Beautiful World, Where Are You?

#10: Featuring thoughts on Sally Rooney's novel, a discussion on how we define genre, why the 'single positivity movement' is a scam, how websites die and more

Hey everyone,

Let’s overlook that this newsletter is a day late and move straight into the 10 things I felt were worth sharing from the past two weeks:

1. Last week, I finished Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? Whilst I didn’t love it as much as I did Normal People — one of my favourite books of 2020 — I did enjoy it very much. On my blog, I shared five thoughts and quotes from the book.

2. I broke my rule about not buying new books this year to purchase The Pyjama Myth by Sian Meades-Williams. But it was for a good reason. Meades-Williams writes the Freelance Writing Jobs newsletter, which compiles a list of freelance writing opportunities every week. This book, which has been very insightful so far, is the freelance writer’s survival guide. Have you guessed what I’m considering yet?

3. Ann Handley (author of Everybody Writes) sends out a fortnightly newsletter about marketing and writing called Total Annarchy. Recently, she shared how she grew her newsletter, which has got me thinking about my own newsletter. I stole this structure from Austin Kleon because curated emails are my favourite and it’s an easy, repeatable format. But I’m toying with making big changes to make the newsletter more my own. More me.

4. Isaac Fellman (of the Isaac’s Law newsletter) and Kate McKean (of the Agents and Books newsletter) had an interesting discussion on how writers and the publishing industry define genre. Fellman also wrote a great polemic about fan-fiction: "Dismissing Fan Fiction As Base Just Makes You Look Basic."

5. For the third newsletter in a row, I’m linking a James Greig article. This one made me say “thank you” out loud as it touched upon my own thoughts re: singledom and loneliness that I’ve never been able to put into words: “Young, fun and... alone? The problems with the ‘single positivity movement.’”

6. Matt Bell advises writers to just “start writing, and the draft will come.” Whilst he’s talking about novels here, his argument can be applied to any fictional (and possibly non-fictional) endeavour.

7. Over on Instagram, @shityoushouldcareabout put together a great post featuring a list of useful (and mostly unknown) websites worth knowing.

8. Shaun, one of my favourite content creators, put out a long but excellent video essay on Harry Potter. Whether you’re a Potter fan or not, it’s well worth a watch for a good analysis of the politics of both the series and its author.

9. I discovered Wesley Aptekar-Cassels’ notebook (courtesy of Lucy Bellwood) and found their posts on how websites die and the sameness of social media quite interesting.

10. I’m super late to the party, but I finally caught the Wordle bug. Now I’m hooked, and I went back to play previous Wordles — all thanks to Devang Thakkar’s Wordle archive. Also, “being late to parties” was a consideration for my list of 15 things I could blog about but currently don’t.

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Thank you so much for reading! If you haven’t yet subscribed, you can do so below. And if you enjoyed reading, I’d love it if you could share it with anyone else who you think would like it, too.

Speak to you all at the end of the month.

All the best,

J.W. Stammers