About a year ago, I started this Bindery page. I had two goals:

1. Expand the depth of the community I've found, and

2. Expand the reach of the community enough to maybe be able to publish a book together through Bindery (what they call becoming an "imprint").

So, one year in: how did it go?

I would say a smashing success for goal number one and a total failure on goal number two. But, as my baseball romance friends would tell me, batting .500 is actually astounding!

The deepening of the community has happened in many ways, big and small. The most obvious was creating the Tongue in Cheek Discord. I never would have thought to do something like that before Bindery and that has ended up becoming one of my favorite places on the internet. My community of close friends on the queer bookish internet has grown. And based on the depth of trust, I've felt comfortable tackling more sensitive and complicated subjects, like with my recent video essay about the use of the F slur in M/M romance.

The community has also expanded, but not enough to become a Bindery imprint. And that's okay. I like the tight knit nature of the community and I wouldn't trade the depth for the breadth. I'm also very hopeful that some M/M and queer romance creators will make it big enough on Bindery to become an imprint and be able to publish queer romance through them. I will enthusiastically support them and their authors and I hope you will too.

Given where we are, I feel like it's best to call this year on Bindery a successful experiment, but one that has ended. Over the next year and a half, I do have plans to produce more in depth looks at popular M/M romance books (if you'd like to get a jump on the next series, I'd dust off your Alexis Hall bookshelf...), take a look at Unrivaled by Rachel Reid (as well as Season Two of Heated Rivalry), and then I might find it necessary to check out some darker M/M romances...

But, I plan to do that on my YouTube channel, with conversations happening on Instagram, TikTok and the Discord.

However, it is nice to have a "home base" for my work online. A newsletter to let people know what's going on is also nice. And it would be particularly nice to go back through some old series (like my "Butt Stuff in Books" TikTok playlist) and organize them, perhaps even post cleaned up transcripts. While that could go on Bindery, I think it makes more sense to move that all to a website just for me.

And that's exactly what I've done at: carterkalchik.com

If you're receiving this email from Bindery, then you're already signed up for the newsletter at my site to get monthly-ish emails from me -- nothing for you to do. If you'd rather not follow along, the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any email from the new site works instantly, no hard feelings. I'll also be slowly fleshing out things like pages for my videos with transcripts, updates to old projects, et cetera. I hope you'll follow along there -- it's free and hopefully you'd find it useful.

Thank you so much to everyone who followed along here and pushed me to take my little gay romance thoughts a bit more seriously. While this is a goodbye for Bindery, it's really more of a hello to the next phase of my work.

All the best and my queerest love for you,

Carter