The Witness Chronicles, June 1, 2024
Clearing up some confusion
A Clarification Regarding Witness Chronicles and the Grasshopper
A subscription, paid or free, is for both. Here’s why.
This week (what a week!) a reader (thanks Holly!) pointed out something that may be a point of confusion for my readers and subscribers. She is a fan of the Witness Chronicles and wanted to upgrade to paid but when she went to do so, she saw she was subscribing to the Grasshopper and hesitated.
It made me realize I needed to clarify the relationship of the two and why. First, technically from Substack’s point of view they are one and the same because Witness is a Section I added to Grasshopper when they introduced the Sections feature. Grasshopper has been a newsletter about the writing lifestyle and Witness was added so readers could see some of my ‘actual’ writing, the political stuff, that at the time was mostly on Medium behind a paywall.
But it turned out that I had only so much to say about the writing lifestyle* (not that glamorous would be an understatement!), but a lot to say about the real world in The Witness Chronicles. And that is what people responded to.
So my focus shifted to writing about the political world, my personal somewhat horrifying fascination, and less so with The Grasshopper. Unfortunately Substack can’t separate the two without a lot of ogida (heartburn) and it would screw up my current subscribers.
So I’m phasing back the Grasshopper to an occasional piece when inspired and staying focused on the day in day out with the Witness Chronicles.
Subscriptions get you both. And all subscriptions, free and paid, get you everything because I feel an upgrade to paid is really a vote of additional support for what I am doing. Thank you to both types!
Sorry for any confusion and thanks again to Holly for pointing this out. I’ll be changing the subscription messaging to clarify this.
Martin Edic
*There are many wonderful writing newsletters on Substack. It may be their most popular subject category and there is no need for another from me. Let the writing stand on its own!
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1) "The Witness Chronicles" is for some obscure writerly reason a great title! I do not read you a lot because I disagree with some of your views. Thank you for clearing this stuff up. Interestingly, I too added a 'Section' with resultant confusions. I was trying to separate out the specific scholarly-derived work that is "Economics" (ECONO) from my stuff as the general category of "Jacob's News.... " This did not go as planned, in my case either. But of course the newsletter still has the manifestation of the results of what I was trying to do so I still PRETEND that these are like, two real categories.
And other thing is when you see a person has not one but several discrete newsletters. I suspect that would work better than "Sections." All the newsletters would show on the "name page," as I call it. As advice for others, this might be useful. So, best of luck with your newsletter ---I guess!