My writing journey

half a life in unfinished novels and paragraphs on everyday life

I love writing. I have always (well, I guess, from the age of three!) written in some form or another.

As a child, it was illustrated limericks, stories about fairyland (my best friend and I were fairy princesses and visited fairyland most weekends, via portals in the exposed roots of trees, the stumps of tree trunks, and, when we couldn’t get out and about, via her mum’s Singer sewing machine).

In my teens there were a lot of introspective, angst-filled poems, horror short stories, and also a few very weird drug-induced short stories. And also one published poem in a local poetry magazine, for which I received £5; a handful of rejections from Cosmo; some bits from creative writing class at school (and a lovely report from the teacher, telling me I had determination, but absolutely no imagination - that was nice); and a handful of chapters of a novel that was probably more suited to TV scripts as it was about a group of teenage friends who would meet up on the swings in the park in the early evening and each chapter addressed some issue that would basically argue about, sometimes personal, but often big questions that these days might be debated in an ethics or PSHE class - abortion, religion, war, the purpose of the police, racism… I think I wrote eight chapters of that one.

In my twenties it was many started, but never finished (you may well spot this as a theme) novels, and a handful of short stories, some of which I sent out to competitions, none of which won anything. The novels were mostly the kind of thing I was reading at the time - and a lot of that time was ‘aga saga’s - Mary Wesley and Joanna Trollope in particular. The one I got furthest with was about a mother of three kids and wife of a European Parliament person (I actually never fully decided what he did, but they lived in Brussel and he worked in some capacity within the European Parliament). She was a full-time, stay-at-home mother in a well-off household. And she was bored and losing her sense of self and she had a best friend from uni who was single and speeding up the publishing ladder and who ended up sleeping with her husband. I wrote a full plan of the book - which would be fifty chapter. And then I started writing the chapters. I wrote this during the lunchtime English Club at the Lycée where I was a language-assistant during my year abroad. No-one joined the club, but I was still contracted to be there every lunchtime, so I wrote. I loved writing it. When I read back over what I did write, it reads like it belongs in the same genre. I have no idea how I felt I could write about motherhood and losing my sense of self at that time, though, well before I had kids - my main experience to draw on was the other books I had read and perhaps my aunt, who had three kids and was a stay-at-home mum (though not in Brussels and not well off!).

In my thirties, and after kids, I moved on to ‘momlit’ - which actually weren’t that different from the aga saga, though perhaps had a bit more experience behind them. And then I went off on a crime/thriller tangent. Meanwhile, I discovered blogging (though, actually, I realise I had already kind of been blogging for a few years on LiveJournal). And I wrote a reasonably popular and quite successful (at the time) parenting blog (www.wahm-bam.org) and even started making money from it (though mostly via sponsored posts that genuinely sucked absolutely all the joy out of writing and the only joy I got from them was that the money I made from them sat in my PayPal account and counted, in my head, as mine and only mine and got spent on luxuries like a netbook and lovely boots that actually fitted my very wide calves - and later, art supplies and art courses).

As my thirties drifted closer to, and into, my forties, drawing seemed to take over as my main focus. At the same time, blogging was changing - the people sticking it out were mostly turning it into a full-on career and being very organised about it. The ones succeeding were those who could do those sponsored posts and make people still want to read them and largely gloss over the fact they were sponsored. I wasn’t brilliant at that and I didn’t enjoy it. But at the same time social media was getting bigger and bigger (and becoming part and parcel of making money from blogging - or, latterly ‘influencing’) and I found that my writing shifted to Facebook posts and away from the blog. I enjoyed writing the little snippets of everyday life (another theme I have found myself drawn to through all my creative channels) and knowing there were people who enjoyed reading them. It was fast and didn’t require planning or SEO or deep thought, and left me time for drawing. I also loved writing responses and comments in various Facebook groups - parenting groups, pattern design groups, illustration groups, political groups, and so on. I almost always wrote quite long comments and, actually, probably ended up spending more time doing that, than I would have writing a couple of blog posts a week again!

And that leaves us here. Now at the start of my fifties. I have written some blog posts over at www.tashagoddard.com, but they were generally very spread out, sometimes with a year between posts. I also wrote a very intermittent newsletter (some of you reading this have kindly subscribed to that from the start and lived through intermittent newsletters, through a period last autumn of daily ones to wherever I land now).

And I wrote less and less on social media. Because social media stopped being very social. For a good few years, Facebook was an extension of school gate and a kind of water cooler and interest circle. When I looked at Facebook what I would see was pages of little snippets of friends’ and acquaintances’ everyday lives; pictures of their kids, or lunch; little funny tales about something that happened; gripes about mundane things; rants about big things. Now, when I look at Facebook, apart from posts from groups I am still in (a couple of illustration/arty groups and an interrailing group for older people and a group for solo women travels over 50), it’s all adverts and suggested posts. I see something from an actual human being I am interested in fairly rarely. I don’t know if that’s because no-one is writings anything on there any more (I suspect that is a large part of it) or whether it’s the dreaded algorithm throwing me stuff that will make Meta money, constantly showing me local news pieces of clickbait, even when I have repeatedly told it not, constantly throwing me weird videos that are somehow really hard to stop watching even though I have no interest whatsoever in their content. (Typing this I am wondering more and more what on earth I am doing there still. The answer, I suspect, is that there are handful of relatives who post there and that I love to read about and see their photos. And the travel groups are quite useful (although can both be a bit click-baity sometimes and suck the time out of my life again). Oh, and I have a Facebook page for my illustration work that gets more engagement than my Instagram page, that’s something, plus you kind of have to have both and connect them, don’t you? Ew.)

Substack feels like a space that is bringing back my love of writing. It feels like a door back into writing creatively, but also just a place to write and maybe be read by some people. It feels similar to the early parent blogging days, especially the feeling of community, and discovering new writers via the writers we already follow, rather than what Meta thinks I should be reading (or, more commonly, buying). I have a couple of novels bubbling away, mostly in my head, with a few notes in my ‘writing’ folder on One Drive. I am not at the point where I have found a regular writing rhythm to get the words out yet. I keep imagining that I will do that when I am travelling, but it hasn’t happened yet. But, despite that, I feel this is the decade where I will actually finish writing one. And I think hanging out here will help that.

My vision for my life by the time I’m knocking on the next decade is one where my time is split between illustration/pattern design and writing, with a lot of travel thrown in. And where my main relationship with publishing is as a supplier of illustrations for books and as an author. Not as a supplier of services to publishers. Not as a project manager.

When I started typing this, it was going to be my ‘hero post’. Not everyone will know what that is, but on Substack, it’s useful to have a post that briefly introduces who you are and lets people know what you will mostly be writing about, roughly when, and what the deal is with paid/unpaid subscriptions (there are many ways to do that - having everything behind a paywall, having a specific proportion of paid:free posts, just putting resources or specific types of resource behind the paywall and, what I’m currently doing, keeping everything free, but having an option to pay for those who want to). But it turned into an essay about my writing through the decades and where I want my writing to go. Some of that involves this Substack, obviously, but it’s not really a manifesto of what I will provide here.

I think the hero post will have to wait a little longer. Which is fine, really. I’m very much still finding my way here and still working out fully how I will use this space.

Perennial income update

A little update, after last week’s post about working towards a perennial income… I now have seven pages of colouring content. I think that’s about a fifth of what I would need if I were to publish a 75-page colouring book on KDP with blank reverse pages (because I understand their paper is not particularly bleed-proof). So… one of the things I’m recognising is that creating this colouring book isn’t a quick task. I absolutely still want to do it, because (a) I am enjoying it (b) colouring books is an area I have consistently made (some) money from and (c) I want to use this year to experiment with different potential income streams and dig deeper into those that work best, and this is one of them.

So do I keep just working on the colouring book until it’s ready? Or do I thread in one more (speedier) potential income source. I think the quickest and easiest one would be creating illustrations and patterns for microstock. I am thinking of picking a theme per week, and drawing a handful of simple motifs per day, and then spending a couple of hours toward the end of the week, cleaning up each motif, uploading them individually and then running out some simple patterns with them in, and uploading them. So, say, half an hour a day and then two hours on Friday, Saturday or Sunday to process and upload.

And I can keep going with the colouring book during my morning and evening sofa time. I also reminded myself (it’s been a few years since I last made a colouring book) that I don’t need to draw every page from scratch, it’s possible to reuse patterns from one page on another, and to reuse other elements, as well - so one page might be all mugs and another might have a scene with a table set for afternoon tea, and some pages could just be full-page patterns, using the patterns decorating the tea cups.

Reusing elements for colouring book pages

What I’m reading and watching

I thought I’d share, every now and then, what I’m reading and watching, because I love to know what other people are reading watching and discover new culture to consume, so I imagine some of you also like that! [Maybe this should be a separate post in future, rather than tagged on the end of something else.]

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee - this is a re-read; I read it in autumn 2022 and then I watched the TV show on Apple TV and then I recently rewatched it with Chris (my husband) and now I’m re-reading it and it’s interesting to read both a second time and compare to that, but also compare to the TV show. It always fascinates me how books are adapted into TV shows and films. I’ve managed to, mostly, grow out of the feeling of annoyance or anger at the changes and instead consume them in different ways and just observe the differences. The book, and TV show, are wonderful. The characters are incredibly well-drawn and I especially love the exploration of the everyday life (see - a definite theme for me!) of the women. And it’s fascinating from a historical perspective and also because we, as a family, have been getting to know Korea and Japan a lot more over the last seven or eight years - listening to kPop, watching kDramas, learning Japanese (Chris, not me - well, I think I managed a few units on Duolingo a few years ago, before moving to a more familiar European langague - Portuguese) and reading quite a lot of Japanese and Korean literature. (I actually went to Seoul in 2019 with my youngest for a week, which was an amazing experience).

Food for Life by Tim Spector - I’ve been wanting to read this for a while, having read quite a few articles by him or about the book in The Guardian and having used the Zoe app during the pandemic, and it was on offer in Tesco the other week when I was in picking up Galentine’s Day sleepover supplies with my youngest. I’m only a few chapters in so far, but it is truly fascinating.

The Success Myth by Emma Gannon - if you’re on Substack, you will surely already know Emma Gannon (she writes The Hyphen). I read The Multi-Hyphen Method a while back and loved it and felt seen, as someone who seems to always have multiple projects/careers on the go! Again, only a few chapters in, but I’m finding this one equally inspiring and relevant. I have always struggled with the concept of success. I have always described our business as a successful one, because we have sustained it for decades now and never gone bust and it is kept a roof over our head and food on the table, etc. But now and then I would question whether I was allowed to call it a success, because surely that would have mean we had expanded and employed people and should we making hundreds of thousands of pounds to truly be ‘successful’. This book is about reframing our concept of success and I am loving it so far, too.

One Day TV show on Netflix - well, really who hasn’t been watching this? I’d say especially people of around my age because, oh boy, the nostalgia! But apparently my kids’ generation are also all over it. My eldest watched it and said ‘It was so sad!’ (have to admit I had forgotten from the book and the film that there was sadness, darnit, but sadness is an important part of life). What a brilliant adaptation! (Much much better than the film.) And something else that explores everyday life quite a bit.

Gilmore Girls TV show on Netflix*- having been ill for what feels like the whole of 2024 - this weekend feels like the first time I have felt that I can actually be a functioning human being again who goes for walks and cooks proper food and so on - I had to watch this; it’s my go-to comfort TV for whenever I’m feeling ill or low. And even though I’m better now, I’m going to watch to the end, and I might venture into the mini-series too, maybe.

* I hadn’t touched Netflix in a while, because it would only ever let us watch on one screen at a time with the new payment plans and I wasn’t going to shell out for that expensive top price. Decided to bite the bullet and go for ad-supported, which means I can watch Netflix again and not get booted off by the rest of the family. I am finding I don’t mind the ads too much, but would really like there to be more variety. I am honestly so sick of the Sainbsury’s ad (this will obviously be a UK-only one) that I will probably never be able to go into a Sainsbury’s again (probably not their intention).

Dungeons and Dragons movie on Now TV - Chris had been suggesting we watch this for ages (he already saw it, at the cinema, I think). I have to admit avoiding it for a while, because I didn’t think it would be something I’d like. He kept insisting I would and in the end I thought I would try. I loved it! It reminded me a lot of The Princess Bride, with a similar kind of feel to it. Very feel good, fun, and funny film. Do try it, even if it sounds like something you’d never touch with a bargepole (especially if you loved The Princess Bride).

Where the Crawdads Sing movie - rewatched this for the third time on Friday night (this one, I persuaded Chris to watch and he enjoyed it) and I still love it. It’s sooooo beautiful, and yet another adaptation that I’ve enjoyed after having read the book.

I’ve put in links to books on Waterstones UK and to TV shows and films to where I watched them (again, UK). Obviously, if you’re not in the UK you’ll need to find them yourself.

OK…. I’m definitely feeling better, because I have written 3000 words. This is probably now way too long for anyone to want to read in its entirety. Congratulations, if you made it to the end!