CxD #201: 📚 + 🏡 Cxd.Community

Dear Characters,

Last week’s CxD #200 announced with wild fanfare 🥳 and reckless abandon 🤪 that I’ll be creating our own online community for subscribers only, a place where we can nourish more meaningful connections and discussions about all things character.

Turns out I need to clarify something:

The CxD newsletter in the format you’ve come to love these past four years will also continue, but the majority of it will now be behind a paywall. This will hopefully incentivize people who don’t value character to be worth more than $1/week to unsubscribe, and to those who do, to invest in it a little, flexing those generosity muscles ❤️💪. That investment itself ought to change the frame enough to encourage more, umm, investment into character.

And, simultaneously, the CxD community will also be available to subscribers, but in addition to the newsletter rather than its replacement.

So:

The past= issues #1-200: CxD Newsletter was sent to everyone for free; subscribers were patrons; everyone had the same access.

Present + Future= CxD Newsletter has a free version that is limited to 1 or 2 character morsels. The rest will be behind a paywall. Subscribers have access to the whole thing.

And subscribers also gain access to the CxD community if they’d like a deeper, relational experience.

But you don’t need to abandon the newsletter if the CxD community doesn’t sound appealing. You can pick your character delights in whatever format fits your life’s dance patterns.

Wine, poetry, or Virtue; it’s your choice, but get drunk. 🍷

---

1. One of the things we’ll be doing over at www.cxd.community is talking about books. I’ve been kvetching for a while now about what feels to me a lost, or displaced art and habit of deep reading and thoughtful, ongoing discussion in the era of quick blurbs and bleeps and tweets. 🧐

So my intention will be to try to read approximately 2 books per month—1 book every two weeks, approximately, and to have an open forum discussion about each of them over on cxd.community.

I’ll try very hard to announce each new book here in the newsletter every other Sunday so that anyone interested in reading it and discussing it will have about two weeks to read at least some of it. I’ll also tailor the selections to be approximately about character in some hopefully obvious way, but almost everything touches on character eventually, so expect a wide-ranging and expansive selection.

Speaking of books:

Here’s a link to a fascinating curation of ostensibly the Top 25 books of the past 125 years in which readers get to vote for their Top 3.

Books are full of characters and there are fewer ways of studying our own than via the reaction we have to other characters, real or imagined, especially when we get to know them deeply and intimately over hundreds of pages.

Top 25 Books Voting Here

Which 3 did I vote for? Hint: I have the last line of one of them tattooed on my right shoulder.

Answers and much more below.