The following anecdote is brought to you by someone who has to laugh or they will shrivel up and die from EMBARRASSMENT.
So a while ago I decided to link my Patreon page with this blog, because I get a lot of views on posts from 2011 and it is no longer 2011. I’ve changed, this blog has changed, I don’t really want to be cancelled by a random basement-dweller who finds content from 2011 and writes an essay about how my teenaged perspective means I should never work again. Also the older posts bring in thousands of views, which I’d like to leverage into Patreon membership.
So I upgraded my WordPress membership and got on with moving posts from 2009-2010 behind a Patreon membership paywall. I thought it might be doable with just a couple of clicks (select a whole month or year of posts and bulk-edit them to be readable only if you’re signed into your Patreon account and a member of my page, that level of easy). It turned out that to move a post behind the paywall, I have to go into the post editor and manually assign it to being viewable only to Patreon members.
Which meant I had to read what I wrote and published in 2009 and 2010.
I know I’m a young adult author and this could be career ending, but it kind of needs to be said: teenagers can be fucking idiots. Not every waking hour, and not for the entire eight years of teenagerdom. But good gosh. Aged 14 I had half a braincell floating about. Not even half. Like an eighth of a braincell. Ariel Scarlet, the protagonist of my last book who is canonically emotionally stunted, is smarter than I was at 14.
So at some point I decided that posts from circa 2011-2017 could go behind a paywall, and pre-2011 posts could leave the internet forever.
Then my blog views dropped and I decided that I wanted to leverage views to make cash more than I wanted to hide being an embarrassing teenager 15 years ago. Leaving them up would make me authentic! Honest! Interesting! So I re-published posts from February 2010, making sure they were behind that juicy juicy paywall.
And WordPress dot com told everyone on my subscribers list. Apparently there are 357 people – well, 356 because one of the subscribers is me which is how I found out about it – subscribed to this site. If you’re reading via your inbox, hi! It’s great to have you! Am I right in assuming you did not ever need or want to see neon-green posts in your inbox written by Francesca in 2010? Nod along.
I was, and I’ve had to count, aged 14 in February 2010. I turn 31 in three weeks. If you saw new posts in your inbox just now and read them, I am so sorry you spent time you’ll never get back. We can never make eye contact in real life. Here is a video compilation of some dogs to make up for it.
I’m going to lie in a dark room and try to disappear now.
Look after yourselves,
Francesca
Thanks for reading. If you’ve been looking for a corner of the internet without yelling, algorithm-gaming or debating who’s got the most accurate and/or worthy take on an issue, you’re in the right place. Hit the subscribe button to stay in touch and if you’d like to put reality on pause for a bit, check out my novels and films. To support independent, human-created art and thinking and hold actual conversations with fellow readers, join my wonderful Patreon community or hit up the tip jar. See you in the comments for a chat.
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