Newsletter business

We sent off the first volume of The Squeeter Pig this weekend. If you signed up and didn't receive yours, you either entered your email address wrong (several few bounced back) or your ISP is blocking me. Almost all the "delayed delivery" messages I got were for email addresses ending in aol.com. I've had emails with some questions about the newsletter that I'll answer here:

"Can you include a way for people to unsubscribe?"
Ack! First volume and already people want out? The person who asked, I believe, was being helpful and suggesting additions that other newsletters have. Of course, she was assuming that we're sophisticated enough to set up such a system. Pretty much, if you want to unsubscribe, you just email me with the request, and then I hunt through the file with all the email addresses in it and delete yours. Pretty low tech. I'm happy to do it, but don't worry, as promised we'll only send out The Squeeter Pig twice a year and won't use your email address for anything else. Oh, and I might sell it to a Viagra vender, but that's all...okay, I'm kidding.

"Where are the fan essays you asked for?"
Excellent question. The problem was my lack of foresight. We decided not to include fan essays in this volume because we only realized after the fact that it was a difficult thing to include in a newsletter. 300 words is a lot of text for a newsletter but not quite enough for an essay, and the newsletter was getting long as it was. The book reviews by young readers worked much better, and we'll keep taking book review submissions for future newsletters. Thanks to those who submitted the essays. You're very cool!