Introducing: Postcard Club

Sep 22, 2023

I know how this is going to sound, so please stick with me knowing this: I’m not high.

But…it’s pretty crazy that we’re here, isn’t it, sharing this digital space together? I think it’s crazy that it’s even a possibility, let alone something we’re doing right this second.

Email, after all, is 52 years old at the time of this writing. The internet is 40. When you consider that Homo sapiens have been on this planet for about 300,000 years, those numbers represent a single blink of a single eye.

Zoom out even further to remind yourself that earth is 4.5 billion years old, and our entire existence as a species equates to the blink of an eye—thus reducing our aforementioned inventions, cute as they are, to the teeniest, tiniest fraction of a blink.

My point being: the tools we’re using to meet right here, and right now, as old hat as they might feel to us at times, are indeed very, very new. They’re awesome. They’re powerful, capable of great things. I mean, I’m writing this in Seattle, Washington, and I know that the second I hit “Send” it’ll go out to anyone who has subscribed regardless of where they live on the planet. One click and boom, there it is.

That’s wild!

Yet… I’m of the belief that these digital relationships of ours shouldn’t be our everything.

Great as they can be, we shouldn’t live just digital lives, and forge and maintain digital relationships. We just can’t. I think we as individuals, and we as a species, lose a little bit of ourselves the more attention we give to our profiles, and our personas, and our avatars. Over time, I think we forget about who we are and where we’ve come from. What makes us, us.

But these digital spaces, these digital relationships, they aren’t going away. And that’s largely a good thing, because they aren’t evil. I certainly don’t want them to go away.

I think perhaps we should aim not for digital relationships to dominate our social lives, but instead for them to be entry points to connecting with one another on a deeper level, in the physical world.

That’s where I hope Postcard Club can step in.

A postcard featuring Lake Washington (near Seattle) in 1907. What’s interesting to me about this is that the sender wrote, “Their Coney Island here. Elden.” Why that’s interesting to me is that the first name given to the area by white settlers in 1851 was, very, very unoriginally “New York.” They then added “Alki” so that it read “New York-Alki.” Alki is Chinook Jargon for “By and by” or “eventually” and what Indigenous peoples called the land upon which the settlers—some of whom were from New York—first decided to settle. (If you’re still reading, sorry for the brief detour. I won’t be finding and sending old postcards through Postcard Club, I just found this one in the public domain, found it interesting and wanted to share. Onward!)

What is Postcard Club?

In short, Postcard Club is an optional perk for paid subscribers.

Interested paid subscribers can submit their preferred mailing address via Google Form (coming soon) to start receiving one fun and unique postcard each quarter—designed by me, addressed by me and mailed by me.

Each postcard sent will have a short handwritten message on it from yours truly as well.

What designs? What messages?

Any? All?

The only plan I have here is to not really have a plan. One quarter maybe I send a postcard entirely from the perspective of a character of mine (even the handwritten message). Another quarter, maybe I send something about the weather.

In other words: it’ll be dictated by the moment, by what’s going on in my life at that time.

And, because each one will be printed in what’s called a “limited run,” they really are unique, and they’ll remain unique because there won’t be any additional printings of that design.

Will this cost me anything?

Nope. Nada.

Postcard Club isn’t meant to put any sort of stress on you in the slightest; it’s something I want to offer to fans as a way to connect quasi-IRL, wherever you live.

(If I had the means to do so, I’d love to travel to a town near you and grab a coffee or something. Because that isn’t possible at this time, this’ll have to do!)

And also, in the event that my writing starts reaching a wide audience, those who supported me from the jump will have what I think are going to be some cool collector’s items.

(Cha-ching.)

The upcoming schedule

Below is a list of months members of Postcard Club will receive their mailings:

December 2023
March 2024
June 2024
September 2024
December 2024

Become a paid subscriber

As mentioned, you must be a paid subscriber to be eligible for Postcard Club.

I’ll be putting together a Google Form within the next couple of weeks and sending it to paid subscribers only to sign up. So, if Postcard Club sounds like fun to you, consider upgrading your subscription.

And because I thought a reminder could be helpful, Postcard Club isn’t the only perk of being a paid subscriber:

Paid Subscribers Receive ($5 per month OR $50 per year)

Read every post
Full access to 130,000+ words and 2+ hours of audio in archives (including books, short stories, screenplays and more)
Earlybird access & discounts on occasional physical offerings (e.g. paperbacks)
Voting rights (on book cover designs, etc.)
Invitation to Postcard Club (coming soon)
10% of all paid subscriptions is donated to the World Resources Institute

A sneak peek

Okay, so I’m really not lying when I say there’s no real plan involved here. But I have started fiddling with some postcard design ideas, and I wanted to share one with you here because, well, I’m just excited about it, and about getting this thing started.

Check it out:

Sign up

Ooookay. Ready to sign up? Below is the link to the Google Form.

If you have any trouble, just shoot me an email and I’ll help in any way I can.