Leaving Substack and Moving to Paragraph
Action required if you'd like to continue following!
[UPDATE ADDED 30 JULY 2023: This newsletter has been retired and all comments are closed. Endarkenment posts are no longer available on Substack; I’m leaving this farewell note here only as a pointer to the Internet Archive, where you can read the full archives (2018-2023). A good place to start is my most popular post: A Beginner’s Guide to Dark Ambient: Quick-Start Guide.]
Dear Endarkenment subscribers,
For a number of reasons, including major tectonic shifts in my creative and professional life, my semi-retirement from music journalism, and various health-related factors, I’m preparing to leave Substack entirely and shutter my Twitter accounts.
Shrinking my spheres of online attention allocation is a necessary step to free up time and energy for what’s next.
All three of my Substacks — Endarkenment, Of Hearth & Shadow: Notes from Black Stone Sanctuary, and The Anticareerist — will be deleted on Aug. 1, 2023. For the most part I will no longer be writing under these titles, at least not as separate topic-specific entities.
None of my Substack material will be migrated over to Paragraph.
The new home base for my future writings will be A Digital Incubation Space on Paragraph. I've already published a few pieces there, including further info about why I’m leaving Substack and an intro to my new project, Forms of Incubation.
In the months ahead I'll be building out A Digital Incubation Space into a permanent digital home: an online writing space where my work can survive the demise of any publishing platform because it lives on a blockchain.
Existing subscribers will not be migrated over to Paragraph automatically. The topic-specific entity you originally subscribed to on Substack is now shapeshifting or retreating from public view, and I didn’t want to assume you’d be interested in following this nascent onchain entity.
So if you’d like to follow my work outside of Substack (and receive an email when the Ulf Söderberg interview is released), you’ll need to take action.
To follow A Digital Incubation Space, you don’t need to set up a whole new account on Paragraph, but you will need to click this link, hit the subscribe button, and enter your email. You’ll receive one short “welcome to Paragraph” email with a tutorial (like this one), which can easily be deleted or disregarded if you have no interest in publishing there yourself. After that you'll get an email every time I publish a new piece, and you can unsubscribe anytime with a single click. That’s it.
Even if you don't subscribe, you can always leave public comments on my Paragraph posts using an email address.
Again: I won’t be migrating my Substack material over to Paragraph. All of it will be deleted! (Apologies in advance for the broken links).
But you can always read all my previous Substack material, including subscriber comments, by searching at the Internet Archive where it’s already been preserved under the existing URLs.
However, I do plan to compile special curated collectible editions of my earlier music writings, both published and unpublished. These collectible editions will include Endarkenment: The Collected Interviews (subject to interviewee approvals).
Collectors may receive bonus material, which could include:
never-before-seen essays
early drafts from the book manuscript
historical material from my writings on other music sites (e.g., I Die: You Die, This Is Darkness, and the former Heathen Harvest)
interview out-takes
All collectible editions will be announced through Paragraph when they’re ready.
Thanks for reading. Hope to see you on Paragraph!
~ Danica Swanson