– Where we were and where I hope we go from here

You may have wondered. You may (or not!) have wondered when the Genie would get her derrière in gear and start posting those reviews and musings again, checked the TAG Facebook page to see if you might have missed a post (no worries, you haven’t!). You wonder …

Is that it? 265 blog posts and <BAM!/POW!> – no more? No more rambling reviews that haul in everything from history to literature to … well, whatever I can think to throw into a review of that odiferous stuff of dream and emotion we call perfume?

Well, no.

As I’ve stated before numerous times, back in the day (2010, and I can’t believe that, either), I began my first perfume blog, Scent Less Sensibilities, as a writing exercise. The more you do it, the better you get, so both the saying and Stephen King’s On Writing go, therefore, if I could sink my verbal fangs into communicating what is in effect a wordless art, I might learn a thing or two about writing along the way.

I dare say I have. Writing about perfume taught me so much about writing, in fact, I applied every single trick I learned by the time the fall of 2013 rolled around and my first novel of over 780 pages was edited for publication from the ground up in a blistering five weeks, including proof-reading, cover compositing and final adjustments, which also taught me a thing or two about deadlines and my ability to fulfill them.

Here you and I are these four years later. You’re still reading, and I’m still writing – if rather less than I used to, not because the words have dried up, but because my time is no longer my own.

But what if it could be?

To that end, and all thanks to the Dude and his “you’re-way-too-good-not-to-get paid/far-more-people-need-to-read-you” attitude, I decided back in June to join Patreon and hook a paywall into The Alembicated Genie.

The paywall goes live on September 20^th. It would have been earlier, but Mercury Retrograde got in the way.

How it will work

Patreon is basically your chance to feel – if even a little – like a Medici. You – the Lorenzo or, say, the Eleonora de Medici – contribute a token sum to the starving artist, which would be me. For this, you will have five options:

The Subscription Option:

For a measly $5.00 a month, you subscribe to the latest TAG posts – meaning, the latest two. If there’s an interest, I can add a monthly newsletter with things like rebates and special offers, short articles on materials, spotlights on perfumers, Creative Directors and so on as well as links to other revelations from Planet Perfume. TAG has – and this still surprises me – 225 subscribers at the time of writing. If everyone subscribed through Patreon, I could not only finance TAG’s overhead, I’d also have created my very own student job. The job of edifying YOU, my readers, twice a week, and not only that. You would in effect be my employers, which really puts the onus on me to deliver the smelly verbiage twice a week, posted every Wednesday and Saturday. No more, because I’m also a student at the moment with a heavy work- and reading load.

The Gift Subscription

Maybe you like what I write and you read so much, you’d like to gift a subscription to a friend, colleague or family member. For the exact same price of $5.00 a month, you can do just that. Tell the world! Tell your friends! Or simply gift them a subscription and let them judge for themselves.

The One-Off

If a dedicated subscription is a bit more commitment than you’re able to handle, you have the option to pay $0.99 for reading the latest two reviews. That might be feasible so you can decide whether or not my idiosyncratic style and perspective is a good fit for you – or not. And it’s only 99 cents. I’ll wager you’ve blown far more than that on perfume, yes?

The Tip Jar

Once upon a storied time a long, long time ago, I used to busk with a friend on Strøget, the Walking Street in Copenhagen. We sang a capella whatever we could think of at the time, but I recall a distinct predilection for Kid Creole and the Coconuts songs, and ‘Gina, Gina’ in particular. The tip jar option is that virtual hat on the ground. Contribute however much or little you please, but for reasons of logistics I’m unable to control, the minimum is $1.00.

The Freebie

Paywall, schmaywall. Blogs should be free, you might think. They have been for this long – whether with advertising or without – so why stop now? This option is for you: Pay nothing. That’s right. Nothing. Because I garnered a reputation, such as it is, for something, and you want to know why, you just don’t want the obligation or the commitment of subscribing. So in the future, all reviews, musings and general fragrant blathering except the last two are free to read, to comment upon (something I greatly applaud/appreciate, and all comments get a reply), and to link to. (I will be notified if you do, and I’m more grateful than you know.)

The Filthy Lucre

I enter this perilous undertaking on the premise that I’ll be lucky to get five subscribers, if that many. I’m only too aware that I’ve lost a metric ton of street-cred and influence these past meagerly posted years, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get back to where I was in 2011-2012, but by golly, I’ll die trying. What I’m emphatically NOT out to do is score a bunch of free cash and leave you, my dearly beloved readers, in the lurch. In other words:

I’m not doing this for the money. I’m doing this for the motivation.

Say, I do land five subscribers – well, the way I see it, that’s $25 I didn’t have before – for writing about perfume. Any amount is x amount of dollars I didn’t have before.

Each of the four first options has a specific purpose ear-marked. The subscription and the one-off money goes toward overhead; web hosting (I no longer use WordPress hosting), domain upkeep, and blog templates, and the best ones are more expensive than you’d think. 2017 has been an expensive year in that regard, but I have some hopes things will run very much smoother in the future.

The gift subscription and tip jar options will go towards something equally vital to the purposes of TAG – a new computer. Four years ago, I crowd sourced a ‘new’ used 17” MacBook Pro, which has been a godsend for this writer. Four years on, I’m still profoundly grateful many of you made that happen.

Having said that, it was used. Like every Mac I’ve ever owned since 1997. It still works beautifully and without a glitch, but it IS nine years old by now, the frame around the screen has broken, and I’m no longer able to close it properly, and therefore, no longer able to transport it everywhere. (I suspect Janice Divacat and her annoying, forbidden habit of lying on top of the closed computer, something she well knows is strictly verboten.)

I’ve been given a Windows 8 laptop (which is big, bulky, and an Epic Pain) for school by the Dude, who is vehemently against everything Apple. I have no words for how much I loathe and detest Windows 8, and I can’t afford to upgrade to Windows 10. Even if I could, I’m emphatically NOT a Windows person, although I mean no slight to those who are.

As I’ve tried to explain to a linear-thinking, rational, stats-and-specs-obsessed, non-creative IT supporter, it’s not about the specifications. It’s about something else.

Since I began writing in earnest in 1998, I’ve written on Macs. Some were big and bulky and beige (my least favorite color), and two others were sleek, silver laptops. All could – and indeed still do – run my beloved Adobe package of graphics software (a necessity), MS Word and all the other bells and whistles.

So it’s become a habit and also more than a little superstition. Those two MacBooks I’ve owned since 2008 have made these very words possible. Closer to my point is this significant revelation:

A Mac lights my imagination on fire in ways Windows never, ever could. Not only that, I consider my MacBook to be an indispensible family member the same way I regard my iPhone 6. It engages my emotions daily, takes care of all the background stuff, and offers the shortest way from the A of ideas of the Z of execution in the most painless way possible. If that means I’ll be forking out an insane amount of money, then yes, I’ll pay for that lack of (daily) aggravation.

So the tip jar and the one-offs will go towards saving for this beauty. Like my battered 17”, it can do absolutely everything I’ll need a computer to do – for TAG, for my future books and stories, and for school. Also, like I said earlier, I’ve never unpacked a computer straight from the box to use, all shiny, fresh and pristine. I can take it with me everywhere. And – important for my personal sense of aesthetics, and to hell with stats and specs – it’s pretty. These things matter, or is that just me and my own demented mind? I might get it. I might not. But it would be at least a possibility, and I can hope for that.

Anything left over – and as I said earlier, I have extremely low-key expectations – will go towards keeping the Genie afloat in samples and/or decants for review.

The Future Genie

I’ve been sitting on a stash of what I dub Big Reviews. Meaning important perfume releases I can’t wait to edify you with. Some are stories, some are simply reviews, but all of them are proof of why I love to write about the art (which it is) of perfume. A few are brands I haven’t reviewed before, and that’s another tangent I’d like to go on – to review those brands who don’t get so much attention, along with some too important to ignore. I’ve found things to blow my socks off, and things to rile me up for being so uniquely horrifying.

I can’t wait to share them with all of you, can’t wait to discuss them, argue about them, and expand all our horizons in the process.

Speaking of process, YOU – yes, you! – are the most important part. I’d love to read what you might think and feel and say about all of this.

Watch this space – and let me know in the comments what you think!

Photo: A still from Fritz Lang’s 1925 film, Metropolis.