3 Little Pieces

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It's a day for publishing little pieces.

After a bit of a flurry of longer length articles a couple of weeks ago, today has seen me writing about individual tracks and compiling this month's F-Word music blog post and playlist.

Writing about women and music around the same time as International Women's Day is always a bit weird.

It's as though all the PR companies and record companies wake up to the fact they've got some women on their rosters and, for one day only, start promoting the hell out of them.

OK, some of them remember to promote their female artists the rest of the year as well, but it's frustrating when you spend 364 days of the year receiving largely irrelevant promo (all of which I listen to, by the way) and then one day a year where pretty much 100% of it is relevant and useful.

It isn't great for a writer to receive a press release that contains a lot of stats, data and musical content that would be best served by an in depth piece... on the day that the PR wants the story written about and promoted. It's especially unhelpful when you've received about seven other equally interesting, in depth and complex press releases of equal interest on the same day.

I like writing women and music stories. I'm the music editor at a feminist website, I have licence to write those kind of stories, and commission them, 365 days of the year. As such, it would be better for me if I was given tip offs on interesting stories across the full 365 days, not all at once on one day in March.

Some PR's are very good and do pitch stuff to me with the feminist angle in mind, but most PR's don't. In a way, this is good because it means I have to actively seek out artists and music myself, which stops me getting lazy and complacent, but it's also bad because it means I get sent a lot of highly irrelevant music and music based press releases, that I still feel compelled to waste time listening to.

Long time readers will also be aware that another thing that annoys me is the lack of women headlining music festivals in the UK. I wrote about this two years ago, and it is touched on in this month's F-Word Music blog post, but I don't think I'll be leaving it at that. I think I'll be revisiting the issue before the summer is out. Watch this space.

Siobhan Wilson by Emma Dagger

Today I've also published a review of Siobhan Wilson's video 'Marry You' and the new Chromatic's song 'Time Rider'. Both of which are well worth checking out.

Earlier in the week, I also published another of my whimsical pieces for Medium, this time about possible historical predecessors to the podcast. As per usual, I had a lot of fun writing the piece, though I'm not massively convinced that a lot of people will read it. If you do take the time though, I hope you like it.

Happy week, sad week...

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It's been a funny old week, hasn't it?

I found myself getting very over-stimulated and over-excited yesterday. Having your laptop locked to the Revoke Article 50 petition and watching it climb by 2000 signatures per minute can do that to you. Especially if you're logged into Twitter at the same time.

Given that it's been a very Brexit orientated week, it's incredibly apt that Four Goods chose today to publish my piece about Veg boxes and Brexit.  I'm not the kind of writer to write a good old j'accuse but I can confess that this is one of two pitches I sent out to publications on the theme of Brexit. The other one was about reading habits in times of national crisis and was going to be a tongue in cheek look at what people were currently reading to forget about Brexit. That was about a month and a half ago though and I think it might have missed it's moment. No one wanted it anyway.

Earlier this week I also had the pleasure of seeing my first piece for Get In Her Ears go up online. This was a track of the day piece, reviewing Havvk's excellent new song. 

I do have other writing plans and, in fact, am hoping some of them will come to fruition very soon.

Will keep you posted...

The book pile has been fed

The book pile needs feeding...

I have requested some library books to fill it up a bit.

I feel vaguely uneasy if there aren't enough new books to read.

Walking, scribing and writing

This lady isn't me by the way. I just liked the picture.

It's been a busy few weeks, hence my absence from the blog...

Earlier today I posted a Q&A interview over on The F-Word that one of my writers, Victoria Bailey, had done with the incendiary spoken word poet Toria Garbutt. 

This was an interesting piece to edit in a number of ways. I don't know a lot about the spoken word scene and, technically, it wasn't really my section of the site. But then, as with things like fanzines and podcasts, it wasn't really anyone else's section either. Victoria is one of my writers and I'd commissioned her to do the piece so I made it my responsibility.

It's great when you get a piece back and it's brilliant. Not only because it makes the editing so much easier, but also because it means you're really excited about putting it up on the site and having people read it. And you totally should read it, because it's a great piece.

This evening I finished writing up and formatting my own interview with Amanda Palmer for Louder Than War. I'd taken on this commission because it was offered to me by Melanie Smith at LTW and I like the Dresden Dolls and also Amanda's solo work, most of which I was introduced to by my friend Jane Appleby. It's been six years since the last Amanda Palmer album, but last year she collaborated with the Welsh singer/songwriter Jasmine Power on the song 'Mr Weinstein will see you now', a track which features in this months F-Word playlist.

I'm happy to report that I really enjoyed talking to Amanda Palmer, and hopefully that comes across in the finished interview. There will be a review of the album to follow in the next couple of days, but it's progress has been slowed by the temp work I've been doing this past week, and will continue to do until Wednesday afternoon.

Why the temp work? Well, because full time freelancing is not paying the bills.

This isn't a surprise to me to be honest, and I had a whole list of strategies when I went full time freelance as to how I was going to tease out my meagre writing earnings. I got a lot of my advice from the start up/freelance community on Medium which, in retrospect, perhaps wasn't the best place to start. I'm getting better advice from the freelance journalism community these days, including amazing women like Lucy O'Brien, Anna Codrea-Rado, Sian Meades, and Robyn Vinter. All of whom will probably never know the extent to which they have helped this self taught music writer these past few months.

Funnily enough, I've had more luck (or near misses...) with the writing opportunities than I have with things like proofreading, copywriting, copyediting and so on. And, as such, I decided to return to something I knew a bit about and knew I could do: Ad hoc temping and casual work.

Over the years I've been a Casual Library Assistant, including doing the book equivalent of supermarket checkout work at the School Library Service for a few weeks in 2005, I've done Clearing work for one of the local universities, I've done two types of Election work, I've hammered online surveys... And, now, I've been a scribe for SEN kids for their mock GCSE's over in Gorton.

Taking a week out to do the scribing has eaten into my journalism time, naturally, and I have been very knackered thanks to the 45 minute walk each way to work, but at least it's bringing in some money and the staff and the kids are nice.

Once the scribing is over, I have another piece to write for Four Goods, but I'm keeping that one largely under wraps at the moment as it's still very much a work in progress.

One thing I do want to do is go back to writing on here more regularly again, as the blog is one of my most enjoyable writing outlets. I also have some other plans I'm hoping to put in place in the next couple of months, but they're still at the planning stage.

There will be more soon.

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