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Caroline is Writing

a blog by a writer attempting to live the literary good life on the internet
7 min read Permalink

Caroline's Day Off

In which I take the radical step of "not working all the time".

I became a freelance writer in July 2017. I think I can count on one hand the number of days since then on which I have done no work whatsoever. The wonderful flexibility of having a job where nobody holds you to particular hours or expects you to be in a certain location has a less wonderful side. Nobody from payroll polices how much I work or locks me out of the office when it has to close. There are no paid sick days or holiday days, either. I have filed pieces from hospital waiting rooms and uploaded podcasts on Christmas Day. If you are an anxious person with much of your self-worth tied up in your career (hi!), it can be hard to see any reason ever to stop.

Until recently, when I started noticing that although I was "working" as much as ever, all those hours spent sat in front of the computer weren't producing the same level of output as before. Nothing like. Whole chunks of time were spent staring into space and, when I tried to return to the task at hand my mind would perceptibly flinch away from it, bouncing me into a different browser tab to look at something easy and numbing, like Instagram or a news website. It was frustrating: I had just come through several busy months of cramming extra work into every available minute as my book came out; why was it so hard now to simply write an email?

Lots of reasons come to mind — tiredness, burnout, stress, a general feeling of being at a crossroads both professionally and personally. All of these problems felt too large and amorphous to even begin tackling, but I did have one more manageable idea that I could try. I could have a day off. I really could not work for a whole day. The world might not end.

I'm sure this seems incredibly obvious, even silly, to anyone with a healthy relationship to their work. Of course I can have a day off! I used to have a staff job at a magazine where I got 25 paid days off a year, not including public holidays, and I used to take them all! But that was a different person to the one I am today, and now there is no contract with an employer enforcing my right not to work. I am the boss of me and I am not inclined to grant myself such perks.

But I forced myself to do it. In a rare moment of self-knowledge, I realised that this could not be something spontaneous. I needed to make plans, to put in place guardrails so I could not slip easily back into old habits. First, I made a list of everything I would like to do on a day off, which read like this:

  • take a long walk with my dog without needing to be back at a certain time for a meeting
  • watch television, just because I want to and not because I have to review the show
  • go out for a meal by myself
  • explore a place I'm curious about with no agenda or timetable
  • do an activity with some friends

I felt that this was simultaneously a very basic set of requirements and also quite an ambitious list for a single day off. I mulled it over for a few days. The next thing that happened was that the YouTube algorithm relentlessly targeted me with promotional videos for the new series of Bridgerton. I have read all of those books and I have watched the previous seasons, so I suppose that makes sense. From this publicity, I learned that for the first time the show was going to be released in two batches of four episodes a month apart (no doubt to keep people subscribed to Netflix for two months instead of one). On 16th May, the first four would drop.

For no good reason other than I find that show a fluffy, unchallenging diversion, I picked that as the date for my day off. I had no work obligations scheduled that would need to move. It also happened to be a day when my chamber choir was due to rehearse in the evening, and the weather forecast was decent. It all seemed to line up: I would watch some new Bridgerton, take my dog for a nice walk, go into Liverpool mid afternoon, wander around a bit, go out to eat, and then enjoy singing with my friends. A good plan.

I arranged with my colleagues at The Browser to swap duties that day and started looking forward to it. I even assigned blocks on my calendar to my different day off activities to make sure that I would have a timetable to follow and wouldn't waste the day doing household chores or scrolling on my phone. Again, absurd that this is necessary, but I knew how easily I could guilt myself into not doing what I wanted, and then I would berate myself for the failure. If there was already a schedule to follow and I didn't need to make any decisions, it seemed more likely that I would take the path of least resistance and stick to the plan.

My resolve was tested once in between making the arrangements and the day itself, when a podcast interviewee needed to reschedule and had a strong preference for this day. I even drafted a response to their email agreeing to it, appeasing my inner objections with the idea that "it'll only be 90 minutes out of your day off". But it wouldn't be, would it? I would have to prepare, set up the equipment, transfer the files afterwards, decompress from being "on" for a while before I could do anything else. I deleted the draft reply and proposed new dates a few weeks ahead, one of which worked. Nobody minded. The day off was saved.

The 16th May arrived. I followed my timetable and had a lovely time! I did feel a little foolish adhering to a detailed schedule that had things like "watch Bridgerton episode two" on it, it is true. I'm still very new to prioritising my mental wellbeing over my incessant compulsion to work all the time, I think, and like a small child I need structure to thrive.

After a pleasant morning involving some television and some dog walking, I took the train into Liverpool. I headed for a riverside area called the Baltic Triangle where, pre-pandemic, I had a little studio space. It has a post-industrial, slightly dilapidated feeling. As the name suggests, this is where timber and other imported goods from Scandinavia were warehoused in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that industry then declined and relocated. I haven't really been there much since 2020, and the gentrification/redevelopment process has come on apace. There are some really nice new innovations, like this community garden with a view of the Anglican cathedral:

I wandered around there for a while, then went to a coffee shop I used to frequent when I used to come here to work. It has a pleasingly large dairy-free menu, which I used to full advantage:

Inevitably, there is something very "Shoreditch in 2007" to the aesthetic choices here, all plywood and string lights, but I'm old enough these days that this reads as nostalgic rather than annoying.

Next I went to take in some Baltic heritage, in the form of the Gustav Adolf Church, originally built in the late nineteenth century to serve the Scandinavian emigrants living in the area and still a cultural centre for the Nordic community.

I love the extremely pointy lead roof! At this point, I started really enjoying myself as a tourist in my own city as you can only do when you truly let yourself see a familiar place with new eyes. So, I went to the Chinese supermarket and bought the good snacks.

Liverpool's Chinatown is one of the oldest and best-established in Europe and it shares a boundary with the Baltic Triangle. Happily munching, I wandered around some more and took in the excellent graffiti palimpsest at the skatepark:

I don't even follow football and this mural made me tear up a bit. I guess that's what seven years of living here will do to you.

In between the shiny new buildings and warehouse conversions, there are still a few older businesses clinging on.

Very curious about this one:

Last thing before my choir rehearsal, I took myself for an early dinner at a street food market in an old brewery (I know, so hipster). It was a very good falafel wrap, though.

I ended the day singing medieval madrigals with my friends in an old church. And even though I had done nothing other than enjoy myself all day, I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. It was a very good day off. Perhaps I'll have another one some time. I might even make a habit of it.

Until next time,

Caroline

Thank you for reading this, the first instalment of my newly-relaunched newsletter! Any (kind) feedback or requests are welcome via reply to this email. Henceforth, I'm planning on doing broadly three kinds of posts, on no particular schedule: personal essays/updates like this one, lists of good links, and diary entries about my new book project. If you would like to manage which of these you receive, you can do that in your account menu here.

Filed under: newsletterarchive, Personal Essays, blog
6 min read Permalink

what I know about getting books published

This is a post from my newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox here.

I got to feel the most like an author I ever feel this week, when I went to London for a meeting with my UK publishers and agents to begin the publicity process for A Body Made of Glass. It comes out in just over six months’ time, which sounds like a long time away but is also not very long at all — time works differently in the book world, I have learned. The proof copies had coincidentally arrived at the office the day before, so I was able to snag one for myself to take home. This is the first time the book has physical form, albeit in this workaday, non-final design for advance readers like booksellers and reviewers. It’s both exciting and a bit nerve-wracking to realise that the book isn’t just mine any more: strangers can hold it and read it now, too.

This is my second book with the same publisher, so a lot of what was unknown to me back in 2019 is now somewhat familiar. I know the basics of how we go about trying to convince people to take a chance on what I’ve written, but there are always new things to try and to learn from. As someone who has been reading and enjoying books for her whole life, the behind-the-scenes process of how they get from ideas inside people’s heads on to my shelves fascinates me. When I talk shop with other writers I always like to compare and contrast my experiences with theirs. This is also helpful for me because there are few definitive or transparent sources out there on the publishing industry, either for those seeking to enter it or those already afloat on its choppy waters in some way. When I hear from readers who are also writers, either via email or on Instagram, this is the most common theme of our correspondence: how are you supposed to find out these things that everyone already seems to know?

I’m very far from being an expert in all this. This is just my second non-fiction book for adults with a UK/US publisher, so if you’re publishing a different kind of work elsewhere in the world, my experiences might not apply to you. But people were very generous in helping me when I was trying to work this stuff out and I’d like to put that same energy out into the world in case it helps somebody else. I’d also recommend the Agents and Books, Counter Craft and Craft Talk newsletters for good insights. What follows is my take on the most common questions I receive about writing a book and getting it published.

How do I get started?

This may sound extremely obvious, but you have to write something. Pitching books is not like pitching articles, where you send a brief summary and, if they like it, take it from there. For books, you need to do some really time-intensive writing first. To my mind, this is the hardest part of all, having to take myself and my ideas seriously enough to show up and write it day after day even though nobody asked me to and nobody is paying me yet. If you are writing the kind of non-fiction book I do (narrative/creative non-fiction), you need to write a proposal. This usually consists of an overview of the book, an outline of your structure and chapters, some information about what the market for the book will be (what successful books have similarities to yours?) and a sample chapter. This last bit is the hardest part, but to get publishers to part with cash you need to show them how brilliant your book will be. All told, my proposals tend to be about 20,000 words. It’s a lot. If you’re writing fiction, you typically have to write the whole thing, or at least a very substantial part of it, before anyone will consider it for publication.

Do you have to have an agent?

No, but it helps. Most major publishers rarely work with unagented writers. In exchange for their percentage of any money you make (15 per cent is normal), you get access to your agent’s industry expertise and contacts, as well as having someone in every meeting who is there solely to represent you. Most agents have an online presence where they advertise if/when they are looking for new writers, what kind of writing they are seeking to represent, and how you go about submitting to them. My agent is currently open for submissions, for instance. In general, when agents have guidelines about what you should submit for consideration, follow them to the letter. Most people won’t; you automatically get a leg up just by showing that you can read and abide by instructions. Make it easy for them to pick you. My best tip for finding an agent is to look at the acknowledgements of books you love that are similar to yours and build a list of possible names to research further that way. If they represent writers you aspire to emulate, there’s a decent chance what you’re doing will suit.

Why won’t they publish my book?

Many, many reasons, not all of them fair or rational. If you’ve queried and submitted and obeyed all the rules and it still isn’t working for you, I’m sorry. Publishing is a capricious and changeable industry, built on something that is fundamentally unknowable at scale: precisely what people want to read at any given moment. To illustrate what I mean, here’s something that happened when my first book was sent out to possible editors. My agent sent it to 14 of them; four responded positively and ten said no thank you. Of that ten, exactly half rejected it because they felt the idea had been too much done before and the other half said no because they felt there wasn’t sufficient market for the topic. It’s all subjective: to some, my idea was too niche, to others it was over-saturated. I tried to learn from that not to take anything anyone says as the final definitive word on anything, and I would advise you do the same.

How do you pay bills while you write a book?

For the vast majority of writers (including me!), you pay bills while you write a book by doing other work at the same time. In 2022, the median earnings for authors in the UK was £7,000 a year, down 60 per cent in real terms since 2006. For reference, an annual living wage is estimated at just under £20,000. Other than a few celebrities and very successful authors at the very top, almost nobody is making a full-time living just from writing books. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, or make you feel ashamed about this.

Even when you do get paid what looks, on paper, to be a decent amount for your book, the payment structure and fees can catch you out. Commonly, a publisher will “advance” you a sum against the future sales of your book to cover costs while you write it. They then recoup this out of your sales, so you don’t earn any royalties until your book has “earned out” the amount of its advance. Lots of books never earn out, so the advance is the only money you ever receive. Out of this initial advance payment, you have to take off tax and your agent’s percentage. Also, you will probably be paid the advance in thirds or quarters — one instalment upon signing the contract, one when you deliver the book manuscript, one when the hardback comes out, and one when the paperback is published. There might be three or even four years between the first payment and the last. And publishers, like many big companies, can be slow to pay. I’m sure you can see how quickly even a relatively generous sum starts to feel like something you can’t really rely on as “income”.

So, what can you do? I’m assuming you’re not personally wealthy or the spouse of a rich person, by the way, although that is how some people square this circle. For the rest of us, maybe you have a full-time job and you write books in your spare time. Perhaps writing books is one thing in a portfolio of freelance work that sustains you. If you’re lucky enough to get paid sabbatical time from doing something else, that can be a good time to do the bulk of the work on a book without ending up out of pocket. Some people prefer their day job to be something totally unrelated to writing so that part of their brain is always fresh for their own projects. Others (like me) use the same skills involved in writing books to do related, more lucrative, jobs, like freelance journalism (ha!), newsletter writing, podcasting and so on. Each to their own. There are no wrong ways to go about this.

How many heinous a-holes have you encountered?

I loved the wording of this particular question too much to do a polite paraphrase of it. Honestly, only one truly, truly bad person has crossed my path in my journey through publishing so far, which I feel is quite a good average compared to the general population. I have interacted with a few less-than-sensitive people (and some of those do get called out in my new book, actually!) but they had their redeeming qualities too. In general, the people I work with in publishing are very nice and very hardworking. Maybe I’m just lucky, but I don’t think too many genuine villains spend their time crafting books in exchange for a middling-at-best salary.

I’ll stop now before this email gets so long that it cuts off in your inboxes, but if there are other questions you have or more details you’d like on any of this, just hit reply and let me know.

Filed under: newsletterarchive, blog, Personal Essays
6 min read Permalink

this is me trying

There is a story about Oscar Wilde that I was told in my first week as an undergraduate that I am thinking about a lot at the moment. While he was a student at Oxford, Wilde became well known for the impossibility of his brilliance. All he seemed to do was socialise, spew forth witticisms and lounge around in beautiful outfits, yet he somehow also managed to deliver essays and poems of such astuteness and flair that after four years of such aesthetic idleness he graduated with a double first and won the Newdigate Prize for poetry.

How did he do it? By working tremendously hard in secret, so the tale went. When he finally said goodbye to his friends after a long night of elegant carousing, he did not head for bed as they thought. Instead, he studied and wrote furiously, often going without sleep so that in the morning he could once more give the appearance of effortless, even lazy, genius. And it worked: by the time he left university, Wilde was known internationally for his enormous intellect and supposedly extempore quips. A glittering career as a writer and public intellectual beckoned.

I don’t know if this story is true. I’ve never wanted to research it properly: it is too perfect to spoil with facts. It seems consistent with what I know of Wilde’s career post-university and his place at the vanguard of the burgeoning aesthetic movement, and that is good enough for me. When I heard it at the age of 18, it confirmed for me something that my insecurities had long suggested — that the worst thing in the world is to be caught in the act of trying.

Earnest and anxious from a very early age, I was by this time fairly familiar with being called a “try-hard”. I had also registered that these accusations only accompanied failure, not success. I was a try-hard on the sports field, where no matter how dogged my efforts my lack of talent always resulted in utter humiliation, but never in the classroom, where a freakishly sponge-like memory (now long gone) saw me regurgitating information I did not understand in exchange for good marks. Being told the Wilde story at such an impressionable moment merely confirmed what I thought I already knew: being truly good at something meant never letting anyone see the effort or the failures it had taken to attain success.

When I put the proposal for my first book out for sale, I found that the publishing industry worked on much the same basis. The whole process was very opaque, with little information about how it all worked accessible unless you had a friend or mentor further along who was willing to give you the benefit of their experiences. Seen from the outside, there were long silences punctuated only by dazzling announcements: a major deal, a place on a bestseller list, a film adaptation. The rest — the trying and the failing and the trying again — was kept out of sight, as if it never happened at all.

It was very rare, I found back in 2017, to encounter someone openly discussing that they had tried and failed to write or sell a book. Even once I had found a publisher for my idea and embarked on writing it, the Wildean impulse to make it appear effortless was overwhelming, even though I was a novice laboriously and chaotically doing it all for the first time. To be seen to try is to appear weak, perhaps undeserving. When so many people want to be writers and aren’t given the opportunity, it seems extremely churlish to dwell in public on the less-than-ideal aspects of the occupation. Much better to make the difficulties invisible and then emerge on publication day to bask in the good reviews, accepting any praise that comes with a knowing smile that says “thank you, I did all this without even trying”.

The eye of the storm of all this for me, these days, is social media. At a time when traditional arts coverage is stretched and dominated by the celebrities who keep writing books, for the ordinary author it is vital to have a way of connecting directly with readers. In the past I haven’t put the effort and thought into doing this that it merits. I used to use Twitter for work when I was in political journalism but let my account go dormant as soon as I had moved on professionally; I enjoy posting about my dog and my reading and my cooking on Instagram but I’ve never put in the consistent effort to make it a channel that potential readers might find useful or attractive. I consume TikToks in a lofi secondhand way (might write about this another day) and I don’t make them. Facebook, for me, is entirely about sourcing secondhand furniture.

When my first book came out, I popped up on social media a few days before publication and said “Tada! I wrote book. Please buy it,” and that was about it. The response was, naturally, kind but underwhelming. The rejections from traditional media are far less visible. On a social media platform, my post can sit there forever, visibly ignored. For a long time, the knowledge that this was an important part of my job that I was neglecting chafed against my desire never to be caught in the act of trying. Because what looks more like trying than repeatedly posting publicly about your work, asking people to pay attention to it, and being ignored? Much better to have success miraculously occur and then be able to modestly highlight it, like Oscar Wilde probably would have done if he’d had Instagram in the mid 1870s.

I do think that the architecture of the internet today encourages this hesitance to be seen to be putting in effort. Social media, as we all know but can never remember in those low moments, is just a highlight reel of the best days and the best news. Those who do post with the greatest success do tend to make it look very easy, as if setting up a camera for every shot so as to capture yourself “casually” going about your day and then editing it into a seamless, appealing package with a jaunty soundtrack isn’t a lot of work that once upon a time would have been done by a whole crew of specialists. I’ve mostly tried to cut too-perfect influencers out of my personal media diet, but I do keep those who periodically post their drafts and their outtakes; it is useful for me to be reminded that a polished end product went through a lot of iterations and attempts.

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, because I’m entering a season of life and work in which I want to try, really hard, and I felt the need to set the scene for that. I am aware that writing about trying “too hard” is probably the definition of trying too hard. But: my next book comes out in spring 2024 and it took a lot of effort and soul-searching to bring it into being. I would like as many people as possible to read it. I don’t think I am someone who can be Very Online all the time any more, but I am keen on the idea that even people who aren’t in full-time education can benefit from thinking of their life in semester-length chunks. This coming term and next is going to be a time for me of looking out rather than in, and talking about ideas and work that I’m proud of. This mode doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m going to have to try hard at it.

This newsletter is a big part of that. I found that I couldn’t write to you like this while also writing a book that contained a lot of personal stories and big feelings, but now that’s done, I can be here again. If there are subjects you would like me to cover or questions you want answered, just reply and let me know. This is a space for things that I’m interested in and also what you’re interested in too. Suggestions so far have included: overcoming writer’s block, moving out of London, how to switch career into writing. It won’t be perfect, but then what is?

In the words of the literary giant of our age, Ms Taylor Alison Swift: this is me trying.

Filed under: blog, Personal Essays, newsletter, newsletterarchive
4 min read Permalink

working from home is great until it isn’t

When I first moved out of London — and don’t worry, this isn’t one of those “why I left London” diatribes, although I might write one of those one day, who knows — I was absolutely convinced that I didn’t want to work from home. I was excited to be freelance, yes, but I was also completely sure that if I worked from our house I would never get anything done. I am a creature of completely contradictory motivation levels: I did write the entire first draft of my 85,000-word book in seven weeks, yes, but I also regularly record podcast episodes at 3am on the day they’re supposed to be published. I needed a properly separate “work” environment, I decided, in order to trick myself into doing more of the former and less of the latter.

So I hired a small studio space in the trendy artsy district of Liverpool and filled it with random books, boxes of papers that wouldn’t fit in the house, and a grimy Ikea desk. My husband and I would leave together in the morning to take the train to our places of work, even though only one of us actually had to exit the house in order to get paid.

I never liked working at the studio, for lots of very obvious reasons including: it’s a 30 minute walk from the train station and it rains a lot here; the place is incredibly dusty and it makes me sneeze constantly; and the people I share the space with do things like sculpture and textile art that can get pretty noisy. But, I kept going because it was where I worked. Also, I didn’t want to have to move the miscellaneous boxes of papers again.

Then, about six months into this arrangement, we got a dog. Initially, I thought I’d just be at home for the first month or so while he adjusted to life with us, and then dog and I would together go to the studio every day so I could work. Except, we haven’t been once. It turns out that doing that hour-ish journey to the studio by train and on foot was one thing alone, but when loaded up with all my work stuff as well as the things Morris the dog would need to stay entertained during the day, it seems like such an expedition. There always seemed to be something that I needed to be filing urgently that made setting off on this voyage impossible; therefore, we just stayed at home.

It was always a temporary situation, though. I was still someone who didn’t work from home, even when another six months had passed and I’d only made occasional trips to the studio to check on my books. I bought a desk and turned the walk in closet off our bedroom into tiny office, but it still wasn’t my “place of work”. Even today, more than two years after I moved here, I still tell people about the studio as if that’s a significant part of my working routine rather than a ridiculous book storage situation I need to sort out.

Even while I was internally travelling to work every day yet actually only journeying as far as my desk-in-a-cupboard, I was getting very used to all the perks that come with working from home. I can walk my dog whenever I want, cook whatever I fancy for lunch, get chores done when I need to avoid a task I don’t want to do, receive parcels on the first delivery try (I never have to go to the sorting office anymore, it’s such a gift). I eat better, sleep better, and exercise more now that I don’t have to commute. I’m really lucky.

I’ve been focusing very hard on remembering that last part this week, though. A falling-domino series of household problems including a broken boiler and a leaking shower meant that we needed to get workmen in. And suddenly, I’m “working” from home in name only. There’s bashing and crashing and things being hoisted through windows that are clearly too small to take them. Constant decisions must be made about plasterboard and picture rails and thermostats. The water supply had to be off for an entire day, and so I spent ages walking to the station (with my dog) to use the toilet there, and then to the drinking fountain at the other end of the village to fill up a variety of containers for cooking and washing. Some of them leaked in my bag on the way back, but let’s pretend I didn’t get upset about that.

Earlier today, someone took a chisel to a wall and accidentally punched a hole in a pipe though which a huge slapstick squirt of water erupted, instantly soaking the entire room and causing the ceiling below to gently descend onto the kitchen floor.

I essentially live, and work, on the set of Home Alone. I have never wanted more to be at a desk in a noisy, windowless open plan office with too-low ceilings. I crave thin grey carpet. I miss being constantly interrupted by people who want to show me their tweets.

And yet, and yet. Getting to work where I want is an immense privilege, I know. For all of the times I’ve whipped up Alison Roman’s #TheStew for my lunch and thought smugly about the sad overpriced salads I used to eat to break up the work day, there will be weeks where chunks of the wall mysteriously fall into the neighbours’ garden for no apparent reason. I used to hide in the toilet on a different floor at the office so that nobody I knew would see me coming out with red eyes. Mopping the ceiling off the floor seems quite fun by comparison.

Things to read, watch and listen to:

Thank you very much for all the kind responses to last week’s letter, I really appreciated them all.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: I do daily podcast recommendations at The Listener, I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes on Twitter.

Filed under: blog, newsletter, newsletterarchive
5 min read Permalink

the process of reading as unconscious as breathing

I have really struggled with reading in the last six months. This week, I finally tidied up the windowsill next to the bed and was confronted with the true depth of this problem. There were over twenty books strewn across it in various stages of unreadness. It’s not a “to be read” pile so much as a “I can’t read it” pile.

Some of the volumes in that stack are titles that I’d made it three quarters of the way into before bailing out, others where I had only flicked through the first few pages one night before falling asleep. Putting them all away again felt a little like admitting defeat. I’m probably not going to finish any of those books any time soon.

It’s not them, it’s me. I’m finding it hard to concentrate on one thing for very long (c.f. the absolute state of the world these days) but I don’t think that’s the problem here. I’ve been a procrastinator for most of my life; I’m used to having to trick myself into doing things I don’t really want to do for sustained periods. This doesn’t feel like that.

I think what makes me put a book down and lose all desire to ever pick it up again is a feeling that I should be doing something more worthwhile with my time. Something that will make things better. I cannot articulate what that other activity is, nor have I, in six months of listlessly turning pages, chanced across it. I just know that reading that book, in that moment, is not it.

And that really upsets me, because I’ve always been able to read anything whenever I felt like it. The concept of not being able to “get into” a book was, until recently, completely alien to me. I would just pick something up and set off, no looking back, the process of reading as unconscious as breathing.

I’m absolutely not alone in this problem — all of the extremely bookish people that I follow on Instagram seem to be suffering with it too. Ruined reading, the weird dreams, extreme screen fatigue: these are the low level side effects of the coronavirus that we will probably be dealing with for years. Like all the other small-big changes that this year has brought, I have begun to reshape myself around my inability to read a whole book whenever I want to.

It happened once before, when I was in an isolation ward in a hospital for six weeks between my first and second years of university. It was a planned stay, not an emergency, so I had days to think about how I would amuse myself in my tiny and extremely well ventilated room high up above south London. I packed all the books I had ever found comforting to read — Jane Austen, the Chalet School, The Swiss Family Robinson — and explained to my parents what extra volumes they should bring to top up my bedside library when they visited.

Of course, I didn’t read a word. Of anything. I don’t remember how I filled all those hours now. My time is wholly unaccounted for, and I didn’t even have a smartphone yet. I have a vague memory of watching the Christopher Eccleston Doctor Who series over and over again, but I might have invented that memory later. I talked to the hospital staff a lot, I think, and I looked out of the window at the sky.

I do remember the combination of listlessness and restlessness that washed over me as I lay there staring, and I recognise it in myself now. It’s the sensation of being unable to settle with any one idea for too long, because there’s one big idea that cannot be allowed to come into focus. Slowly, I recovered, and so did my ability to read. Life began to move quickly again and that part of my brain opened up.

I think it’s starting to happen now, that process of unfurling all of the thoughts I’ve been keeping too tightly coiled. The first book to break through was The Secret Countess by Eva Ibbotson, which I took to bed planning to read for 15 minutes before an early night and was still awake trying to finish six hours later. This impeccably told story of Anna Grazinsky, a young and aristocratic Russian emigré trying to make her way as a maid in post WWI England, just seemed to flow into me like drinking a cool glass of water on a summer’s day. When I got to the end, I cried, and not just because good triumphs over evil.

Ibbotson, I decided, was the answer. She wrote children’s fiction, but also stories like this one for “young adults” at a time when that wasn’t really yet a publishing category, so wasn’t — in my opinion — sufficiently acclaimed for those books before she died in 2010. There’s been something of a reappraisal of late, though, and Pan Macmillan are reissuing some of her novels, which makes them much easier to get hold of.

And oh, how glorious they are. In her introduction to The Morning Gift, Sarra Manning describes Ibbotson’s work as “the missing link between I Capture the Castle and Jilly Cooper’s early romances” and I think that’s a pretty good way of placing her. There are elements of Austen in her dry dialogue, of Wodehouse in her perfectly convoluted plots, of Nancy Mitford in her cheerful, practical heroines, of Barbara Pym in her close interweaving of deep sorrow and utter joy. The writing is smooth, funny and just the right amount of acerbic. She’s a master of the craft.

Ibbotson was born in Vienna and came to Britain in 1933 when her Jewish family realised early on what the rise of Nazism was going to mean. Writing these novels decades later, she gives the problems of displacement and ostracism that she had experienced to her characters as generously as she gives them beautiful wavy hair and a talent for housekeeping. One of my favourite lines of hers I’ve found so far is this:

“Proom told him the story, while Leo made Central European noises of sympathy.”

Proom is an English butler with a madcap plan to save the day, and Leo is a benevolent Jewish financier who is going to help him. They are unlikely allies and, after this, destined to be lifelong friends. Their whole dynamic is, for me, flawlessly encapsulated in those thirteen words.

The balance between grim reality and beautiful fantasy in Ibbotson’s fiction is perfect. The horrors of the coming war are ever present: I wept at the minor subplot in The Morning Gift about the exiled Austrian string quartet who are now practising in a north London cupboard as a trio because their violinist died trying to escape Vienna by jumping from a fourth floor window when the stormtroopers entered his building. It’s a barely there aside, but it is devastating, and there are moments like this on every other page.

Nobody in these stories is miraculously cured of their ailments, nor does everyone you love survive. But good people lead good lives in hard times, and I think that’s why I can finish these books now when I can’t get through many others. By the time I come to the end of an Eva Ibbotson, I’m aching inside from all the feelings, and it’s hard to tell if that’s because I’m happy or sad. But I have made it to the end, and that’s a start.

Twelve things I’m reading, watching and listening to:

This is and always will be a free newsletter, but if you want to contribute to my work another way, consider signing up for a subscription to The Listener, the daily podcast recommendation newsletter that I write. It’s very good.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes on Twitter and Instagram.

Until next time,

Caroline

Filed under: blog, newsletter, newsletterarchive
4 min read Permalink

to go any distance across rough terrain

I want to talk about these boots.

These are the Scarpa Women’s Terra GTX hiking boots. They are what my dreams are made of. Even though I like walking and do a lot of it, I’ve never had boots that made me happy. Boots have always been a process, a case of grinning and bearing it through the blisters while I wait for the mythical moment when they will be properly ‘worn in’, when they will stop working against me and start working with me.

These boots were perfect from the first time I put them on. Soft and yielding beneath the foot but stiff enough to protect from awkward surfaces and to keep my dodgy ankles from turning every other step. The women in my family all seem to lack some crucial ligament tension in the lower leg; it’s a very dominant trait, as it is possible to see if we’re all wearing sandals at a family reunion. The connection between our feet and our legs is just. . . dangerously loose.

My resilient, no nonsense mother — who once drove herself safely to the hospital while she was fully in labour — has been known to pass out from the intense pain if she turns her ankle. As a result, my extremely athletic sister used to spend hours balancing one legged on a physical therapy cushion while watching television to strengthen her lower leg muscles. I, needless to say, have never bothered to put in this work. Therefore, to go any distance across rough terrain, I require my hiking boots to act as a rigid corset about the foot that can hold in all of the moving parts that don’t stay in place by themselves.

Somehow, despite fulfilling this function perfectly, these are boots that I can put on and take off very quickly. Foot in, laces crossed and tightened, knots tied, done. Part of the unpleasant process involved in previous bad versions has been the grit and determination required just to get them on, which meant that I would rarely wear them, which in turn meant that the wearing in thing never got very far.

I bought these boots in April, when we were still in the “only leave your house if you absolutely have to” stage of Covid-19 lockdown. I think we all developed our own unexpected displacement activities: one of mine was reading hundreds of boot reviews online and measuring my feet with a tape measure. I learned things about Gore-Tex. I reread Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. I fell down a YouTube spiral of raw vegans vlogging while thru-hiking the Appalachian trail. It was all entirely unnecessary and beautifully distracting.

Along with paying attention to the physical properties one generally requires from a pair of boots, I shied away from any that looked too high tech. I’m fond of walking, but I’m not fast. For me, wearing anything with neon colours or reflective panels or ostentatiously breathable fabric makes promises that I’m not going to be able to fulfil. Ideally, I want to look like a lady hillwalker from about 1935, which is unfortunately not an aesthetic that is easy to filter for on today’s outdoors apparel sites.

Buying the boots at all was a promise to myself that I would one day be able to use them for more than just a walk on the pavements around my village. And, as you probably gathered from that photograph at the top, I did manage to do this: at the end of July, my husband, dog and I drove to the very north of Scotland for a couple of weeks of camping and walking.

This is when we had planned to be on holiday anyway, and we were very fortunate to still be able to go to the area we had intended to visit, even though the cottage we had rented wasn’t available and the constant need to clean everything changed our plans a good deal. Our car became a mobile storage unit for masks, disinfectant wipes and hand sanitiser, and I spent more time thinking about which surfaces I had touched and in what order than I generally prefer to do while travelling for pleasure. The reminders of our changed world were everywhere. Tracking down somewhere to buy a hot evening meal could take up a good deal of the afternoon, and having a camping stove so that we could eat on the beach was very useful.

I’m not very good at adapting when things don’t go to plan. Finding places unexpectedly closed or getting caught with a tent half up in a torrential downpour that wasn’t forecast doesn’t see me at my best. I think that’s why I was so floored by the fact that these boots just worked, immediately. I even walked in them across some of what they call The Flow Country, a huge area of peatland bog that covers part of Caithness and Sutherland. My dog was wet and muddy up to the ears, but my feet were perfectly dry.

I think I’ve been hunched over in anticipation of disappointment and disaster for months now without fully realising it; this felt like a reminder to relax my shoulders, a little.

Twelve things I’m reading, watching and listening to:

I’ve been interviewed a few times recently, so you can read about what hardware/software I use to work on Uses This, about how I consume media on Why Is This Interesting?, about how I write and podcast on A Bit Lit (video), and about my book reading habits at the Stromness Books & Prints website.

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: I do daily podcast recommendations at The Listener, I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes on Twitter and Instagram. The latter is where I will eventually get round to posting more pictures from our socially distant trip to northern Scotland and Orkney.

Until next time,

Caroline

Filed under: Personal Essays, blog, newsletter, newsletterarchive
5 min read Permalink

the five podcasts I actually listen to

If you had told me back in 2007, when approximately 30 per cent of all my waking hours were spent trying to sync new episodes of The Bugle to my iPod Classic, that listening to podcasts would be a substantial part of my job I would not have believed you. Making a podcast was barely a job then; just listening to them could surely not result in an income.

Yet here I am, someone who is professionally obligated to listen to 6+ hours of podcasts a week. Most of that is done for the podcast recommendation newsletter The Listener, in which I write about three different episodes a day. The aim is to choose stuff that readers will not encounter otherwise — i.e. shows that aren’t hosted by celebrities or Ira Glass — so I sift through an endless stream of random audio to filter out the undiscovered gems. Recent picks that I’m proud of include this Australian show about escalators, this interview about how much fishing is too much fishing, and this fifteen minute dog-based romantic comedy.

But like anyone who has successfully monetised a beloved hobby, I occasionally still yearn for the old days of doing it for nothing. When I could just listen to eighteen episodes of the same badly made podcast in a row because it was making me laugh and not worry about the impact that choice would have on my ability to get through enough new shows before my next deadline.

After over a year of listening intensely like this (Lifehacker interviewed me about my system and tech setup last year, by the way, if you’re interested), I’m still constantly impressed by the seemingly infinite variety and creativity to be found in the podcasting medium. I mean, this same format and means of publication encompasses both Describing A Rock and Joe Rogan.

However, I have recently come to realise that doing what I do prizes mostly what is novel, whereas the way most people listen is by loyally tuning in again and again to the few shows that they enjoy. I’m constantly flitting between feeds, looking for the next thing that I can recommend. That means that I spend far less time doing what it was that drew me to podcasts in the first place: the habit of listening consistently to conversational shows where the hosts’ particular brand of humour or world view happens to align with mine.

Since noticing that I was neglecting this quintessential aspect of podcast listening, I’ve been making more of an effort to carve out time for the handful of shows that currently meet the above criteria for me.

These are the podcasts that I keep up with, no matter what else is in my queue. I’m not going to include them in The Listener any time soon; perhaps they already had an episode recommended, or perhaps their appeal is just too personal for me to articulate why anyone else should try them. But I did want to share them here, in case they resonate with any of you too.

I did actually write about Election Profit Makers at the end of its first series in 2016. The three hosts — David Rees, Jon Kimball and Starlee Kine (of Mystery Show fame) — had spent all summer cheerily using a political betting site to make money from the US presidential election.

And then Donald Trump won, and their entire worldview collapsed in on them. I found it very cathartic to hear them process the result together, live. The podcast had become more and more eccentric as the campaign went on, dropping mixtapes and banning specific people from listening to the show, but in a way that just… worked for me.

It has returned for a second season for the 2020 campaign, more wary and more zany than ever. These days, it’s the only American political commentary I can cope with.

I should reassure any friends or family members reading this: I am not pregnant, trying to get pregnant, or in any other way personally engaged with the content of Matt and Doree’s Eggcellent Adventure, a podcast that is ostensibly just about one couple’s efforts to have a child with IVF.

So why am I listening to it every week? I’m not really sure. I think it just comes down to the personalities of the hosts — I like spending time with them no matter what they’re talking about. They both do other podcasts that are ostensibly more aligned with my interests, too, but it’s this one that I stay up to date with.

This one isn’t conversational — Hot Pipes! is just one man introducing recordings of music played on old fashioned theatre pipe organs. And I love it so much. I don’t feel like I need to say any more about this one: if you know, you know.

I can’t actually remember how I first came across The Receipts, but I’ve been listening since about episode ten and they’re now somewhere over a hundred. There are a lot of shows that purport to do this kind unfiltered, unscripted talk about relationships and sex, but this is the one that works for me. It went exclusive on Spotify around episode seventy, so if you get addicted you’ll have to switch over to that here.

There is explicit language in this one, just fyi for anyone who might press play with young children around.

This is the newest edition to my private podcast rotation — the show only started at the beginning of the pandemic. The hosts are a couple: Finneas O’Connell is a musician (he’s Billie Eilish’s brother) and Claudia Sulewski is a YouTuber. Their weekly conversations about what they’ve been up to and their takes on current affairs feel to me a lot like the erstwhile perception of all podcasting, because they really do just set up a microphone in their basement and talk into it for an hour and then upload.

Occasionally some aspects of their Los Angeles celebrity-adjacent lifestyle irritates me, but mostly I find them soothing to have on in the background, talking about what TV shows they have enjoyed and what their dog has done recently. I treat it like background chatter in a coffee shop and for that purpose, it is perfect.

That’s it from me this week — other recommendations will return next time when I might have had more time to read stuff.

If you read this far and thought ‘I want more of her’, then you can get that in a few different places: the aforementioned daily podcast recommendations at The Listener, weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, my own fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and sometimes Twitter and Instagram. My book is now out in paperback, find the links to purchase a copy here.

Until next time,

Caroline

Filed under: blog, newsletter, newsletterarchive
3 min read Permalink

when will we cry in public again?

I haven’t been on a train since early March, so naturally I’ve been daydreaming about public transport a lot recently.

I’m lucky not to need to use it at the moment, of course, and I’m well aware that for every time I’ve spent a journey staring out of the window at a gorgeous view, there’s one where I sat in some vomit. Similarly, I’ve had some deeply unpleasant interactions with strangers while travelling — the roving packs of men going to stag parties on the Friday night train to Liverpool, for instance —  but it’s the unexpectedly amiable ones that have come to mind again now.

A case in point: it was the morning after the night before I had told someone I liked them, really liked them. Absurdly, I don’t actually remember what it was that they said in response, the precise words they used, but it was definitely along the lines of “thanks, but no thanks”. I had been keying myself up to make this declaration for months. Every aspect of how I should do it, every possible permutation, had already been considered and taken into account by my febrile, overactive brain. Except this one: how do I keep going afterwards if it doesn’t go well?

That’s how I ended up on the Tube, taking my usual train to work but feeling as if the connection between my body and my mind had come unstuck. I was sitting in my seat but also floating somewhere around in the curved roof of the carriage, watching myself fall apart without a plan. It was still on the early side for a morning commute, but there were enough people milling about in the stations to make this dislocation even more acutely unpleasant.

My journey was only a short one, two stations north on one line and then four east on another one, but I couldn’t make it. Just before the doors closed at Embankment I dived out and collapsed on one of the recessed benches in the wall in tears. Nobody could really see me, because there were people bustling in both directions along the narrow platform between me and the trains, and anyway one of the glorious and awful things about having a public breakdown in central London is that everyone ignores you.

When will we cry in public again? It’s an unimaginable activity now, in the time of face masks and the constant awareness of bodily fluids and air circulation. Part of what made it cathartic was that intensity of being alone in a crowd, the press of uncaring bodies all around emphasising the absolute solitude of the emotion. It was an especially effective release on trains or in stations — places that contain their own sense of momentum and can impart some of that to someone who pauses there to weep.

I thought I was invisible, tucked into the wall like that. But someone had seen me. A woman dressed in that irreproachable City armour of tailored grey sheath dress, matching jacket and uncomfortable black court shoes suddenly loomed into my little nook. She was holding a packet of tissues out to me. I took them. I probably did an ugly snort where I meant to say “thank you” in response. She didn’t linger, just melting straight back into the crowd. Of course, that just made me cry harder, but at least now I had a way of blowing my nose.

The kindness of strangers. I miss it.

Twelve things I’m reading, watching and listening to:

If you enjoy the podcasts I recommend in this newsletter, consider taking out a subscription to The Listener, the daily podcast recommendation newsletter I write. I promise, it’s really good, and it’s a great way to show your support of my work.

Apart from that, there are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes on Twitter and Instagram. My book is now out in paperback, find the links to purchase a copy here.

Until next time,

Caroline

Filed under: blog, newsletterarchive, newsletter
4 min read Permalink

I feel a warm little glow of satisfaction

I read that piece in the Observer last weekend about how fear of a miserable, long, dark winter is mostly in the mind — I’m paraphrasing, but that was roughly it — so of course I have started watching Borgen again from the beginning.

I saw this Danish political drama when it first started airing on the BBC in 2012, so I’m not really in it for the coalition-forming drama this time. Rather, I’m looking for clues on how to be good at being inside when it’s cold and dark all the time.

This scene from the first episode struck me as an atmosphere I’d like to have. Philip Christensen, husband of politician Birgitte Nyborg, has been at home on his own with the kids while she’s out campaigning. When she comes home, we see him from her perspective as she comes through the front door. He’s working on the sofa, shoes off, books next to him, a beer half drunk on the table in front of him. The curtains behind him are open, showing the darkness outside, because he’s not bothered about it and his house is well insulated. He looks cosy, busy, and just a little bit pissed off that she’s now going to interrupt him with a long story about how all the other politicians are bad apart from her.

In the UK, Borgen was part of the inspiration for a larger trend towards more Nordic cool in interiors, publishing and fashion. People went wild for the lampshades and for a while you couldn’t turn round in a bookshop without knocking over a “how to hygge” book. The mania has abated somewhat, but if Instagram is anything to go by, people are still very into mustard L-shaped couches.

Now, I should emphasise, this is very much not my personal aesthetic. That low-backed sofa Philip is sitting on looks extremely uncomfortable and I bet the hairy rug is a devil to clean. Plus, I like my light fittings to look like something other than flying saucers. My house is from the 1890s and I’m much more interested in making it look like a National Trust property on a budget.

But I do like how happily Philip is coexisting with the darkness outside, leaving his curtains open and keeping the light minimal. The day after we watched this episode, I looked around the tottering piles of stuff in our living room and had a think about how I could make the space feel less frustrating, given that all the signs are I’m not going to be leaving it any time soon.

I decided on two courses of action that in my head I called “clearing sightlines” and “minor mendings”. I can’t Marie Kondo away all of the stuff, because a) although it does not spark joy a lot of it is paperwork and course materials my husband needs for work that would normally be at his office and b) it feels redundant, even unfair to dump donatable things on charity shops nobody is shopping in at the moment. But I can organise it in such away that it isn’t always in my eye line, and make the vista as you enter a room a pleasant one.

“Minor mendings” is a phrase that came unbidden into my head, borrowed from the 2014 conclusion to Lev Grossman Magicians trilogy. A character discovers that he has no grand, impressive magical gift, but rather a talent for fixing things, for making good after a disaster. Those books are not without their problems, but they would make for a nice wintery reading session if you haven’t tried them yet.

My own version of this involved standing in the middle of each room with a notebook for a few minutes, thinking about the things that are inconvenient or broken but in such a familiar way now that I don’t notice them. It was very gratifying every time I spotted another one, like doing one of those “spot the difference” puzzles, and soon I had quite a list of handles to glue back on, wobbly hooks to screw in properly, and light bulbs to replace. I’m by no means a competent or well equipped handyman, but even I had enough epoxy and the right screwdriver to make these small adjustments.

It probably took less than an hour to tidy up and to fix everything. Now, every time I reach up and successfully open a kitchen cupboard that used to have a handle that pinged off one in three times that you touched it, I feel a warm little glow of satisfaction. The same happens when I come through the front door and see a nice clear table in front of me, or reach out to put a mug down easily and safely while drinking tea in an armchair. It might sound simple, but the lethargy towards these small household chores I felt after six months of being in the house all the time was immense.

I’m not sure that I will ever obtain the positive attitude towards the winter confinement that a resident of Copenhagen or Tromsø might have, but I have at least made my space a little more inviting for the coming months. If you’re also in the northern hemisphere, I recommend doing the same now, before the clocks go back and the pre-4pm darkness envelopes us.

Twelve things I’m reading, watching and listening to:

If you enjoy the podcasts I recommend in this newsletter, consider taking out a subscription to The Listener, the daily podcast recommendation newsletter I write. I promise, it’s really good, and it’s a great way to show your support of my work.

Apart from that, there are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes on Twitter and Instagram. My book is now out in paperback, find the links to purchase a copy here.

Until next time,

Caroline

Filed under: newsletterarchive, blog, newsletter
5 min read Permalink

because of all the words I deleted

This is how many words I wrote last week:

During the working week 24 — 28 August, I wrote 13,671 words. Which is a lot, far more than I had expected. I also didn’t anticipate that fully a quarter of all the words I wrote that week would be in emails to other people, nor that writing scripts for my podcast Shedunnit would be the biggest subtotal.

Why, I can hear you wondering, did you keep this record? Why, when you could have been writing, or sleeping, or doing literally anything else, did you choose to keep pasting text into wordcounter.net and then enter the total into a spreadsheet at the end of each day? Is this some advanced form of procrastination?

The answer to the last question, in my case, is almost always yes, no matter what I’m doing. But I hope that it was purposeful procrastination, if that’s not a ludicrous oxymoron. I’m cautiously tiptoeing towards another book project at the moment, always looking at it sideways or out of the corner of my eye because if I look straight at it the idea might evaporate completely.

I’m not making very fast progress into turning it into something more solid. I’ve been finding it really hard to carve out the time to work on the proposal because I always seem to get to the end of each day and be completely written out. It never used to be the case, but nowadays there’s a limit to how much I can write in a single day until there are no more words left in me.

Maybe it’s the pandemic, maybe it’s because I’m not in my twenties anymore, but the days of me being able to keep going all night if the inspiration is there seem to be over, at least for now. I have to spend my daily quota of words wisely, and therefore I thought I’d see if there was any slack in the system, anywhere I could pinch back a few hundred here or there and give them to the book instead.

I got the idea from something my mother told me about when I was about five years old. She is a computer scientist, and at that point she worked at a big corporate research laboratory. For a few months, she was part of a team conducting a study on how work was done at the facility so they could determine whether any new equipment was needed, or a new structure, or more people, and so on.

Every day she was at a different area of the campus, drawing plans of offices and labs and marking where all the computers were and recording who used them to do what. She built some software to handle all of this information and, at the end of the study, to spit out some conclusions. Because it was the 1990s, the programme was housed on dozens of floppy discs, enough to fill an entire cardboard box.

I loved hearing about her job every night when she came home. I also loved computers, especially the discarded broken ones that she brought home from work to fix in her spare time. The orange screen and blinking cursor that would appear after hours of patient soldering and fiddling around was very exciting.

Somehow I absorbed this idea of examining your work habits, of gathering data about how you’re operating, from this period of her career. I think in business speak it’s called doing a “time and motion” study, although that might be a very outdated term. Yet even though I’m just one person sitting still in a cupboard writing newsletters and making podcasts, I decided it was worth doing such a study on myself.

Some notes on methodology. I tried to count all the words I wrote for work purposes, i.e. where there is some remuneration involved. Messages to friends or family were obviously excluded. I didn’t include Slack or WhatsApp messages in my count, even though I do use them to communicate about work for some projects, just because it was a faff to paste my text accurately out of those interfaces. I also didn’t include the posts I wrote on the private forum attached to my podcast’s supporters’ club; although technically part of work, I suppose, it just feels too much like fun.

I was perfectly satisfied with my totals for my three regular writing jobs — my podcast, the audio industry newsletter I write for, and the podcast recommendation newsletter I do. If anything, I was pleased with how much scripting I got done this week. But I was shocked when I realised that I’d written nearly 2,000 words in emails just on Monday. For context, one podcast episode is usually about 3,500-4,000 words. I’d written the equivalent of half an episode in one day’s emails.

I think the fact that I was totalling up at the end of each day started to affect my behaviour. I started trying to rein it in for the rest of the week — you can see how my emails total dropped to 105 for the next day. Partly that’s because I got through such a backlog on the first day, but it’s also because I started thinking harder about how long I was spending on my responses.

Could I write “yes, thanks” instead of “Yes, absolutely, really looking forward to it, can’t wait!”? Yes, I could, without being rude or dismissive or negligent or really making any difference at all to the recipient. This 2017 article — Do You Want to Be Known For Your Writing, or For Your Swift Email Responses? — was very much in my mind while I tried to be more purposeful and concise, as was something I saw the writer Sinéad Gleeson post on her Instagram: do art, not admin.

Even while I was still doing it, the study made me reflect on my own behaviour a good deal. In some ways, this count is inaccurate because of all the words I deleted, ridding my draft emails of my needless adjectives and pointless flourishes. I find it too easy to slip into the habit of being overly obliging. Nobody is expecting instant replies to emails, or indeed replies at all in some cases, yet I still provide them. And that means I have less unimpeded mental space to give to the writing work I’m lucky enough to be paid to do, and to experiment with other projects around the edges.

I need to be more French, it seems, according to this piece from 2016: “In France, a personal life is not a passive entity, the leftover bits of one’s existence that haven’t been gobbled up by the office, but a separate entity, the sovereignty of which is worth defending, even if that means that someone’s spreadsheet doesn’t get finished on time.”

I didn’t include my word count for the book proposal in the spreadsheet. I’m nervous about anybody even seeing that much of it at this stage. But I did make progress this week, more than I have for ages. Uncounted, the words are finally flowing.

Twelve things I’m reading, watching and listening to:

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: I do daily podcast recommendations at The Listener, I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes on Twitter and Instagram. My book is now out in paperback, find the links to purchase a copy here.

Until next time,

Caroline

Filed under: blog, newsletterarchive, newsletter