ty!
A year of envy and inner focus
This is just a little end-of-year note to thank you for reading and supporting me in a million different ways via this newsletter. If you and I have had the chance to talk shop in person sometime in 2025, then you will know that I’ve run quite the gamut of mixed emotions re: the way the newsletter world has grown exponentially — so much so that Substack and newslettering have become the predominant hustle in the media industry now. It’s a very wild thing to observe and also be a part of, especially as Deez Links comes up on ten years in the game this February.
I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’ve felt at various points utterly washed, left behind, or like I missed out on some specific wave of all this, or mad at myself, like why can’t I get it together more so that I could be sending you this from Deez Links Multimedia Co. HQ in some frosty high-rise downtown? It’s amazing to witness how veterans and new players alike are building new empires in real time, obviously. (The interesting thing about media is that yes, it’s always dying, but it’s also always growing.) There is a lot of money and attention pouring into this space, and the incentive to do more and be more — more online, more fast-twitch, more sparkly — is utterly beguiling.
On an almost weekly basis, I wonder about putting more and more of myself into this newsletter. To just game the shit out of this, fuck it, perform whatever parasocial-paid-subs-performance pirouettes might be required. This is already how I pay my rent, amazingly; but what if it could be more??????? But that’s a a very specific road to choose to go down, and it’s not unlike the other highly structured games this industry has deigned to reward as a matter of “business model” for now. Frankly, it would be much simpler to have just one singular area of focus, versus splitting my time between the newsletter and freelance work. But I think I do not ever really want to do any of this stuff on my own, and for the moment, I’m really happy I don’t have to. This year, I found a lot more stability as a freelancer by doing a lot of contract-based work and, true joy of joys, finally getting into editing again. These freelance adventures have helped me realize that I am still happiest showing up to an office (uh well not every day, I’m not a sociopath) and working with a team and learning everything I can from extremely smart people (both younger and older!) and figuring out how to be useful — not to mention putting entire publications together and working with writers/editors whom I admire and get to champion. The whole point, really.
And I actually think that has always been the point of Deez Links, to be a place where I got to work out a point of view about who was doing what that was interesting, or at least worth having an attitude over. I started this newsletter at the very beginning of my career as an intern; wherever this point in my career is now, it feels like a genuinely interesting place to be. Without a clear playbook — no dream job title, no dream employer, no clear blueprint going forward — I have the luxury of the time and energy to be paying close attention to what’s genuinely exciting, both in media and with life itself, and to sit tight with a lot of it for now. There’s so much I want to do, even if I don’t know where I want to end up even a year from now. So I will always appreciate having this newsletter as a space to keep working things out and to have some fun as we go. Thank you for making this kind of life possible. It’s already the dream.
xoxo delia
