Reasons why Fran has leapt onto Substack

1. My daughter told me to.

She’s not easy to ignore. ‘Mum, you need to be on Substack.’

‘Will it react with my blood pressure tablets?’

‘You’re not funny. Get on it and start writing.’

I listen to her these days. Now she’s 40, she’s approaching sensible, and now I’m over 60, and appear to be going the other way, I need her.

She’s the best critic of my work. She was brave enough to tell me once that my writing was sometimes self-indulgent. She did me the hugest favour and, in truth, I owe her two-thirds of my book royalties for it. (Sssh.)

2. I miss blogging.

For nearly 15 years, I wrote a blog called ‘Being Me’, its title being Exhibit A in the stack of evidence of self-indulgence.

Here’s a link if you have a month to spare to trawl through its archives. Being Me

I see that the last entry was 7 August 2022. I don’t know why I stopped. Perhaps it was because I was knee-deep in editing ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’, the novel I had coming out with Legend Press.

The posts made people smile, though. And that’s my favourite thing to do.

I headed each post either ‘Reasons why ….’ or ‘Evidence that ….’ and I’m going to carry on doing that while Substacking. It seemed to work.

3. It’s better out than in.

The thoughts in my head have to go somewhere. I love making observations about the ironies and mismatches and comic moments and idiosyncrasies I see while I’m on buses, at the shops, at writers’ events, doing the hoovering, walking to fetch my grandkids from school, in the kitchen making the tea, opening my laptop to write a new scene for a novel …

When something goes wrong with the electricity serving the lit-up STOPPING sign on a bus and it just says PING when someone rings the bell. When my kids tell me that calling the tea ‘savoury mince’ ages me by a thousand years. When the grandchildren tell me about a new computer game and I only understand a quarter of their words. These things tickle me.

4. I’ve gone blurry at the edges.

I taught secondary English for nearly 20 years. I had timetables, itineraries, long-term plans, short-term plans, end-of-term plans. My days were split into lessons, breaktimes, lunchtimes, duty periods. My morning alarm rang at 6. I made tea at 6.04. I turned on the shower at 6.08. I was all frothed up at 6.09, ready for my husband to turn on the hot tap downstairs so that the shower water went Antarctic and I said words I’d forgotten I knew.

Now I’m retired from teaching, and trying to be a full-time novelist, the boundaries of my life are more hazy. I’d like some fixed points. And committing to a Substack post once a week will help.

It’ll take me a while to get familiar with all the Substackky features. But the writing will be here if you too would giggle at the PING.

(At this point, Substack wants me to find an image and tells me ‘For best results, use 1100px x 220px PNG’ but I need to run that through Google Translate at a future date.)

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