Dispatch #1

Honestly actually technically more of a prologue

Should we make badges?

I’m torn between thanking and congratulating you. Well hey, why not both?

Let’s start with: Thank you! Thank you for being encouraging and supportive and willing to follow along on this brand new THING I’m doing. If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be doing it, and that’s the truth.

And now: Congratulations! Dispatch #1 is going out to a very select group of people, and you are one of them. How do you feel? That’s not rhetorical, and the only right answer is “amazing.”

If you are one of the First Fifty (we should make badges), it means I reached out to you, personally, with an invitation. It means, in other words, that you are exactly the kind of person I want to be writing things for.

Expectations you should have

The backbone of the Dispatches will be fiction. Short stories I’ve written, excerpts from novels, maybe even a screenplay here and there. But it will all go out in the most readable way possible, I promise. No one wants to spend hours in their email inbox. I mean, we all do spend hours in there most days, but no one wants to.

Which means I’ll be publishing stories serially, in digestible chunks, about once per week.

The first fiction-filled Dispatch will hit your inbox on Friday morning. It’ll be Part 1 of a brand new short story I’ve been working on that I think you’ll like.

And that’s what you can expect most Fridays: serialized stories or one-offs.

Non-Fridays, on the other hand, will be for nonfiction. I won’t promise any kind of consistency, but I’ve got plenty of things in the pipeline, and they’ll get dispatched when it feels right.

50+

As of this writing, Dispatches from Inner Space has 50 subscribers. That’s you! Like it or not, you will always be the beating heart of my audience. You will be who I am thinking about when I think about sharing what I write. There’s nothing you can do to change this. I’m sorry.

That said, I am absolutely committed to growing the audience for my work. I’ve learned that art struggles for breath without exposure, and so I’d like to get my best stuff as much air as possible.

And I’d like this effort to be collaborative, which is why I am asking that you do the following 3 things:

1. Open and read the next few Dispatches as soon as you get them.

2. Like and comment on them — not only for the Substack algorithms, but also because it makes me feel good, and ALSO because it would be really cool if some of you who don’t know each other could start getting to know each other.

3. Share at least one Dispatch with someone who doesn’t already know me. (Preferably not this one. This one is just for you.)

It is only because we are such good friends that I am asking you to do these things now, instead of later, after I’ve “provided value.” Of course I hope that everyone who comes later feels so inclined, but I’m hoping you’ll do it just because you love me. Obviously if you don’t do it it’s because you don’t love me, which is I guess something I’ll just have to deal with.

Some hype

I have a lot of thrilling ideas for this blog newsletter. Not spilling all of them out right here, right now, is taking considerable restraint. I tend to be an oversharer.

So instead of doing that, I’ll try to exploit the natural allure of mystery, and simply remind you to look for Part 1 of a very new, very strange short story in your inbox this coming Friday. That’ll be 4/22/22, which pleases me.

Oh, hey, quick question: any good ideas for signoffs?