Highly Irregular Newsletter #27 March 2025

Fairy tale-crime mashup writing workshop last call - and permission corner on why I am choosing to making paid subscriptions free for anyone who wants one...

(listen to me read this post here.)

Hello, all!

I would love you to join me next week for my Zoom writing workshop on Tues March 11th 7pm-9pm UK time - a fairy-tale/crime mash-up! If you’ve never been on one of my writing workshops, my main aim is for us to have fun, with words in whatever shapes you want to write them - poetry, stories, hybrids, anythings. You don’t have to come with any ideas, and there’s no need to be worried about the blank page. My workshops are always a combination of writing exercises to bend and stretch your writing muscles, and reading & discussion of all sorts and kinds of pieces I bring with. The crowd tends to be quite large, so I keep everyone on mute, with any discussion and commenting going on in the chat. If you don’t want to comment, and you prefer your camera off, that’s completely fine too.

What you write is just for you, there’s no sharing of work - and you’ll leave with at least four drafts of new pieces, and/or maybe with ideas for how to play with something you’re already working on, or how to approach something you’ve been trying to write for a while. No need to have either any writing experience or any experience with fairy tales, crime writing or mash-ups - I’m here to pass on permission to play!

If you can’t join us live, everyone gets the link to the recording afterwards to watch at your leisure. As always, there are free and half-price concessionary places for those who need them, and a pay-what-you-can option where you order a free ticket and can then make a donation of the amount of your choice. All details and booking here, looking forward to seeing you there! Unbox subscribers, your discount code is at the bottom of last month’s first Unbox post, and I’ll include it in this months’s first Unbox post on Mar 10th.

Permission Corner

Talking of Unbox subscribers, many of you will have seen my announcement a few weeks ago about offering “paid” subscriptions here for free to anyone who would find the cost a struggle, using this special link: https://taniahershman.substack.com/freesub. I thought I’d use this month’s Permission Corner to talk a bit more about why I decided to do this - it’s not exactly about writing permission, as this corner mostly has been, but permission to go against the flow and do your own thing, which I thought some of you might be interested in.

A few years ago, I wrote a piece, “Catherine the Great Reassesses Her Expansionist Policies”, (included in my Nine Arches collection, Still Life With Octopus) in which my Catherine the Great decides to seize control of a section of lake near where I live. The piece ends:

You ask

why am I content

with part, why not take it

all? Child, you too will learn

that happiness

never comes

from having more of anything.

My writing always has been cleverer than me, it knew before I was consciously aware of it that, like my version of Catherine the Great but on a (much) smaller scale, I am reassessing my expanionist policies - and discovering that I don’t have any. I’m just not interested in what pretty much all of the society around me is telling me I “should” be interested in: making whatever I am doing bigger & bigger and earning more & more from it (not to mention great fame).

Those of you who also post on Substack will know what I found when I moved here from the delightful and low-key TinyLetter (which was bought out) just over a year ago: the focus here is on growing and mainly on growing the number of paying subscribers, unsurprisingly, since Substack is a for-profit business.

Substack encourages you to want more. More subscribers, more revenue, more growth.

More of everything. And the issue with the “more” culture is that you never get to “enough”.

I’m not writing this in order to stand in judgement on anyone else, we each have to find what works for us, what fits with our value system. Having more & more subscribers and more & more revenue is not my personal definition of success. This is not the measure I choose of whether what I am doing has value. I’m here for connection, for community, for conversations. I’m here to be entertaining and, I hope, useful. I’m here to pass on permission to write what you want in the way you want to write it.

Why did I add a “paid” option at all? Well, first, it’s appealing because it’s right there, it’s built in to the Substack business model and it’s really easy to set up. Also, around a year ago I was realising that, although I absolutely love teaching, it’s exhausting - doubly so on Zoom, it turns out, although Zoom has so many brilliant benefits. And I found I was too tired to actually do the thing I love most: writing. I thought that perhaps some income from Substack would mean that I could do less teaching, save my energy and get more time to write. So six months ago, last September, I announced the two tiers of subscription: everyone gets this newsletter, which will always be free. And paying subscribers, for a minimum of £3.50 per month, receive two more posts from me: Unbox Your Words 1 (on the 10th of the month) with a writing prompt/exercise/provocation, and Unbox Your Words 2 (later on in the month) with something interesting to read.

It has always been extremely important to me that not being able to afford something doesn’t get in the way of someone taking part - in everything I do, online and in person - and I make sure when I am doing events for other organisations that this is built in to the pricing, both free places and, if possible, a pay-what-you-can option. I don’t ever want to be offering content that only those who paid for can access (once again, no judgement on those who do like to work with this model). So from the beginning last September I made sure to say that if you can’t afford a subscription, message me and we will work something out. And I thought that was taken care of.

Well, it wasn’t. What I realised after I ran my first Unbox Your Words Zoom writing workshop in January was that while lots of people took me up on the free and half-price tickets for the workshop, not a single person had ever messaged me about a free Unbox Your Words subscription, and this realisation left me feeling very uncomfortable.

So I went for a long walk to think about it and then it hit me: I was not only putting all the burden on the person who wanted a free subscription to message me, I was forcing them into a position of having to declare something it’s generally very hard to talk about: that they are, for whatever reason, not able to pay for something. With the Zoom workshop tickets on TicketTailor, all someone has to do is tick a box and it’s done, no explaining, no interaction. This was most probably why no-one had ever messaged to ask for a free or discount subscription.

There is no way on Substack to offer the “paid” subscriptions for free except as individual gift subscriptions to one person at a time - so I had to find a workaround: I realised I could set up a non-time-limited “special offer” of a 100% discount off the price which you can find here (it may look like they’re going to charge you, but the 100% discount will come off at the end): https://taniahershman.substack.com/freesub

Yes, I could just have made all my posts free for everyone, but as I know well from the other Substacks I subscribe to - and as a number of people here have mentioned - the amount of emails that are coming into our Inboxes daily, weekly, monthly, is getting out of hand! I didn’t want to suddenly send everyone three emails a month, I wanted to keep it as an opt-in kind of thing. It’s your choice, and now affordability isn’t a part of that choice.

It’s important for me to mention at this point that I’m not saying if you are able to take out a paid subscription, I don’t want you to and I don’t appreciate anyone who can support me financially. What I’ve chosen to do over the past six months, to truly work for myself and run workshops under my own brand for the first time instead of running workshops for other organisations, has been transformative for me - not only in terms of receiving all the income from the workshops I run, but also having creative control over all aspects of what I offer (how long the workshop is, how many free and half price places I offer etc…) without having to worry about pleasing anyone else or fitting into their workshop model. It’s just that there is more than one way to show your appreciation if you find what I’m doing here helpful (and maybe even entertaining!) - you might click “like” on a post, leave a comment, spread the word, help me create a community of permission-givers and receivers, that sort of thing!

I’m also experimenting with a Tip Jar kind of set up - if you click the button below, you’ll get whisked off to PayPal and you’ll be able to send me a little cash if you’d like to, no amount too small. But absolutely no pressure, and I will need to sit with this and see if I am comfortable even with the Tip Jar button. We will see!

Please do share your thoughts in the comments - do you have a Substack and how does what I’ve talked about here land for you? Do you also struggle against the “go big or go home”, growth-focused value system that surrounds us? One of my favourite cafes near me is a tiny hole-in-the-wall affair, and the owner has told me that she keeps getting well-meaning people asking why she doesn’t expand, doesn’t open a bigger place, doesn’t create a franchise. Nope, she says. She doesn’t want to, this is what makes her happy and this is what she is able to manage, in terms of time, energy levels, staff etc… Happiness really doesn’t come from more of anything, does it? Even cake. And for me, that’s saying a lot!

Until next time, happy writing/reading etc… - hope to see some of you at my next workshop!

Tania x