Nov 10, 2023·edited Nov 10, 2023Liked by john sundman
Excellent. I hadn't heard that business about the Gordon Lish theory about sentences and consecution, so thank you for putting it in there. Gordon was, as many writing teacher-editor-geniuses, quite good at using way too many words to state the obvious. Yawn.
I never met the fellow and have been heretofore only vaguely aware of him. I've been too busy hanging out with the elites, doing dump runs, and crawling on my belly like a reptile, I guess.
Thank you for the compliment, btw. I greatly appreciate it.
First, I compose my essays using the Substack website, not the app. (In fact I haven't even installed the app on my phone yet, but after some helpful comments from Geoff Arnold last week, I realize that that's that's a mistake on my part. I need to be much more app-aware. I will fix that.)
When I'm composing, after the post reaches a certain size a hard-to-miss banner appears at the top of the screen that says something like "Warning: Post almost at email limit." If I keep adding to it, the message changes to "Post too long for email".
Substack allows me to send posts that are 'too long for email,' but if I do, it sends a truncated version, and recipients must go to the website to read the conclusion. I have imposed the restriction on myself that I will not send any essays that do that.
What's being measured, of course, is not the 'length' of any post, but its size, in terms of bytes. Images are the biggest consideration. When I have a post with a lot of fictures, such as 'Shelfie City,' there isn't much room for text.
The jpeg format for images is much more economical of space than other formats such as png. So one of the tasks that adds to the time I need to compose a post is converting any png images I want to use to jpeg. I use the 'preview' app on my macbook to do that. Sometimes I crop images-- both to improve the picture and to save bytes. For that, I use a "crop your jpegs for free" website. (I use a website that sells photo manipulation software & provides jpeg cropping as a way to attract leads. Some sites just offer jpeg cropping for free, 'no strings attached,' but I'm wary of sites like that — no such thing as a free lunch — because I know that malware can be inserted into images, so I stick to sites from places like Adobe that I take to be reputable.
Interesting! I’m only two posts in to my new Substack newsletter, and I’ve been relatively light on images and length, so I’ve not run into this feature...yet. 😉
Signed up for your substack. Just doing free, for now, sorry. I'm kind of maxed out and watching every penny until the new books come out. I'll check it out sometime over this weekend.
You're welcome. I would find it helpful if Substack just announced what the hard limit was, and then showed you a running count as you were composing so you could see how much you were using up & how much you had left. But so far as I can tell, there is no way to see that. You keep writing and then you pass some unseen threshold and you see the warning.
I've been doing it long enough now that I have a general sense of when I'm about to hit the warning, so it's not that big of a deal.
Excellent. I hadn't heard that business about the Gordon Lish theory about sentences and consecution, so thank you for putting it in there. Gordon was, as many writing teacher-editor-geniuses, quite good at using way too many words to state the obvious. Yawn.
I never met the fellow and have been heretofore only vaguely aware of him. I've been too busy hanging out with the elites, doing dump runs, and crawling on my belly like a reptile, I guess.
Thank you for the compliment, btw. I greatly appreciate it.
So I’m curious, John: how do you decide when an episode of “Sundman figures it out” has “run out of space?
A good question, Matt
First, I compose my essays using the Substack website, not the app. (In fact I haven't even installed the app on my phone yet, but after some helpful comments from Geoff Arnold last week, I realize that that's that's a mistake on my part. I need to be much more app-aware. I will fix that.)
When I'm composing, after the post reaches a certain size a hard-to-miss banner appears at the top of the screen that says something like "Warning: Post almost at email limit." If I keep adding to it, the message changes to "Post too long for email".
Substack allows me to send posts that are 'too long for email,' but if I do, it sends a truncated version, and recipients must go to the website to read the conclusion. I have imposed the restriction on myself that I will not send any essays that do that.
What's being measured, of course, is not the 'length' of any post, but its size, in terms of bytes. Images are the biggest consideration. When I have a post with a lot of fictures, such as 'Shelfie City,' there isn't much room for text.
The jpeg format for images is much more economical of space than other formats such as png. So one of the tasks that adds to the time I need to compose a post is converting any png images I want to use to jpeg. I use the 'preview' app on my macbook to do that. Sometimes I crop images-- both to improve the picture and to save bytes. For that, I use a "crop your jpegs for free" website. (I use a website that sells photo manipulation software & provides jpeg cropping as a way to attract leads. Some sites just offer jpeg cropping for free, 'no strings attached,' but I'm wary of sites like that — no such thing as a free lunch — because I know that malware can be inserted into images, so I stick to sites from places like Adobe that I take to be reputable.
Interesting! I’m only two posts in to my new Substack newsletter, and I’ve been relatively light on images and length, so I’ve not run into this feature...yet. 😉
Thanks for the in-depth education!
Signed up for your substack. Just doing free, for now, sorry. I'm kind of maxed out and watching every penny until the new books come out. I'll check it out sometime over this weekend.
Just honored to have you reading! That’s worth much more to me at this point than the cash.
You're welcome. I would find it helpful if Substack just announced what the hard limit was, and then showed you a running count as you were composing so you could see how much you were using up & how much you had left. But so far as I can tell, there is no way to see that. You keep writing and then you pass some unseen threshold and you see the warning.
I've been doing it long enough now that I have a general sense of when I'm about to hit the warning, so it's not that big of a deal.
You are such a tease, Sundman.