A few days ago I noticed that 992 people had signed up for the SMITH newsletter, so of course started obsessing over hitting 1,000. I checked the stats late Wednesday night and — hot damn! — we hit 1000. Then I got curious: Who was Mr. or Mrs. 1000, and why are they here? E-mail ensued.

Ladies and gentleman of SMITH Nation, introducing Brian McDonough, a reader and subscriber who we couldn’t have scripted any better if we actually had a marketing deparment (and I am always dubious when the billionth-type customer notice arrives). Brian is a writer, editor and producer who lives in Hollywood, and just finished writing The Powers of Story: How to Catch and Keep an Audience. He has his own blog, which he says, “tracks my progress from the beginning of writing the book (very honestly).” Brian also has his own newsletter which you can sign up for here. He says he’s never won anything and was pleased to discover I was not trying to sell him online meds when he received my “winner’s notice.”

OK, so we’re still far from our goal of having all 300,000 million of us sign up for SMITH, but we’re on the way. To Brian, we’re sending a SMITH tee (as that’s pretty much what we have to give away). To the many thousands more of you who read SMITH, we say: please sign up for the newsletter, soon to be arriving more frequently with a delightful new format. And our deal to you is this: sign up 10 friends for the newsletter (and prove it by sending their emails which we can then verify) and we’ll send you our limited edition “make art, not schwag” t-shirt. It would be our pleasure.