Television Sky New Years Letters

Television Sky New Year Letters

(How Not to Be “Unhoused” in March)

This year I finally figured out what a Christmas Letter really is! I’ve only ever gotten two of them, but they’re just soft-focus class warfare.

The Valium gloss recap. Casually mentioned vacations. “We enjoyed a wonderful year.” “wonderful getaway” “amazing restaurants!” “highly recommended” “So blessed!” “It was a whirlwind trip, but fun.” “That was a blast!”. It’s social accounting. PERFORMATIVE SOCIAL BOOKKEEPING. The letter’s job is:

1. To confirm the senders are active, healthy, happy, engaged, doing better than you.
2. To reaffirm ties by name dropping relatives, events, opportunities, how just, amazing everything is.
3. To perform gratitude and cheer by talking about everything they were blessed to experience in the year.

I got one last year and didn’t think much about it. Maybe it was the difference in the situation. A natural disaster versus a human one. But this year it read as tone deaf.

We’re about to be homeless. You’re working on your memoir.

The cap was wishing me calmness this holiday season.

No mention of what hurt this year, what was frightening, where the fault lines in the family are. Story has been replaced by report, while the rest of us are refreshing city inspection portals and googling “can my landlord retaliate for code complaints” at 3 a.m.

So I’m bending the light around it. 110. The flat circle is never not feast or famine.

Instead of a cheery “we’re so blessed” Christmas letter, Television Sky is sending out underground New Year Letters: limited, hand-numbered, story-bearing cards that double as art object and lifeline.

Because here’s the situation as pain as I can put it:

• This is our second emergency move in twelve months.
• Our landlord has chosen not to renew our lease after we involved inspectors and the City about safety and code issues.
• On March 19, if I haven’t brought in more money than I am currently confident I can, my multigenerational household is staring down literal homelessness. (We will be “unhoused” if you want to sanitize it.)

I don’t want to write a GoFundMe. Motherfucker I’m good at it, but I hate GoFundMes. I’ve written 6 and they all filled. The last was for my dead best friend.

I do not want to weigh taking care of her cunt mom after she’s dead against my family having a place to live, to find out what comes at the end of that popularity contest.

But unless someone has a better idea and this experiment (Among others) doesn’t just do well but very well, there is probably going to be a GoFundMe in our future too. It would run in February. You get 30 days to run a GoFundMe. 13.9% of GoFundMes hit goal. If you reach 20-30% of goal in two days, your chance of filling to completion jumps by 85-90%+. It’s not just a popularity contest, a grief parade, it’s social engineering and bullshit.

This is me trying everything I can before I get there.

What the FUCK is a Television Sky New Year Letter?

Short version:

40 hand-numbered New Year cards to start.
Each one is personally inscribed, comes with a New Year “letter” that actually tells a story instead of lying about how great everything is, and includes one unique page from that story.

We sell through 125 in time, I’ll print a one-time-only novella: 125 copies, priced one dollar above what they cost to land at your door, one for each card-holder. No reprints. Ever.

Longer version:

Phase 1: The first 40 (right now; I just got the pack of cards)

• 40 New Year cards in the opening salvo

Each card is:

• Hand numbered
• hand inscribed by me (who knows, maybe someone else too)

Each envelope includes:

• A New Year letter that functions as a story map or an actual rundown of 2025, not a social flex
• One page from a story: Each card gets a different page, so you’re literally holding a fragment of the longer work. It’s part of a 125 page novella, don’t worry, there won’t be any filler.
• Some small, strange extras, depending on your generosity

This first run of 40 is the cheapest, roughest, most bootleg this project will ever be. This is the zine version.

Phase 2: THE LONG ARC GOAL 125 TOTAL

If the first 40 sell, I’ll do three more small waves through the the Chinese Lunar New Year in February (Year of the Horse) until we cap at:

• 40 / 25 / 20/ 48 → 133 cards total1

That’s it. 133 cards. 133 letters. 133 people in the experiment.

Phase 3: The ghost book

If we hit that full 133:

I will print a novella, the long-form version of this story, and sell it to card-holders for one dollar above print + landing cost.

There will be exactly 133 copies.

No reprints. No second edition. No ebook. No POD. Nothing.

That means the first “book” from Television Sky will be mine, bootleg as hell, before we’re fully incorporated or fancy or ready, on the brink of being fucking homeless, rabid, probably psychotic. Sorta on the nose as far as on message goes right?

You’re not just buying a card. You’re buying into a one-time-only press run that will never exist again.

Why THIS? Why NOW?

Because this is what it looks like when you live close enough to the edge that one landlord’s decision can kick the floor out from under you.

Last January, the emergency was a roof full of snow and a kitchen ceiling collapsing into our lives, months of crumpled up bills for Doordash because we couldn’t use the space, mold, everything damp and sad all the time, me parading my trauma, dancing for coins, discounting editing I shouldn’t have. We were literally doing snow-load math on a hundred-year-old flat roof while dirty meltwater rained on the stove and my coffee maker.

I wrote about it in a piece called “Homeless in January”. That was Move #1.

A few choice lines from that for context:

“Because the last few years have been hard for everyone, we live on the razor’s edge of existing in modern America. As debt laden or above as your average citizen, with less savings to match…”

“The melt was raining down into our kitchen. The roof of this building is severely compromised. We rent.”

“Sometime tomorrow the ceiling is going to cave in.
We will have to evacuate.”

“It is painful and in the United States shameful to admit that you need help of this kind. The greater portion of the population sees it as bad planning or a moral failure…”

“It pains me beyond words that even though it’s not the best apartment in the world, I’m about to be forced to abandon the last place I will ever remember seeing my best friend and sister in my house and in my room.”

We survived that, but barely. With a lot of help.

Now the disaster isn’t gravity and snowpack. It’s retaliation by any other name, slow-walked maintenance, quietly weaponized non-renewal. Same city with a different rental failure mode. Different ceiling, same feeling, but somehow it’s much more personal. We planned to stay here. It’s fairly tolerable. Whole apartment fulla find out though.

This New Year Letter initiative is the sequel: I want to turn panic into print.

The Structure of Generosity

$15 – New Year Letter & Card (also, the best international option)

• One Television Sky New Year card
• Hand-numbered
• Personally inscribed with your name and some Emil static
• New Year letter that’s actually a story, not social theater bullshit
• One unique page from the long-form story tucked inside

This is the “keep us housed” base. Every one of these matters. And there IS a baked in cost. The first 40 cards are $.35 a pop + $.78 base postage +toner and time.

This is also good if you’re overseas. Because postage has turned into a luxury.

The option for getting the bootleg first book from Television Sky, my first pub, something that BR Yeager’s legendary Pearl Death novella in cards will be classed with.

$35 – Bubble Mailer of Goodies

You get everything above, plus:

• A padded mailer stuffed with small, strange, occultly/curated items from my shelves and trinket box:
• mini-zines, stickers, weird little prints
• oddities that should not go into storage
• ephemera that feels like it fell out of another life

I have a lot of obscure shit. You might as well get some of it before I have to pay movers to haul it one more time, because I’m not boxing everything up. And I’m always downsizing. Who knows, you may get something worth a lot more than the package it came in.

Proof below, this ain’t my first fuckin’ rodeo:

(Rainbow Rat Patreon tier rewards, 2020)

(It was Halloween. Think less Target stuff and candy, because that costs more overhead, and more personal shit from my archives)

(Oh, and do watch for confetti…)

$50+ Full Care Package

You get the card + story letter + unique page, and:

• A bigger, heavier, weirder package
• The more you give, the more I will dig:
• strange, rare, or out-of-print books
• limited-run objects
• odd relics that have lived with me through multiple eras + why they’re important
• genuinely valuable, but extremely “what the fuck is this” artifacts

This is “Emil raids his own archive for you” tier. The more you give, the more you get. Give me fifty bucks and I may give you a hatpin I wore while I made a milli on tour, give $500 and you may get a Ghostface Killah Adidas track jacket or the only unsigned copy of Fight Club I own (movie cover, I know it’s the original because it’s unsigned) a short story cut from a notebook. You’re a whale with more money than god? I’ll put PEARL DEATH on the block. (go try to find it for sale, or find a price for one of the original run. People who have this do not sell it.)

How to get one

If you want in on the first 40:

Email: [email protected]

Use one of these subject lines so I can keep track:

• NEW YEAR LETTER – for the $15
• GIFT BAG – for the $35 tier
• or GIFT BOX – for $50+ care package (ADD +$10 for a card from my personal collection of greeting cards. yes, it’s a thing. This is in service of. Well, read the one footnote, OK)

In your email, include:

• Your name
• Your mailing address
• Which tier you want
• Whether you’re okay with getting something TRULY weird / obscene / obscure in your package

I’ll respond with payment details (PayPal / Venmo / Cash App / Wise, etc.), confirm you’re in, and assign your card number.

First 40 cards just hit from Amazon.

I have two toner cartridges, a horror-movie landlord arc, a boiling white hot rage in my center, and a laser printer that hasn’t betrayed me yet. I’ll be writing the letter, printing letters, writing and printing pages, hand-numbering and inscribing cards, and packing and mailing envelopes as fast as my broke ass body and executive dysfunctions allow.

Happy Holidays from Television Sky.

About the GoFundMe (because I’m not going to pretend it’s not hovering)

I’ve been resisting the GoFundMe route for years because it feels like competing in the Misery Olympics. I know other people have needs bad or worse than me, and I know the stats for the platform (they’re bad). I know how quickly a feed full of medical and housing emergencies starts to feel like static. I’m worried THIS turns into compassion and giving fatigue at the holidays already.

But I’m also not going to lie: if this card initiative and a very aggressive editing schedule don’t close enough of the gap, I’m probably going to have to write one.

Unless someone has a better idea, (please, someone have a better idea even if GoFundMe is the cultural default) that’s the next card in the deck.

If I end up doing it, I’ll say it explicitly, link it openly, and still keep making the work I know is actually useful to people (the Autopsies, the craft posts, the fiction). I’m not going to paywall the one net-good thing I’ve brought into the world because my landlord decided my insistence on not living in a potential tinderbox of code violations was worth all this.

But before I press “publish” on a GoFundMe, I wanted to try this:

• Make something real
• Make it limited
• Make it haunted
• Let people help in a way that gives them an object, a story fragment, a future book, not just a receipt and a happy feeling.

How you can help

If you’ve read this far, thank you. Here’s the practical part:

• Buy a card if you can.
  $15 gets you a hand-numbered New Year letter, an inscription, and a page of the story.
• Go weird with a gift bag or gift box if you’re able.
  $35 or $50+ helps us cover deposits, movers, and all the non-insured costs of getting out. I promise you the mail you get back will be worth opening.
• If money is tight but you give a shit:
• Share this post.
• Point people here who would love strange limited-run ephemera.
• Hire me for editorial work if you’re sitting on a story or a book and want someone a lot of people in the fiction tab are calling “The Editor of Substack” to tear into it at a competitive starting rate. (specifically I’m looking for full manuscripts ready for a long haul editorial, short stories, and novellas. [email protected] subject line EDITORIAL INQUIRIES, serious inquiries ONLY at this time.)

This is me trying to handle it in-house with family and community before I resort to the full GoFundMe siren.

I hate my family being here again. I hate “Christmas letter” in our world translating to “notice to vacate.” But if we’re going to go through it, I’d rather make something sharp and beautiful with you while we fight.

Good luck and Godspeed.

Fade twice, stand up twice.

— Emil