Cartoon Gravity 27 - Into the future...

Julian Simpson -

It is ten years since the first Infodump newsletter went out. TEN YEARS. I only realised that just now when I went hunting for it. Infodump became Cartoon Gravity in 2021, with the first newsletter being send from the Riverside Tearoom in Orford, while I was writing "Who Is Aldrich Kemp?". Readers of the Saltmarsh storyline on the Pleasant Green Blog will note that the same tearoom appeared in the penultimate instalment.

I would like to say a lot has changed in ten years, and out there in the world it clearly has. Here though, not so much. Cartoon Gravity has grown to several thousand subscribers, and the newsletters mostly faded away to be replaced by blog posts which, I suspect, far fewer people read. I started a Substack called Development Hell, through which paying subscribers received a newsletter containing tips, tricks and observations about working as a professional writer. That got a fair few eyeballs, but it also distracted me from Cartoon Gravity.

Then, about a month ago, I stumbled on the Mighty Networks service and launched The Cartoon Gravity Club, which I hoped would produce something of a community that might bring together fans of the Pleasant Green Universe and of the Aldrich Kemp radio series, with regular Cartoon Gravity subscribers who wanted to talk about broader topics. Just a few weeks in, that has exceeded all my expectations; we now have hundreds of people in the club every day, talking about movies, books, TV shows, games and comics, or just hanging out while they work and play. We instituted a general "no politics" agreement, and the space seems to have become a haven where people can hang out without fear of getting into fights. If you're into any of the stuff that is talked about on these pages, and you want to meet like-minded people, click the link and take a look around.

The advent of the club has reinvigorated my enthusiasm for the Cartoon Gravity site itself. At the same time, Substack has become kind of a pain-point; I still love the environment over there, but posting is not nearly as clean and easy as it is here (I can publish straight out of Ulysses or IA Writer here, on Substack everything has to be copied and pasted and links have to be rebuilt etc). As Substack has grown in popularity, so posts start to get lost and the whole place now feels more crowded. I still think it's great as a reader, but I'm not sure how much work I am prepared to put into it as an author at this stage.

So now seems like a good moment (10 YEARS!) to consolidate. I want to build out the Cartoon Gravity space, devote more time to it, and really build the Club community. And I want to bring as much as I can under one roof. So here's what's going to be happening over the next few hours/days/weeks...

  • Comments on the Cartoon Gravity website have been closed. Any discussion of posts now takes place in the Cartoon Gravity Club.
  • The Development Hell Substack is being migrated here and the archive has been moved to Cartoon Gravity.
  • Paid subscribers will be transferred across (with the option to cancel, obviously)
  • A new subscription tier, priced the same as the Substack, is launching here. The Development Hell tier will give access to the complete Development Hell archive and to new (regular?!) Development Hell newsletters about matters that concern professional writers/directors etc

I think these changes are all-upside for you guys. They mean that everything is available in one place and the free stuff that I was posting to Substack will now also be here, and be free to regular subscribers.

The Pleasant Green site is a separate concern and will continue to be its own thing, but the link at the top of the Cartoon Gravity page will now take you straight there. I did briefly consider merging the two sites, but melding a fictional universe and a real one is just going to be all kinds of confusing.

The Cartoon Gravity Club is also hosted separately, by Mighty Networks, but there is now a link to take you right there at the top of the Cartoon Gravity home page. This is as easy as the navigation can be made. You're smart people, you'll figure it out.

There will be a little bit of a redesign on the site itself, but I suspect that I may be the only one who notices.

What I'm most excited about is the idea of getting back to Cartoon Gravity as a scrapbook for the various things that interest me:

  • A daily(?!) blog/journal of inspirational/interesting/weird stuff.
  • A round up of that stuff and more in the Cartoon Gravity newsletter.
  • The pro-writer stuff in the Development Hell newsletter
  • MAYBE a little bit of light podcasting.
  • A burgeoning community of people united under a weird-nerd banner.

This isn't new, so much as a return to first principles for this site. But I'm really looking forward to where it goes.

Fuck it. Send.