Rose-Coloured: Rebecca Rosenblum has started an email newsletter

Hello and Welcome to My Newsletter! It is called Rose-Coloured and if you somehow ended up here without knowing me (how? will analytics tell me?) my name is Rebecca Rosenblum and I’m a writer who lives in Toronto. So far I have published two collections of short stories, called Once and The Big Dream respectively, a novel called So Much Love, and approximately a billion words on the internet, some of which ended up collected in my memoir about the pandemic called These Days Are Numbered: Diary of a High-Rise Lockdown. 

For most of my writing career, I have done my internet writing on a WordPress blog called Rose-Coloured. That evolved out an earlier Rose-Coloured that I had on Blogspot, which evolved out of a private LiveJournal, which will remain private. When traffic went down on the blog I started sharing more on my Facebook, where most of my friends are, and those posts eventually became the aforementioned pandemic memoir. But now Facebook as a platform is sort of falling apart—why are so many posts about how to feed a family of 10 and how someone is or is not the assh*le, from people I don’t know? I’ll probably quit that soon, as I did last fall with Twitter/X. I still exist on Instagram, which I enjoy, and LinkedIn, which I do not enjoy. I have a YouTube full of old cat videos, and somewhere, a Pinterest board of hair inspo for my wedding.

From what I hear, the internet communication waves to ride now are newsletters, TikTok, podcasts, and probably other things I haven’t heard of. I can’t get a TikTok or a podcast because learning to edit video or sound is not in my wheelhouse. I am a woman of words—the only things I have ever done that anyone has liked have been word related (or baking, I suppose I could start sending cookie grams, but that sounds like too much work). So it is a natural next step that I would start this newsletter.

Are you going to like this newsletter? Maybe! I like to write about literature, the craft of writing, the books I’m reading—occasional book reviews—writers I know, and just random book thoughts. I write about TV, movies, and sometimes theatre and music in much the same manner though not as knowledgeably. I write a lot about my husband, the author Mark Sampson, sometimes as we talk about books or Simpsons reruns or Robert Borden or who loaded the dishwasher wrong. I also talk a lot about my two cats, Evan and Alice; my mother, Mominator; the city of Toronto, which is the other love of my life besides Mark. Sometimes I talk about politics or current events, though sparingly—I’m passionate but sometimes ill-informed, so I try to be careful about what I sound off about. I work for a magazine association in communications so sometimes I talk about magazines or working communications. I actually found Beehiv, the ESP that powers this newsletter, because I thought my work was going to change newsletter platforms, so I did a bunch of research and then we didn’t, so I thought I might as well stop procrastinating and start mine, so that research wouldn’t go to waste.

And here we are.

I’m a chatty friendly person with a lot of opinions and a lot of energy to share them. I don’t have much of an agenda here—Beehiv asks what you hope to accomplish with your newsletter, selling a product or subscriptions or “personal branding” or what. I suppose if and when I publish another book, I will talk about that and likely let folks know how it can be purchased. Theoretically there could be a paid option for this newsletter someday, though currently sitting at zero subscribers, that seems unlikely. Mainly I just like to share stories and have conversations. If you like this newsletter and write to tell me, I’ll be thrilled. If you dislike this newsletter and write to tell me, I’ll take it under advisement. If you have any kind of response to this newsletter at all and write to tell me, honestly, it will make my day.

I hope something I wrote here made you a little bit happy, and that you consider sticking with me until the next one.