When you're blocked or feeling down, come back to what you know.
Or welcome to my rants: queer stuff, pop culture, writing and miscellaneous bullshit.
Who remembers the days of the group email? Ah, weren’t they grand. Armed with your Hotmail account, you’d add every friend, every family member you didn’t need to censor your life from, and acquaintances you wanted to make jealous for being more successful than they were, and away you’d go. 500-2000 words of bragging; of turning the mundane and minor into envy-worthy updates. Group emails are where I cut my teeth on trying to entertain, evoke a smile or even get a giggle through writing. In my early ‘20s when I was single, worked in advertising agencies and got pissed a lot, there was always good material.
I’ve never been one to be pithy; Twitter was never my medium. But I miss writing those group emails. So I’m approaching this Substack as the new form of group email – nothing over-thought, not overly edited. I will attempt to temper my ego more than my 21-year-old self did, and in fact I’m writing this because my ego is a bit down in the dumps at the moment. I’m finding it hard to work on my next book or anything that feels serious or high-stakes, and paid work has been pretty up and down for the last six months. I’m spending way too much time playing WhiteOut Survival, and my cat has started talking back.
Think of this Substack as what you would get if we were at the pub and I was on my third or fourth wine. I’m coming back to what I love: a good rant.
In this Substack you may encounter any of the following topics, and more:
Tips for being a freelancer – See below for some guidance on quoting and managing jobs, with Part 2 to come.
Who was that actor that played queer and is now in a new TV show. (I see you Cat from Lip Service, Scottish version of The L Word, now in the crime show Patience. Her character in Lip Service was very annoying – every queer show needs a Jenny I guess, but I still find her a little annoying so unfortunately it may just be her face.)
What my queen Kate Winslet is up to, ponderings on when we will marry.
What book I’m reading and great passages from books I come across.
The general theme of ‘Are heterosexual people okay?’
Sex stuff (leaving this purposefully ambiguous to pique your interest).
TV shows that made me yell at the screen, made me annoy my girlfriend by constantly asking her what is happening, or that I love – old and new.
Things about writing that I learned and thought you might find interesting.
Schemes. Plots. Murmurings.
Constant musings about what is happiness anyway.
Who my latest nemesis is.
Something I fucked up this week.
Lots of lists. Fun fact: the first time I was ever published was in a US book called To-Do List, when I was about 20. It was a book of lists and I had THREE published. ‘Things my mum taught me’, ‘Girls I’ve kissed’ and something else I can’t remember but I’m sure was Pulitzer-worthy.
Answers to questions. Look, I don’t know a lot about anything, but I do teach people how to write for a living and am kinda a professional lesbian, so fire me some questions about freelancing, how to pitch and quote jobs, how to write memoir or edit an anthology, or about gay stuff!
And finally, why Sofia the judge from Masterchef Australia is so hot (spoiler: a large part due to how enthusiastically she eats).
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Something I fucked up this week.
My friend Alie Benge who I edited OTHERHOOD with has a far more well-written Substack called Burnt Toast. Alie is one of those people that comes across as having her shit together, but when it comes to baking she most certainly does not, and I take great glee in reading about the MASSIVE overconfidence she goes into bakes with, and the very silly decisions she makes along the way that always results in fucking things up.
Isn’t it fun to see others failing? Some may think it’s responding to authenticity but I think it’s schadenfreude. In keeping with the spirit of people fucking up, my fuck up this week was…
Asking for more hours (money) for a freelance job, and then losing the job as a result: A lesson on quoting jobs.
There is always a gambling element to being a freelancer, especially when it comes to quoting jobs. Yes, some jobs are as simple as ‘Here’s my rate’ and it’s accepted, but most have some element of negotiation. I have a number of psychologically-based schemes for how I quote jobs, designed to make clients feel like they’re getting more value for money while at the same time making sure I’m paid what I’m worth.
In this case the client is a new one – an ad agency. Advertising agencies are typically the stingiest with their rates, miserly with the hours they allocate to a job, and have very tight deadlines. They always put the thumbscrews on you to try and get your rate down, or to make you quote a day rate. A day rate is fine when you’re being given at least 3 days’ work a week for a minimum of 2 months, but not when the whole budget is about 60 hours’ worth of work, spread across a month. I avoid a day rate like the plague.
When people try and get you to lower your rate, you have to take an informed guess about whether to hold your ground or not.
I’d managed to get my standard rate for previous work with this agency, but the job had been a hard slog and I felt that the value I was giving was worth more than the hours I could bill. So when they asked if I’d help out on a new job for a different client: “just a small tidy of web copy” (it’s never just a small tidy), I pushed back on the hours they’d allocated.
I don’t think the agency should be telling the writer how many hours it would take. They could have a loose idea, but a suit cannot possibly understand what goes into the writing enough to estimate accurately. So when they said it would take 8-10 hours, I was like, no way Jose. You’re asking me to look at 10 web pages – it’s my rule of thumb that you should never quote less than 2 hours per page, even if it’s “just a tidy”.
I said as much and very politely asked for up to 16 hours. My psychological technique here is that I always tell my clients I’ll only bill for the hours I use. That makes them feel better, and they are more likely to accept a higher ‘ask’. Having more hours to play with also makes me feel better, even if I don’t use them. There’s nothing worse than going into a job feeling resentment before you start because the hours allocation is low, and I think it affects the work.
I could have said ‘Sure I’ll do it, but I suspect it could take longer, so I’ll let you know if I’m getting near the allocated time.” That’s the opposite approach, and which one you use depends on if you can sense that the budget is flexible and they’re just trying to screw you down, or if they truly only have that amount of money to spend. If they only have a set amount to spend, I will say ‘Here’s what I can achieve for that budget’. But ad agencies will always try and pay their freelancers less so they can take more of the cut from the client budget, so in this case I suspected they would have more to work with.
TL:DR my punt didn’t work and they decided to give the job to someone internally instead. But, it is my philosophy that you should ask for what you’re worth, and be prepared to walk away/lose the job. But that’s where I think I went wrong. As a new client, I hadn’t yet built up the trust and respect where they’d rather give the job to me and know it was in safe hands, and that I would actually only bill what I used, rather than save a few dollars with someone cheaper who might be a pain in their arse.
I will say that in this case, they may have pulled the job internal whether I’d asked for more time or not, as it is January so their salaried copywriters have more time. So I’m not beating myself up about it, even though I needed the money. January is often a tough time for freelance copywriters.
Part 2: Key takeaways and some tips on quoting jobs.
I realised that I’d written nearly 1000 words after the above fuck up all about how to quote jobs, establish what you’re worth and more – including some tips on how to conduct yourself if you don’t have the financial security (a.k.a privilege) to ask for more or risk losing the job. But that is getting pretty long for my first post.
So stay tuned for the next installment, which I think is helpful for anyone who freelances, wants to, or even wants to be better at asking for things in their everyday life.
What I’m watching
Television is one of my great loves. From watching Batman and X-Men on a Saturday morning as a kid to adoring women behaving badly in Absolutely Fabulous (the first time I’d seen women do physical comedy), to endlessly quoting Kath & Kim with my sister; I am very, ahem, passionate. I did TV Studies at uni (everyone was obsessed with The Sopranos at the time), and have spent countless hours watching telenovelas in a language I don’t understand just to see a lesbian kiss. Nothing captures my attention like a complex female character on television. I went as Carrie Matheson from Homeland to Halloween one year, and I think season 2 of Fleabag is the most perfect season of television ever made. My ideal dinner guests would be some combination of Tina Fey (30 Rock), Sharon Horgan (Bad Sisters), Amy Poehler (for everything), Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You) and of course, Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
I have five categories of TV shows I watch:
Ones I watch with my girlfriend, which means I have to be very patient and only watch when she watches. Recently this has been Bad Sisters, Dessert Masters, Hacks, Black Doves etc.
Ones I have been banned from watching with my girlfriend, because I pick apart the writing and continuity too much, or yell at the screen. This includes Grey’s Anatomy.
Ones I watch but I skip through to the good bits and characters I like. Oh the joys of being able to skip boring plot lines or characters (I see you Temple and Silo).
Ones I don’t watch at all, but I read every recap. These tend to be twisty, slow-moving plot-lines that I don’t have the patience for, but I enjoy reading them. I know this is strange. Examples include Yellowjackets and The Rain.
TV shows that I come back to again and again. These include 30 Rock, Game of Thrones, and Fleabag. I also do this with my favourite books, which allegedly is a polarising thing to do. My girlfriend would never go back and read a book again, but I like to read The Stand and The Dark Tower series by Stephen King, The Passage series by Justin Cronin, Swan Song by Robert McCammon and the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown every few years or so. I find this incredibly comforting. Also we shouldn’t follow my girlfriend’s example, because she doesn’t read the blurb of a book before starting it, and when she finishes a book she immediately starts the next one. Like, within 30 seconds. This brings me to a new potential topic: Am I dating a sociopath?
There are actually more categories of shows I watch than this, but five is a nice number and a girl needs to keep some mystery about her.
Get to the point what are you actually fucking watching?
Dexter: Original Sin. It’s a prequel to the lovable serial killer series Dexter, and is surprisingly good. (Better than the sequel they made a couple of years ago.) Michael C. Hall, the original Dexter, still does the narration, and young Dexter is played by a guy who was in one of my favourite ‘what the fuck is happening’ TV shows: The OA.
Silo. I only care about Walk and Juliet, who are both queer/queer coded. Juliet is an engineer and I particularly love storylines where people have to build things to solve a problem, using what they can find lying around – say – an abandoned underground silo in a world where the air outside is poisonous. Or is it? Walk is played by Harriet Walter who was also fantastic in Killing Eve as Dasha, an aging yet lethal Russian assassin. I enjoyed the first couple of books this series is based on, which started with Wool by Hugh Howey.
Patience: A pretty run-of-the-mill British crime-of-the-week series. As we know, every crime or medical mystery show needs to have a quirky/acerbic and damaged yet lovable or neurodivergent character who can ‘see’ things that others don’t. This show has an autistic character called – you guessed it – Patience. She has a pet lizard because of course she does. At least they’ve cast an actor who is autistic, and yes I do look up these things.
Fun fact: I have a list tracking what day of the week TV show episodes release in the States, which I have maintained lovingly for about 15 years.
Joy is a time of year when every day has a new episode of a show to watch, but it’s slim pickings at the moment because of the writer’s strike and because allegedly we’re in an era of ‘mid’ TV, according to a lot of think pieces like this one and this one.
Other things I consumed that I liked recently:
The Briar Club by Kate Quinn. A murder mystery set in a women’s boarding house in the 1960s, where every boarder has a super interesting story and background, and they all converge in a heartwarming and ‘women-stick-together’ way.
Maya Felix’s Portugal renovation: Being without work at the mo, I have spent hours on YouTube watching from the first video of this always-positive, dancing German woman renovating a massive property in Portugal, with no experience.
Coffee ice cream from Island Gelato Co. on Ponsonby Rd. Superior to the Coffee Rubble Duck Island flavour, and about even with the Kapiti Affogato flavour.
Not recently but I can’t stop thinking about it: ‘The Triangle of Sadness’ film. I recently saw a short clip from this on Instagram and it got me thinking about what a batshit movie this is. A skewering of the rich and beautiful, and you never know what’s coming next. This is the last time I can remember walking out of a movie feeling absolutely astonished and excited.
Dinner at Kisa in Wellington: Gorgeous Middle Eastern food in refined surroundings. One of those restaurants where you’re already planning what you’re going to eat the next time you come because there are so many good things, and you’re a bit sad that you can’t try them all now.
The Substack Receipt from the Bookshop by Kate Clapham. She’s an independent bookseller somewhere in the UK, and writes about all the customers that come into her shop (or don’t come in), and the latest books that she’s unpacked. It’s very funny and quirky, and helps ensure my TBR list is always HUNDREDS of books long (yet I can never find a book that I want to read next; someone help me explain this paradox).
If you made it this far, thank you for reading my group email! This was fun! Please subscribe if you want more nonsense from me!