New Pop-up Walk, Reading Digitally in 2024
First, I’m running a new pop-up newsletter connected with my upcoming Tōkaidō walk. The newsletter is called The Return to Pachinko Road and you can sign up here. It starts on May 14, ends on June 1st-ish. I’ll be walking some 600 kilometers from Kyoto to Tokyo and, as usual, publishing a daily essay with photographs.
I haven’t done a walk + newsletter of this length in … a long time. I’ve done a few TOKIO TŌKYŌ TOKYOs (shorter walks w/ newsletter), and done some huge walks without newsletters (England; coast-to-coast), and some non-walks with newsletters (BASIE!BOP!JAMAICA!) but this old-school (classic, you could say) combo of physically-rigorous solo-walk asceticism combined with daily long form bloviation and photographs (and, probably also binaural podcast / YouTube upload) hasn’t been done for a few years (!!). Sign up if you’re game, it should be fun:
Second, good bud Robin Sloan’s new book, MOONBOUND, is coming out in about a month and I’ve been very keenly observing his language around preorders. (Because I, too, will be deploying lots of preorder solicitations in the not-too-distant-future for Random House TBOT.) Language powerful and full of truth: As a “consumer” you have a weirdly disproportionately large influence over a book’s future by way of preordering. From Sloan:
