcoleptic face-first into keyboard ZZZZZZZzzzzzz.

Because — no fun. I don’t want to be cute and promotional all day. That sounds exhausting & awful. This has to be FUN. It has to be INTERESTING.

So while diligently building My Email List to Nowhere, MailChimp asked:

WILL SUBSCRIBERS RECEIVE MESSAGES IN PLAIN TEXT OR HTML??

WARNING!!! the MailChimp shrieked banana in hand, If you use Plain Text you CANNOT embed pictures nor monkey graphics! You cannot neither dazzle nor Truly Shine!!! No corkscrewing borders! No automated countdown clocks, tickers, widgets —  and I thought Well, HELL YES. That’s GREAT! With a sad, stripped-down format from the late 90s, I can’t really do ANYTHING but type letters and hope they’re worth reading.

The idea was born: PLAIN TEXT AND THE TRUTH.

Real process updates from a working writer, what I’m doing/thinking/reading. Thoughts on day jobs, getting published, having adventures. What matters and what’s worthless. Some emails will be epic poems of TLDR proportion. Others will be over-brief and highly disappointing. There will be gems.

Each message will be as honest as I can make it. In this way, I’ll connect with readers and The Writing Tribe without social media as a go-between. I don’t like social media. And I believe in the magic and power of words on a page — this wild alchemy that continues to bind us, fire us up, make us better understand one another.  A careful arrangement of characters can make you fall in love, start a protest, inspire banning & burning, make you move cross-country, quit your job, start over with a smile and there’s really something to it, this whole writing thing.

So this train is leaving the station. If you’d like to join, Welcome Aboard.

I hope this works. If it doesn’t, I’ll let you know. Honestly. In plain text.

Sincerely,
J.C. Geiger