I've started to assess the functionality of our home not by how neat and tidy it is (a tempting metric), but by how active it is-- by how much gets done, and by how lively it feels. It's easy to keep a spotless home if you're not baking bread, cooking from scratch 2-3 times a day, knitting and darning and leaving yarn scraps all over the…

I only ever place subscribe buttons at the very end of my writing. Sometimes I forget altogether and Substack reminds me to add them before publishing. I think it is disingenuous to scatter them throughout a piece. So much of our online behaviour is impulsive, and this just feeds it and breaks the flow of concentration. If people are genuinely interested in your work, they'll make the effort to subscribe.

I'd prefer to know that my subscribers read until the end of my essay, or took the time to…