For a long time this blog has published something new every single day. From today it won’t, and I’d rather tell you why than let it quietly happen.
When I started posting daily I paid freelance writers to help me keep up. They did good work and I’m grateful to them. But Rolf Skeldon is a small business run by one person on very little money, and there came a point where I couldn’t afford them any more.
Rather than slow down, I kept the pace going by using AI to do much of the drafting. It worked, in the sense that a post appeared every morning. The trouble was the kind of post it produced. The pieces on the natural world grew more and more expert, far more expert than I am. Everything arrived polished and fully formed, day after day, and I found it harder and harder to believe in. It was tidy, well informed, and not really me.
That bothered me more than I expected. I write a lot here about Stoic ideas, and one of the plainest comes from Marcus Aurelius: if it isn’t true, don’t say it. A blog that sounds like me without quite being me sits uncomfortably close to that line.
So I’m changing how this works.
There will be two or three posts a week instead of seven. Each one will begin with something that actually happened to me or something I actually think. I’ll still have help knocking the words into shape, because I’m a designer and not a writer by trade, but the thoughts will be mine before anyone or anything else touches them.
The Sunday posts are staying. Those are the ones about reading with a wandering mind and about a shop that never closes in your head, and they are the most personal things on here. The Stoic posts have always drawn the warmest response, which tells me that people come here for a person and not for a publishing schedule.
The pieces on the natural world will be fewer and shorter. When I feel strongly about something I’ll say so plainly, as an opinion and not a lecture. And now and then I’ll write about the clothes themselves, how they’re made and how to look after them, because that is the day job after all.
I don’t see posting less as a step backwards. Slowing down and making fewer, better things is the whole idea behind the clothes, and it feels right that the blog should finally work the same way.
Thank you for reading, whether you’ve been here a while or found your way in last week. There’ll be less to read from now on, and I hope it’s better for it.
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