A blog is a thing you have to feed. It is hungry. It expects a post on Tuesday and another one on Thursday, and it judges you a little, in its quiet way, when you do not deliver. After a while the blog starts to shape what you write — not the other way around — and what you write starts to sound, faintly, like everyone else's blog.
The Currawong Letter is the opposite of a blog. It arrives once a month, in the small hours, when there is something worth saying. If a month goes by without anything worth saying, the Letter waits. The reader gets fewer notes, but they are notes that mean something, written when the writing felt right. That is the deal.
Where the Nest fits
This little corner — Notes from the Nest — is not on a schedule either. It exists because the Letter is a finished thing and finished things need a place for the offcuts. If the Letter is the cleared desk, the Nest is the drawer under the desk, the one with the half-erased notes and the wattle leaves you pressed and forgot about. You are welcome to root around in it. You are welcome to ignore it.
What it will not become: a place where I post every week to "stay on top of search rankings", or where I write listicles about Five Things Picture Book Publishers Wish You Knew, or where I cross-post everything to Instagram so the algorithm gives me a tiny dopamine hit. I do not want the dopamine hit. I want to make books.
The small philosophy
Publishing is a quiet trade. The good ones make a few books a year and let the books do the talking. Currawong Books Press is trying to be that. The Letter is monthly because a month is the right shape for a small press's news. The Nest is unscheduled because an editor's desk is unscheduled. Neither is a content strategy. Both are just the right shape.
If anything ever feels like it is becoming a chore — to write or to read — that is the signal that it has stopped being honest, and I will quietly close it down. The Letter, especially, has my permission to end whenever it stops being useful. I would rather have written twenty-four good monthly letters and then stopped than have ground out a hundred bad ones to keep a streak alive.
That is the philosophy. Now I'm going to stop writing about writing, and go and finish a wattle.
— James