A romantic liaison with the man who stoked my fireplace

Or why I am avoiding marketing myself

A windy French cottage, from whence I can craft my novel. Photo by Duncan McNab on Unsplash

Hello! And thank you so much for being here. I’m grateful to you for reading this, for the emails, comments and likes you send me every week. I love writing to you, and I hope you find what I write useful, entertaining, or simply a mild distraction. Let me know - I am all ears (and eyes).

If you celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope you had a wonderful time, full of turkey and stuffing and love.

This week, my mind has been whirling.

I’m a freelance journalist, and it’s been one of those when I’ve been scrambling to meet a deadline (I’m trying to find retail executives to interview for a feature, less than a month before Christmas) while also trying to pitch story ideas (does anyone out there want to know why I sometimes go out dancing by myself at 46? Because it’s bloody great fun, I have to say, and editors always like a story about someone doing something unusual, but maybe this is not unusual enough, argh!), while also trying to do the thing you have to do if you work for yourself which is marketing.

There is sexy fun work, which is journalism, and I do a fair bit of that. Then there’s the more commercial work that I also enjoy, and not just because it generally pays better.

I’m working on the balance between the two, and part of me wants to shout from the rooftops (aka LinkedIn): “Hello, I can host your podcast/ghostwrite your book/put together scripts for your promo video/moderate your conference panels/and I’ll do a darn good job.”

The other part of me would very much rather not do that, which is the part that would prefer to take myself off to a windy French cottage - like the one Colin Firth’s character retreats to in Love Actually - to tinker around with a book idea and while doing so have a romantic liaison with the man who comes to stoke my fireplace.

Speaking of books, I’m taking writing classes at the moment where our brilliant teacher, Holly, talks about how the characters in the short stories we read as homework are always going through some kind of conflict – either internal or with someone else.

By the end of the story, there has usually been some kind of movement on the conflict, but often it’s ambiguous. In my windy French cottage life, I would be happily crafting literary works featuring similarly conflicted characters.

(I am always having an internal conflict. On Thursday night, it was about what to eat for dinner after the gym: I bought myself a Tesco Finest mozzarella and sundried tomato pizza on the way home, opened the packet, put the oven on, then decided my body needed a three-egg omelette instead so as not to undo the good work I had just done. (No doubt I’ll eat the whole pizza for breakfast to cure my hangover this morning.) Then, after the omelette (protein! muscles! yes!), I couldn’t decide whether to wash my hair at 10.30pm ready for the next day (I have curly hair, and there is a five-step procedure involved), or just zhuzh it up with some spray, and then I couldn’t work out whether to sit with wet hair and write this or go to bed and read a pile of books about dancing/women’s sexuality/how to write. Eventually, the hair wash and writing beat dry shampoo and reading, conflict resolved. I don’t know if these internal conflicts qualify as something one could write in a literary work, but they are the best my brain could come up with.)

Anyway, what was I saying about marketing myself?

Oh yes: I find it really hard to prioritize self-promotion, partly because I mainly focus on work I am paid to do, and in my spare time I write this newsletter, see my friends and family, dance, garden, exercise, read, sleep and procrastinate, but also because there are some things I’d like to do more of but I don’t have masses of experience in so it feels scary to take that leap.

But, like the time I worried about putting this newsletter on LinkedIn (help! What if writing about my life jars with what people expect in their LinkedIn feed: award wins, exciting launches, grand promotions?), I think the thing to be is honest, and clear about what I am looking for and how much experience I have.

I could even use my French-cottage-Colin-Firth-sexy-fireplaceman reference when I post about how great I am, to lighten the tone. I’ll let you know how I get on. (And I’m sorry if you were expecting a juicy tale today - perhaps the liaison will make a good piece of fiction one day…)

Are you freelance too? How do you promote yourself? Any tips, let me know.

Things I like

Fitting in vs belonging

This week,

Tiffany Philippou

wrote an excellent piece about feeling like an outsider, both in terms of her cultural heritage and because she’s 35 and single.

“I feel like an outsider looking in as everyone else gets on with their lives and I feel trapped between the youth of my twenties and the intensity of my thirties. I experience the weight of the responsibility of this era, without the achievement of it,” she writes.

I really get it - but with age I have reset what I think of as an ‘achievement,’ and have also realised I can choose to belong anywhere. This is something I wrote about a while back, after spending an afternoon with some of my best girlfriends, their husbands and children - with me as the only single and childfree one.

All humans want to feel like they belong, and sometimes it’s up to you to accept yourself as you are to do so. It’s not easy, and I still struggle with it.

What I do for ‘future me’

We’re not far off the shortest day here in the UK, and sometimes the dark evenings make me feel blue.

Around this time of year I love to do something for future me, which is to plant tulip and daffodil bulbs in my garden, to look forward to come spring. I am useless at labelling things, so whatever emerges next year will be a surprise when green shoots colourful petals start to appear.