Bananas.

There's no other word for it.

A short Everything Is Amazing update.

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Hi!

All of this has been so incredibly, relentlessly bananas. SO BANANAS.

If you’re brand new here and you’re wondering exactly what is bananas, welcome! This covers much of what this newsletter is about, and this will sum up the best of its first four seasons (when I’ve finished updating it).

And it’s truly bananas to me that most of you are fairly new here. At the beginning of February, there were around 1,500 of us. Now we’re just short of 10,000 (!?!), with hundreds of newcomers each week:

I don’t really have any way of processing all this, other than saying the word “bananas” a lot, as you can see.

(I intend to expand my “I don’t know how to express my amazement and gratitude and imposter syndrome and other stuff, so here are just some random words” vocabulary at some point soon, but this is the only word I have available right now. Sorry.)

To sum up where we are: the fourth season just wrapped (here’s what we covered) - and this is what we’re diving into next season.

And if you’ve just joined our elite cohort of paid subscribers (thank you!), or if you’ve been a part of them from the Before-Bananas Times, I’ll be getting back to you shortly - possibly tomorrow morning at this point - to see if you want to go through the original version of my non-fiction storytelling course, as I mentioned here. Paid subscribers will also be hearing from me every week for the rest of July, as I lay the groundwork for our living geology “season-in-a-season” and run a few on-location outdoorsy curiosity experiments with audio. More on all that soon.

But if you’re on the free list - this is goodbye until August!

I’m taking a month away from writing for you, starting with tomorrow night, when I’ll be joining the thousands of Wild-Night-Out-ers scattered across the UK, by taking my weird, coffin-like bivvy tent to a nearby Scottish beach and doing this kind of thing:

It’s all been bananas incredible - but I’m exhausted, and I really need to recharge properly.

(I also need to read a lot of books. My ability to keep writing this thing, or at least to write it well, is increasingly requiring me to take my reading as seriously as…as…a banana a professional academic. So, a few weeks of doing that should do wonders for the next season of Everything Is Amazing. I promise I’m on it, as of today.)

So if you’re reading this newsletter for free, I’ll be back in early August.

Or, if you want to see what’s happening in here this month or want to give my storytelling course a go (or both!), I’m running a 10% discount for yearly paid subscriptions until the end of Monday 4th July:

Lastly: whew.

This is the most fun & rewarding writing project of my career to date, and you are now the biggest audience I’ve ever directly written for. I’m incredibly grateful to every single one of you - and I intend to repay your time and attention with everything I’ve got.

Thanks for being here, and see you very soon for the next installment.

- Everything Is Amazing’s Head Banana, Mike.

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Images: Diane Alkier; Mike Sowden.