Positive Changes

Introducing an exciting new Substack project and making a few important alterations to this old one...

Hello dear friends, thank you for being among the first to sign up to these pink pages and for bearing with me.

You know things have been quiet on here. The lack of action may be a blessing, one thing we are not short of in 2025 is reading material, but you might also be thinking, why did I sign up to this again? Just F-off!

I am about to put you out of your misery though, so I hope you will stay with me for this one at least. I’m making a few changes around here which I think will be for the better. One of these things is the launch of a kind of ‘virtual library reading room’, but I will come to that in a bit.

I launched The Fishwife in the summer of 2023 while I was on chemo for breast cancer. I wanted a place to share my creative writing, and I thought of it as my very own online literary zine in which I could share my poems and short stories.

I quickly realised, however, that Substack was creating as much of a barrier to my creativity as it was encouraging it; this is why:

1. It was a major distraction! I wanted to read more books, not more articles!

2. It immediately felt like I was in competition for attention. Other Substackers are always bleating on about how they grew their list from zero to a billion in six months and the Substack algorithm always bumps what appears to me to be boring self-congratulatory bollocks.

3. It is so content hungry! Look, I was a blogger for several years and a magazine columnist for more. I know about the necessity to write and keep writing, but I wanted to write on Substack for joy, not work. The moment I started The Fishwife I felt beholden to my own ambitious and unrealistic deadlines and - bearing in mind I was going through a major health crisis at the time - I thought, for the want of a better way of putting it, fuck this!

4. I want to prioritise my stories and poems. I quickly discovered, however, that publishing those things on here is making them ineligible for submission to most other literary publications and writing competitions. To circumvent this, I need to publish stuff on Substack that isn’t my creative writing - reviews, listicles, opinion pieces and personal essays, all stuff that, because of my journalism background, doesn’t feel so new, or such fun to write.

What I absolutely love about Substack, though…

…are the reading and writing groups that emerge out of it. This feels different to the blogging of old - this is a hybrid of blogging and events. I subscribed to Tim Lott’s Writing Boot Camp for the writing advice, and I stayed for Juke Books, his monthly ‘micro book club’ at which participants read an extract from a favourite book, and say why they like it.

I also learnt about the concept of ‘body doubling’, through Substacks such as In Writing by Hattie Crisell and The London Writers' Salon and other organisations such as Writers HQ and ‘Write Night’ at Queens University Belfast.

What I really wanted from Substack, was motivation to write, and I have found that here, certainly, but greedily, I want now to create a bespoke writing community that takes place both here, online and on Substack, but also on my doorstep in Galway. I miss the book club for cooks that I used to host in my home town. I want to start something like that again, and see what happens…

So, the idea for 2 x 40 is born!

2 x 40 is a Substack dedicated to providing users with a space in which to get their writing (or drawing, or brainstorming) done.

It uses the principle of body doubling to motivate participants to schedule time for their personal creative practice. This is hard to do when we squeeze it around commitments to work, family, community and health. Even for those of us who work in the creative industries, client projects usually take precedence over our own creative exploration, but I have talked more about this on the 2 x 40 Substack, so please scoot over there if you are interested.

Our first Zoom event, The Double, is scheduled for 27th March at 7.30pm.

My intention for 2025 is to add more events to the 2 x 40 programme, both online and in-person, that involve quiet shared creative time, reading groups, and talks. Harking back to my indie publishing days, I will also be looking to print some pamphlets, so stay tuned for that.

The most important thing about 2 x 40 is, though, it is a vessel for the community that grows within it. I’m not going to be using it to share my shit. It’s a place for creative people to clock in and clock out having had a productive time doing their own thing. Join us!

What about The Fishwife then?

One thing that bugs me about modern communications is the fact that, in order to have the most ‘success’ on social media, we have to boil our interests down to sickly sucky sweets and sell them to others. I’ll try not to go off on one now about how we are all toiling away as content slaves for big tech, but in this life it seems too much is about building a personal brand, and good branding involves simplifying things ad nauseum.

Human beings are not simple. We don’t have one interest. I don’t believe that we are even entirely the same person for all of our lives: we mature, we change, we take on new responsibilities, new jobs, big things happen to us, good and bad.

Great writing is about showing the complexity of human thought and experience. It’s not about distilling it all down to a tightly packaged unit: this human asks strangers on the street what they are listening to; this human plaits hair beautifully and so on and so on and so on.

Saying that; if The Fishwife is going to carry on at all, it needs to stay true to its name. It can’t be a capsule for all my varied interests and passions, because the audience for that would be just one person (myself).

So, in summary, The Fishwife is going to get fishier… and by that, I mean, I am going to keep writing on here but the focus will be on staying healthy by swimming and enjoying the sea.

This year, I am part of a relay team training to swim Galway Bay.

Galway Bay is a 13km open-water swim and - if you do it on your own without a wetsuit (you champ!) - it forms one third of the Irish Marathon Swimming Association Triple Crown.

I’ll be doing it as a relay, so 3-4km only, but it’s still a BIG DEAL for me, and will raise much needed funds for the charity Cancer Care West that helped me when I was ill.

More about this in a future post, but I will be using The Fishwife as a place to document this training, and otherwise indulge my interest in swimming, the ocean, and my goal to stay as active as possible for my health as a cancer survivor.

If that floats your boat, I’d love you to stick around.

Photos of Atlantic Masters by Chloë King, 2024