The end
Hello there!
I'm ripping off the band-aid to finally send the goodbye letter I meant to send a few months ago. Instead, I went for a French exit and left this tiny newsletter project sitting in internet limbo. And while it's been inactive now for almost half a year, I still have people trickling in the proverbial doors hoping to discover tiny wonderful things, and that feels like I've left the "Open" sign up for a store that's already been cleared out.
So, here we go. What's been up? I'll keep it short-ish.
I started this newsletter for myself in the summer of '21, to set some kind of accountability for myself to explore and discover wonderful things across tech, culture, literature, fashion, art, and design. It worked and in the span of this project, from unknown, optimistic beginnings to end (or better yet, a reboot the colour of re-blue), I've built an entirely new career for myself focused entirely on writing and wonder.
In October of last year, I started to get the sense that what I was giving the newsletter had become more than what I was getting. Sometimes you have to make the leap and just do the thing out of love for it. Sometimes you have to be open to exploring what else is out there. It's so hard to know what's "right". But more and more, I've become interested in the idea of exploring concepts and ideas through timebound projects rather than be tied to one thing forever, because there is no "right" forever, just right now.
It's been a good year and a half run and I hope you enjoyed being here for the ride. So with that, with this definite statement, I'm telling you that Tiny Wonderful Things will no longer be active as a newsletter. Operating a one(ish)-person studio, I have to make decisions about where to spend my time and energy and I only have the capacity for one ongoing newsletter project at this point in time. Scale is still on the horizon for Wondermachine, not its reality quite yet.
What's next?
A call to explore: If you have a moment to spare and an itch to venture out the zone of your algorithm, you can peruse our archives here. I've collected well over 300 things over the last 1.5 years, and many of them still deserve your attention.
A teaser: Tiny Wonderful Things will be returning, no longer as a newsletter but an experience of sorts. Let's leave it at that for now. As a subscriber, you'll hear more about this when the time is near.
A new adventure: If you want to keep up with wonder specifically in the context of language, texture, and colour, I invite you to join me on my current adventure, Violets. I've been going down a rabbithole exploring poetry over the last year, struck with how it had become a new and welcome antidote to the feeling of content burnout and screentime overload. (I almost didn't; it was by accident that I fell in.) Poetry was my inflection point as a writer, a reader, a creative, and a person living in the age of excess information. It was exactly what I needed more of, less of whatever this bland mess of a time is. So I created Violets, an adventure disguised as a newsletter for everyone including poetry beginners looking at this and thinking "poetry isn't for me". Well, it wasn't for me until it was.
And if I can't convince you to try poetry, well I suppose that's goodbye between us for now. Perhaps our internet lives will cross paths at some other pocket of the world wide web, hopefully in a magical and open space away from the barrage of the booming, bland, and boring.
Remember, tiny wonderful things are always all around you. You just have to pay attention.
Thanks for being here!
With love and wonder,
Ana and (the) Wondermachine