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Antonia Malchik's avatar

Fantabulous, Mike! I'm very excited for this and also still think your "seasons" model for your newsletter was a brilliant innovation I wish I'd thought of.

At a conference I was just at, I talked for a while with an editor at an academic press, and we talked about how publishing a book online might benefit an eventual final whole printed book. It was good for me because I could clarify my thinking around what I'm doing and why, but also get some of her thoughts about the risks that publishers see, which is essentially that people who've already read something online won't pay for the whole book later. Which, considering the success of Leslie Jamison's first essay collection among others, is belied by what actually happens.

Not that people need to get publishers on board with this, it's just something I'm personally interested in seeing because I miss having an editor and don't know anything about design or marketing, etc., and am curious to see if publishers--at least smaller, indie, or academic ones--can start envisioning the book ecosystem differently. I said to this editor, and we both laughingly agreed, that it feels like a lot of things are in constant "beta" right now.

Anywho. Please do a post on how PTSD and complex PTSD (as described in a lot of places but most vividly in Stephanie Foo's recent book "What My Bones Know") and other kinds of trauma lead to memory problems. And traumatic brain injuries. As interested as I am in how memory works, I also have a keen interest in the many invisible ways it can be damaged.

Have a fantastic break!

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M. Louisa Locke's avatar

Looking forward to parallel memory season as well as islands. Just finished putting up a rough draft of a novella, scene by scene on my substack over 4 months. I will then publish final version as ebook in about a month. This is definitely an experiment, so looking forward to polling my readers on who read as the scenes came out, who waited until all done, or those who waited to buy finished version. And as this and most of my work is set in 19th century I was well aware of serialization in magazines as common way books first appeared, so I was curious to see how this worked in 21st century. But as for memory issues, at the age of 73, with a father who started showing symptoms of his Alzheimer's by late 70s, I find myself paying more and more attention to when my memory works well, when it doesn't, so I will be very interested in what you discover. Also particularly fascinated by the Steve Johnson video. Since health issues keep me isolated in terms of face to face interactions, but daily phone calls and my growing interaction in the substack environment has made me, if anything, more interconnected than I have ever been before, I was pleased with his conclusion about not needed the coffee shop to come up with creative ideas! In short, really looking forward to this coming season.

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