Posted on February 24, 2021

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What is going on

A couple weeks ago, I was in that half-asleep, half-awake state where sometimes “good” ideas come to you (sometimes, the ideas are entirely nonsensical as soon as you get some mental distance away). I’ve been writing these ideas down for the past couple years, at least whenever I can remember them. This time, though, I had no need to write it down. 

The ideas that came to me wasn’t some grand societal structure, nor was it a way to improve my life, or the lives of humanity. It wasn’t even a sentence. Rather, it was a single word.

“yotally”

Like most thoughts, I can’t identify exactly where it came from. Nothing I’ve been considering lately should’ve led to such a revelation as “yotally”. Yet there it was, presented to my half-asleep brain as if on a silver platter. Unlike many other edge of consciousness (EOC) thoughts, I couldn’t forget it. I turned it over in my mind and it became extremely humorous to me. I started laughing in bed before drifting off to sleep, fully confident that I would remember the word the following morning.

When I awoke the next day, much to my surprise, I remembered the word with little resistance. Normally, I’m left with the memory of the revelation of an EOC idea, but not even a whiff of the content. This time, apparently, was different.

Over the course of the day, and the following weeks, I brainstormed what yotally could be. There is an obvious parallel to yiction, in the sense that both are regular words with their first letter replaced by “y”. For this reason, I incorporated with the yiction project.

At first, it was meant to be just a podcast. The plan was that I would casually riff by myself about things I like to think about, throw it into Logic (my music production program), mess around with the audio (add music, effects, change things up), and then post it on all major podcasting sites through Anchor.

Then, I made (what I think to be) a cool logo:

and a background soundbite of me singing the “theme tune” to make it into a short video:

And then nothing happened. I did not record things, I did not create more with the project. That was it.

Until now.

Now, after realizing that I should probably have an email newsletter because I am a strictly independent artist and independent artists should have email newsletters, I’ve decided to combine the two ideas. Yotally, this random thought I had in the EOC space, is now an email newsletter-podcast combination. And this is just the start.

(and there’s a new revision of the logo)

What will it be like

High level

The newsletter will not be consistent. I may try sending it once every week or two at first, but this may decrease in frequency over time (or slightly increase – but I do not want to spam). I only want to send a newsletter when I feel as though I have something important to share. If there are more important things happening, I may send twice in a single week. After that, I may not send for a full month. One thing’s for sure, though: I want to craft each newsletter as a piece of art. I want the followers of the newsletter to want to open it whenever they see it hit their inbox.

Granular

I’ve got a few ideas for newsletter structure. For the first few, I’m planning on different combinations of [things I’m working on] and [things I like to think about]. I’m also considering different themes to do for specific newsletters (for example, if I get really into goats one week, the newsletter could be entirely goat theme. or something).

In the first newsletter, I’m including the link to this blog post and a short description of the project, as well as a sneak-peek feature of Old Friends, a yiction song that will release on March 5th, 2021.

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