Hi. I’m told my book is headed into production soon, and it will be out in early 2022, probably in March. Whew, and hooray! Date and title to come. I’m excited for you to read it, if you’d like to.
Meanwhile, my old Ancestor Hunger newsletter is warming up in the driveway. I’m aiming to send new dispatches every two weeks. Here are the recent ones:
I didn’t intend to disappear from this site for so long, but the book and my other job kept me busy. And in the unlikely event you were wondering what I was up to in the midst of a pandemic and election and attack on the freaking Capitol and so forth, my Twitter feed probably filled you in.
Recently, though, I deleted all my tweets over a month old in disgust over what social media hath wrought in our democracy and the idea that it was monetizing me in the process. Mostly I feel glad that I did this, and freer, but it was a rash act. I’ve been tweeting since 2008. I often used my archives to remember articles and interviews I’d enjoyed but misplaced. Although I downloaded them before deleting, I don’t see myself perusing the file in the same way.
My personal Facebook page has been blessedly abandoned for three years, so deleting just about everything there didn’t feel difficult at all, though Zuckerberg & Co. do not make it easy and only the insurrection prompted me to sit my ass down for all the hours it took to make it so.
In any case, as my mom used to say in her most theatrical Texan way when I kept trying to reach her, and couldn’t, and did finally: Here I ahhm!
A super-smart fact-checker I was working with on my book late last year called this site the most 2000s blog, design-wise, they’d ever seen, and I could only agree! I also thought, ha ha, you brilliant youngster, you didn’t even see the original paint spatter background (captured in part below) that Max made on actual paper at our kitchen table or the “more subtle” graph paper background we decided on a couple years later.
Truly, it has been a journey here at MaudNewton.com, which will soon undergo a proper redesign. Here’s hoping you’re as well as you can possibly be in these times.