When I started Terrain, I mentally committed myself to doing it for at least one year, a milestone I have now reached. I am enormously grateful for both everyone who encouraged me to start it and for the mostly positive response to its reality.
For this first year, I have averaged about one post per week; some weeks I put out two, some weeks none. I am not sure if people prefer this or a more regular schedule like one post every Monday or something. I have been inclined to just put posts out when they are ready, but I could definitely see benefits to being forced to stick to a regular schedule.
This has been, by far, my most consistent writing project. It has been fun to experiment with different formats like essays, interviews, links roundups, and even a few podcast episodes. For better or worse (for my career prospects), I do not like specializing too narrowly, which is why I have covered all sorts of different topics that may sometimes stretch conceptions of what climate and environmental issues are or can be.
When I started I had a number of Google Docs full of random paragraphs and half-baked ideas. These were things I definitely wanted to write about and gave me a helpful starting place for many of my early articles. I have since exhausted most of those, but I still keep compiling new docs using more or less the same system. Overall I have been able to write a lot of things I am proud of (one of which I was asked to republish in Socialist Forum).
It has also been really rewarding to interview a number of brilliant and talented experts and practitioners, including long-time friends, online acquaintances, and people whose work I have just admired from afar. I sort of see myself as a point guard setting people up, using my questions to tease out their most interesting insights (to me at least) and make it as easy as possible for them to do monster dunks and whatnot. Although I never know how exactly anyone will respond, of course. The editing process is also difficult and fun, kind of like sculpting. I usually cut out more than half of each interview because they end up fairly long in text and I sometimes turn the ball over with bad questions.
I do not know where Terrain will go in 2023. I will keep writing and interviewing as long as I feel like I can produce interesting and useful stuff. Even now, every post feels like a big risk. It is scary to put yourself out there (especially without an editor), with no idea how it will be received or whether it will be ignored.
If nothing else, this newsletter has been helpful for getting ideas out of my head and clarifying my thoughts along with pushing me to read interesting books and giving me a great excuse to talk to cool people. Thanks for indulging me, and have a happy new year.