Mea Culpa

Ever since I started my current job (a few years ago), I’ve had a very hard time keeping to inbox zero for my personal emails. It’s not uncommon for me to leave things unread for months, which is how I’ve lost several digital things that I’m fond of.

One of them, which hurt quite a bit, was my entire Yahoo! email account. That one hurt quite a bit, because though I stoppped using that email address, it did archive my early online footprint – emails with early older mentors, exchanges with Yahoo! groups (I was in a learn Japanese group and a group about Enid Blyton), and so on.

The other, most recent one, was my Mailchimp mailing list. This one was definitely my fault. I started the mailing list around the same time I first self-published The Nutcracker King (which means it was more than ten years ago). The decision to self-publish, was, back then, born a desire experience both the editing process and the self-publishing process (this is what happens when you consume a lot of self-publishing podcasts). It was definitely a fun experience for me and one of the things that emerged from it was a mailing list, because conventional wisdom said (and I think that they are correct), that it’s best to have a way to get directly in touch with the people most likely to buy your books.

However, as pretty much all regular readers of this blog know, my break from writing fiction has turned into a very extended hiatus (even extending to blogposts!) and that also led to a mailing list. And apparently, if your mailchimp account has not been active for more than 23 months, they’ll delete it. And because they send you this warning message one day before they delete the account, I didn’t see it. I’ve not had a daily inbox zero for a long time, so by the time I saw the message, it was about 3 weeks after it had been delivered.

Mea Culpa

I have to say, though, this one hurt a lot less. Perhaps it’s a sign of growth, because I used to get really upset at the thought of losing anything, especially digital items because I had the impression that they should be able to last forever (I pretty much freaked out when my hard drive died, if the Google Drive servers die, I’m not sure what will happen because I have my current work stuff on there too).

So there you have it, how I lost my mailing list. I’m quite sure I made an announcement here when I started it, so I thought it would be fitting to put a little note announcing that it’s not going to resume. And now that I’ve finished posting all the drafts that I had sitting there (some of these book reviews are from March), I think this blog will go quiet for a month or two until I have something new to write about. Until then, I’ll try to be better at checking my WordPress reader!