Austin Kleon：整理个人通讯存档

I have been writing a special Tuesday newsletter for paid subscribers for five years now, which means there’s a bunch of really good stuff just kind of hiding in the archives over there. I’ve tagged a lot of of it on the newsletter homepage in categories like “notebooks,” “mixtapes,” “tutorials,” “zines,” “typewriter interviews,” etc.

But it’s hard to know how to point people back at stuff.

A few weeks ago I had a sale on paid subscriptions, so I used it as an excuse to gather some of the more popular letters, like:

a look inside of my notebooks, a tour of my studio, my guide to block printing, how I make color brush pens, motivational posters for your studio, and the 7 questions I ask myself when I don’t know what to do next. Get it!

The week after that, I gathered up the letters regarding what I know about writing books:

All good things must begin, there’s an abyss between researching and writing and a gulp between when you finish and publish, coming up with a good title matters, there are many tricks for self-editing and the best is “just cut stuff,” you have to love your work long enough to see it through, and it often helps to think of your book (and everything else you write) as a letter to a friend.

I need to spend more time in the newsletter archives doing this kind of work: figuring out what I have and how I can bundle it together. Because honestly, that’s how most of the books were written!

But then again, I’d rather, you know, actually be writing.