Hi! Welcome to All I Care About This Week, an email newsletter about what I’m reading, feeling, and thinking about at any given time. More personal essay than book review, I try to write about the questions that haunt me with nuance and thoughtfulness.
I’m a visual artist and writer from the pacific northwest, currently in LA. I make art about how funny and sad every part of life is. You can see my work here.
You can also find me on instagram, I’m @_nanders
WHY I AM DOING THIS:
I have written 72 (!!) of these newsletters over the course of three and a half years, on my own schedule, at my own pace. As an artist and writer, my main struggle has always been the finite amount of time and energy in the day. Sometimes I feel jealous of people that aren’t attempting to have an artistic practice: imagine getting home at 5:30 and making dinner and watching a TV show and not feeling bad that you “should” be making art or writing or trying to Make Your Creative Career Happen. Imagine not being plagued by guilt all the time! Must be nice! I try to put time into my practice during the evenings and weekends, but I am also a human being that values work life balance and wants to be able to hang out with my girlfriend and my cat and eat pasta. There are only so many hours in the day and I have a limited amount to burn on all of the different things that I do.
I have enjoyed the structural limitations of this tinyletter, and the full lack of accountability to maintaining any type of schedule, but I recognize that accountability, room to experiment, and compensation are what I need to grow in my practice right now.
This year, my goal is to monetize my creative work so I can buy myself more hours to invest back into it. I think financial transparency, especially for creative people, is both interesting and important to share, so these are my goals:
I currently work 40 hours a week building wooden crates. I make $22/hr before tax. My goal is to make enough money on this newsletter to take two (2) days off a month to spend entirely in the studio, writing and making art (dream small, y’know). In order to keep my income flow steady, I am hoping to bring in $352 a month via this newsletter, which comes out to 79 paid subscribers. At the time of this writing, 672 people are signed up for this mailing list— if 11.7% of you choose to support me in this way, I can meet that goal.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU:
I genuinely enjoy sharing my thoughts and writing for free, and it is important to me that my writing remains accessible, so a free version of this newsletter will continue as it always has— irregularly, on my own timeline, with no accountability, featuring a longish-form essay loosely structured around a book I have recently read. They will be sent out roughly once a month, with no set schedule. If paying for this newsletter is something that is not in your budget, or is not of interest to you, I totally understand. No pressure at all— I just appreciate your time and attention.
I’ve moved my full archive over to this platform, if you want to peruse back issues.
A subscription costs $5/month or $50/year. If you are interested in becoming a paid subscriber, here is what you can expect:
access to the regular free newsletter
at least (2) additional newsletters per month. One will be of a similar length and quality to these newsletters you have been receiving, though not necessarily related to a book, and one will be a short, hyper curated link round up at the end of the month (similar to what I occasionally do in my Instagram stories)— bangers only. I’ll provide a short description or pull quote, tell you how long it took me to read each piece, and do my best to curate an interesting, and varied selection of articles. Think of it as mini-magazine to read in bed on a Saturday morning.
I am also interested in experimenting with more casual chatty newsletters— the type of friendly and useless content I enjoy on the internet: everything currently in my fridge, a tour of my ceramic mug collection etc. Maybe I’ll consider doing a Q&A? Excited to play around with structure more.
I used to include more studio updates in my newsletter but over time those portions have been trimmed for word count and stupid arbitrary rules/superstitions I created for myself. I am hoping to use this platform to tell you more about in-progress projects and my studio process.
if I fail to send any newsletters for over two months, I’ll refund your subscription fee for those months.
if you sign up and your budget changes, or you decide I am simply too annoying to let into your inbox, you can downgrade to the free subscription at any time or unsubscribe.
If that sounds like something that interests you, you can sign up here:
Thank you so much, I’m so glad you are here.
Love,
Nicole
