May Update - Shifting Seasons (Patreon)

Hello my beautiful, strange, and wonderful creatures – 

Issue 3 of Writing the Circus has found its way to many of your doorsteps by now (or is making its way to you!)

I wanted to share that I'm planning on shifting gears in terms of my online life for a bit. This doesn't change anything for you folks here - except that you might be hearing from me a little more often as a return my attention to my artistic career with renewed focus.

For the last year, I've maintained a fairly breakneck speed of maintaining a couple different social media platforms, starting up a mailing list. These have allowed me to keep slowly growing some awareness about the projects we all know and love and support here – Writing the Circus zines and, most recently, Slow Circus – and continue to try to slowly build an audience of humans who are interested in what I write or what I have to say.  Y'know, planting seeds for future things, and all that.

I did this while undergoing and recovering from gender-affirming surgery (top surgery), documenting and hustling away on getting back to training and performing in record time to take that dastardly Germany contract that you've all heard about by now.

I did this while doing my first big acting job, in a recurring guest star role that took me all the way out to the West coast of Canada, living out of a hotel room for a few months at a time. In the midst of the pandemic.

That amplified online public presence online meant that throughout the past year, I've been receiving a lot of hate messages and some death threats along the way, too (shocking exactly no one, some folks don't like people visibly thumbing their noses at gender expectations & are more than happy to let me know about it without mincing words).

I'm tired.
Really tired.
I'm tired of the anxiety, I'm tired of the constant demand for attention, I'm tired of the pace at which things are expected to happen, I'm tired of smiling and laughing at hate and vitriol.
Entirely without meaning to, I've found my attention, focus, and energy sucked into these things, instead of the things that really matter to me - like creating. The whole reason why this Patreon exists.

I know many (not all, but many) of you keep tabs on my daily antics through social media, be it Instagram or TikTok.
I'm going to be taking a  break from both of those places, starting at the end of the month. Instead, I'm going to be using that time to dive back into my readings, my writing, grant applications, and my training.

I'm going to be trying an experiment – Ill be letting folks know that I'm going to be using my mailing list to send out updates every other week about training, the work I'm doing, readings and research I'm undertaking, and the like. I'm curious to see if an audience can be grown and nurtured through the 'slower', long-form route of an old-school mailing list. Call it real-life Slow Circus, I guess.

The other place I'll be re-directing folks to is this platform, Patreon, if they're super interested in the nitty-gritty of what I'm creating, like you folks are.This summer will have its smaller projects, but the next 'big' project I'm turning my attention to is the short story collections that I began this Patreon for. It's finally time. I'm ready, those stories are ready, I'm armed with new and improved knowledge about how to physically GET those stories out into the world (e.g. self-publishing know-how) ... I have a good feeling about this.

At this precise moment, I've undertaken some research & readings to see if I can scrounge up enough information on the intersection of historical blackface & clown in North America to make that the subject of the next issue of Writing the Circus.

If any particularly tasty tidbits, acts, or acrobats have come up on your radar that you think I should look into for the next issue of Writing the Circus, drop me a comment, a message, or an email!

Looking forward to this next chapter.

Until next time, stay strange & wonderful -

XO Ess