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Do the (Side) Hustle

Published on by Frances ManwaringLeave a comment

Remember the 1975 disco hit The Hustle by Van McCoy and the Soul Symphony? The ‘song’ made No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Soul Singles charts during the summer of 1975 and on the Canadian RPM charts. It peaked at No. 3 in the U.K., No. 5 in New Zealand, and No. 9 in Australia. It only made 38 on the French Singles Chart, confirming (in case it needed to be) that the French are different. The Hustle won a Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance early in 1976 and sold over a million copies. 

But wait, there’s more. This catchy but annoying ‘song’ has been featured in films including Stuck on You, Vampires Suck and The Lorax, T.V. programmes— Shark Tales, That ‘70s Show, American Dad! and Futurama, amongst others. You’d have to say it was a whopping success despite only having three words—Do the Hustle! 

According to wikiHow, The Hustle is a “fast-paced partner dance, related to swing, and commonly danced to disco and modern pop. The dance involves four basic moves: stepping, twirling, chicken dancing, a move called ‘The Travolta’, and turning.” Then it was rinse and repeat until you drop. 

If you want a walk down memory lane and the chance to brush up on your hustle moves or try them out for the first time, you’ll find instructions in this incredibly cheesy short video. You’ll love it … honestly. Despite my cynicism, listening to it brought a fun flashback to my mid-seventies teenage disco queen. 

Anyway, despite a cursory search into the background of the dance, I couldn’t find anything specific. Presumably, it was a nod to the need to hustle to succeed or survive in the hustle and bustle of the seventies. It’s become much more sophisticated these days—it seems everyone has a side hustle—as a cheeky ‘must have’ accessory to one’s working life. Side hustles are flexible work that you do over and above your primary job to bring extra cash, get your creativity flowing or add purpose to your life. It could be taking up a new hobby, learning a new skill or using an existing one you want to ‘monetise’ at some point. Could even be volunteering for a non-profit you rate. 

As professional speaker and coach Alissa Carpenter says, “We all know Millennials love a good side hustle—to fuel their passions and wallets”. But it’s not just Millennials. It seems we’re all at it, including me; you’re no one if you don’t have a side hustle. It’s the ultimate put-down of our contemporary world: “What, no side hustle!”. I exaggerate, but the concept of the side hustle is endemic. 

I feel we need an updated version of The Hustle—Do The Side Hustle. What a pity Van McCoy died in 1979, shortly after the hit’s success, so he can’t do a side hustle of his own by remastering the original and raking it in. Clearly, it’s a great opportunity for some keen hustler.

Of course, it isn’t new. People have been forced or opted to take up additional burdens to make ends meet since Adam and Eve were ejected from Eden without notice. I’m sure they hadn’t had time to build up a rainy-day nest egg. People bandy the words around like membership of an exclusive club, but for people living on the margins, it’s always been an unwelcome part of their reality—the only way they can feed their families and survive. There’s also always been the darker side. I’m thinking black marketeers during war and rationing when fortunes are made by offering consumer goods that couldn’t be bought in conventional shops at exorbitant prices. The side hustle all too often comes wrapped in the trappings of despair, manipulation or holding people to ransom.  

While this type of side hustle is still shamingly very much part of the human condition, the trendy contemporary version seems pretty harmless. Side hustles, after all, make us better, more rounded, more connected, or simply wealthier people. Where’s the harm? Who suffers if you decide to set up an Etsy Shop as an outlet for your creativity? Or if I use all my waking hours outside work trying to become a best-selling author? Surely, it’s good to pursue the paths that make our hearts sing beyond the 9 to 5 grind. Why not use our ingenuity to make money on the hoof?

I’m a side hustler with the best of them, but there are issues. I’m about to publish a new book, and I’m running on fumes, trying to keep all the plates spinning. Side hustles can be hungry beasts sucking up all your best energy. In my day job, I run a design studio, which I own. As my book launch date looms, I’m not entirely clear which is the side course, and which is the main one as I scramble to keep all the plates spinning and keep my business dynamic whilst doing everything it takes to give my book its best shot. I’m blessed with high energy levels, but they’re not infinite, and I’m conscious of the risk of burnout if I keep the candle lit at both ends. I live alone, so it’s my call how I use my out-of-office time, but side hustles can short-change friends and family, stealing time that should be theirs. 

I’m all for putting time into hobbies and gaining new skills. You meet new people, expand your horizons, and potentially earn a bit of welcome extra dosh. I’ve met a wide range of like-minded people through mine, something I didn’t even consider when I started my indie publishing business with my sister. However, the statistics show that side hustles as a necessity are on the rise. According to CNBC’s Gilli Molinsky, “44% of people with a side hustle think they’ll always need it—and more are picking one up”. According to an April 2023 Bankrate survey of 2,505 U.S. adults, more than 39% have a side hustle to help cover living expenses rather than for discretionary spending. Half of the Millennials surveyed and over fifty per cent of the Gen Xers have one. 

The tragedy behind these stats is that too many people are going backwards financially, often underpaid, and coping with eye-watering costs of living hikes. Inflation at least seems to be under control (for now), but that only means commodities stay at the same high rates; they don’t revert to their more affordable pre-inflationary levels, so the cost-of-living hike is hard-wired in even though the curve has flattened (again, for now).

Anyway, I’m sure you get my point. Side hustles can be fun and richly rewarding on many counts for those of us lucky enough to follow our dreams because we can. They shouldn’t be a survival mechanism for people who have no choice.

P.S. Sorry if I’ve given you an earworm. If it’s any consolation, I can’t get the pesky Hustle thing out of my head either.

You have the attention span of a goldfish!

Published on by Frances ManwaringLeave a comment

Devastating insult or statement of fact? According to “the science”, having the attention span of a goldfish would, until recently, have meant you could only manage to focus on something for around eight seconds. That much? is my first thought. My second is, how on earth can they tell with goldfish?

It’s easy with humans. After all, you kind of get the idea—there’s nothing like the affirming glow of watching someone’s eyes glaze over as they zone out listening to your latest rant. You don’t have to be the empath of the century to discern that you’ve lost them. Even if they’re polite and conditioned to look mildly interested, the twitching mouse hand or the occasional furtive but longing glance at their mobile or the look over your shoulder to find someone more interesting speaks volumes.

But fish? Unless I’m missing something, their eyes are perpetually glassy and lacking focus. Maybe some earth-shattering metaphysical thinking is going on as they swim, seemingly purposelessly, from one side of their bowls to another. Perhaps we judge harshly, and they’re living the fish dream. Enjoying the little joy things like that witty sunken treasure chest or shipwreck you thoughtfully placed to enrich their existence. Maybe they, like humans, aspire to smell the roses and rise above the limitations of the daily grind. For goldfish, rather than roses, think the aesthetic and olfactory glory of a bunch of weird sounding aquatic plants—Moneywort, Hornwort, Rotala Rotundifolia, Pygmy Chain Sword, Hygrophilia Polysparma and Cryptocorne Wendttii are among the most popular. They seem more like ingredients the witches in Macbeth might have been familiar with than joy bringing plants. Each to their own. 

In any case, according to Forbes Magazine, in 2015, the internet was awash with shock and horror about claims that the attention span of the average human had plummeted to eight seconds–about the same as that of a goldfish—and that it was getting shorter  There were even suggestions that big sporting events be condensed to accommodate this downward dog of a trend. “Well, bugger me sideways!” scandalised people everywhere exclaimed (when shock saw off good taste and horror provoked strong reactions). “That’s appalling! How have we sunk so low? Can’t we rewind to the Halcyon Days of pre everything smart and get back to being smart ourselves?” 

More recently, this supposition has been pretty roundly debunked. It turns out that we both—humans and goldfish—can do better than the eight-second average that only a few years ago shocked and horrified so many. Phew. That’s all right then. Let’s face it: eight seconds is mind-bogglingly unimpressive. Eight seconds pass faster than you can spell Mississippi. (Remember how we were taught to time stuff absent as kids by saying one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four, five, etc, ad infinitum to count time for stuff like games and races where timing mattered and we didn’t have mobile phones with inbuilt timers).

But just because we can do something doesn’t mean we will. Even thoug we are able to focus on one topic beyond eight seconds doesn’t always mean we will. Off-hand, I can think of several examples where my attention span slumps to significantly less than eight seconds. I generally give up well before the eight-second mark when searching streaming services for something new to watch, and pick up my Kindle instead. There’s just so much choice. I want to watch stuff as a leisure activity, not something that feels like so much more work. As you will have read in my previous blog, assembling flat pack furniture is another example where I need the dogged determination of a terrier after a rat that’s gone to ground to push beyond any seconds of focus.

All joking apart, I have the 2015 understanding of a goldfish’s attention span when it comes to stuff I don’t care about and an infinite capacity to focus on the stuff I do. Whatever the extended span of a goldfish is now said to be, it’s not like they use it to read books or put together flat-packed furniture! There’s no one-size-fits-all on attention spans, and stupid scientific research trying to average it out is … er … stupid … in my humble opinion. But it does seem as if attention spans have shortened and continue to shrink.

I can cut people slack and believe we pay attention when we want or need to. Perhaps that’s generous, and I should be more worried about the overall plummet in our device-induced vacuousness. But my worry is declining attention seems to walk hand-in-hand with the infinitely scarier knowledge that in places like the UK, as many as 50% of the population don’t read books. That’s don’t, not necessarily, can’t. FIFTY PER CENT!!!! Most people can read. Reading is still taught at schools. They just choose not to. 

I read this in the Times Newspaper this week and nearly wrote an email to the editor expressing my shock and horror until I realised that would make me one of those grumpy older people always harping on about an infinitely better state back in the day. But I can muster pretty impressive howls of outrage at the loss to humanity when people consign the greatest thinkers of the past to the too-hard basket because they no longer have the inclination or stamina to cope with anything more than a meme, lurid headline or the latest TikTok sensation. Oops, straying into the grumpy olds again.  

In our defense, lack of attention is not entirely our choice. We have a conscious aspect that supports focus and a subconscious one that keeps chucking other things on our periphery into the mix. We’re conditioned to scan for trouble so we can trigger the fight, flight reflexes that linger on from our more primal pasts. Now, it’s more like scanning the horizone for shiny new things to fixate over and take flight from the borning task at hand, but there is at least some justification for our fickleness of attention.

Achieving deep focus is a question of practice. It’s not something that just comes naturally to most of us. It’s a layered and nuanced skill built over time and effort, but we can’t be in that zone every minute of every day. There’s nothing wrong with bursts of limited attention. I went to my town’s annual fair yesterday and sifted around in a drift of people enjoying the day and relishing the enticing wafts of all sorts of yumminess from the food carts. I drifted and sifted without any particular focus, idly scanning the stalls for the shiny thing that would draw me in and get my attention. You can’t always give everything full focus—we need enjoyable and non-challenging downtime like that.

Coming back to the point, if goldfish have been proven to have attention spans longer than eight seconds, the old insult no longer holds true. We need something new and worse. What about substituting the humble gnat? Gnats have an attention span of zero—that’s nil, nada, zip, diddly squat—because gnats have no memory. Again, I wonder how on earth THEY know this, but THEY likely do, so I’ll take THEIR word for it. Whatever. Next time you’re tempted to accuse someone of having the attention span of a goldfish, think again. If you want a genuinely desiccating insult, it doesn’t get much better than comparing them to a gant. It’s a winner on two counts. Much worse than a goldfish and, unless you’re a serious gnatofile or gnatologist, they’re also ugly little suckers!

Fun with flatpack furniture

Published on by Frances Manwaring3 Comments

How hard can it be? Seriously. Putting together a bunch of pieces to make an item of furniture? Child’s play, you might think. I certainly did, as I pressed Buy on a stylish mini-drawer set from IKEA, which looked perfect for my new home office. I live in an apartment, so space is always a consideration, and this baby offered bountiful bang for my buck in its miniature Scandi magnificence. 

Flatpacks, AKA knock-down furniture or ready-to-assemble furniture, are very popular. The concept is seductive—go to the online or physical store, buy the item, haul it home or get it delivered, and, after a bit of assembly time, voila, you have the perfect artefact for your home or garden or whatever. Right? Sort of.

But what a great wheeze flatpacks are…for their makers. Imagine the eureka moment when some eager beaver middle manager thought of an innovative way to make truckloads more money. Picture being a fly on the wall as said manager makes a presentation to their senior team, which might have gone something like this:

“I’ve been thinking outside the box to bring a major paradigm shift—or is it a pivot?— to the table here for your consideration. Thank you for the opportunity to run this game-changing idea up the flagpole. The central theme of the premise going forward is to let the customers assemble products themselves. Think what that will save us,” he/she/they enthuse as they rip through a PowerPoint full of quadrant graphs, up arrows next to dollar icons, etc. 

“We get them excited about affordability, convenience and the whole DIY bandwagon that’s kicking off—they’ll love it and won’t notice we’re selling them a pup. Next steps? Whiteboard a go-to-market strategy, take a deep dive, unpack the possibilities, and shift the dial. I’ll reach out in a couple of weeks to touch base and see if it’s in your wheelhouse.” 

In addition to being a walking cliché, our manager was clearly the identical twin of the towering genius who believed self-checkouts were a giant leap forward for civilisation. 

But love them we did—flatpacks that is, not the suits responsible for them. IKEA, the spiritual home of the flatpack, was founded as a mail-order retailer in 1943 by Swedish entrepreneur Ingvar Kamprad. By the early 2000s, IDEA was the world’s largest furniture seller, with three hundred-plus stores and infinite online buying options.

Anyway, in the same way, time heals all wounds—or wounds all heels, if you prefer—it also cauterises past flatpack traumas. I’m not a flatpack virgin—I’ve given a few of them a go since the London IKEA opened to much excitement in 1987. It’s brutal—every time. But if you leave it long enough between purchases, the scars fade, and you forget how awful it was. Your inner recovery mechanisms dampen any trigger warnings, and before you can say, “Flatpacks suck”, you’re back in that magical thinking place where hope triumphs over experience. In my experience, hope has always been the loser.

Returning to last Friday. My new flatpack duly arrives at my business and, with it, my first challenge. It’s heavy. When I bought it, I thought it was made of lightweight wood or MDF or something. Oops. It’s metal. The box itself is pretty small, but I can barely lift it. How to get it to my car and home without breaking myself? My business partner gallantly lends me his fold-up trolley, and, home from work, I’m feeling optimistic and light-hearted as I start unpacking. Until I look at the instructions when buyer remorse kicks in big time. There are 20 different steps involved. Surely, that’s overkill for a box with six dinky drawers. Realising this might be more than a two-minute job, I put it off until Sunday as I have more fun things to do on Saturday.

The next day dawns bright and sunny, but I’m a bit groggy, having got home at 3am and woken up at my usual first sparrows ludicrously early timeslot. Despite the lack of sleep, I know it’s now or never—if I don’t tackle the beast immediately, it will stay in its box for all eternity. It’s summer and already about 30 degrees. By the time I’ve got to Step 12, I’m sweating like a dyslexic on a spelling bee as I realise I’ve made all six drawers with the runners on the inside. Unlike Intel, which is a good thing to find within your computer,  for drawers, the big virtue is runners on the outside. OMG, kill me now. I unravel all six drawers, mashing my fingers with the out-of-control screwdriver and swearing like a trooper. You get the picture, I’m sure. 

It took me three hours. THREE HOURS! The miserable hours. But I have to say, broken nails and bruised hands and all, I am very pleased with myself and my wee drawer set. Here are some handy tips to consider as your mouse hovers over the BUY button:

  1. Understanding flatpack instructions is a near impossibility. Sometimes, you have to discern a build path from screeds of written instructions, typically in a font size requiring more magnification than the Hubble Telescope achieves. The IKEA people had helpfully reduced the one in question to mostly large pictures. Despite this, at most stages, I was still none-the-wiser and resorted to trial and error…which rewarded me with …mostly error.
  2. Putting the wrong pieces together or the right pieces the wrong way around is a certainty, and hours disappear like clouds driven by a gale-force wind as you undo it all and start again. 
  3. It’s easy to miss something in any given step. I’m unsure that the back of my drawer set is securely attached. But it’s the back, so who cares? Twenty-four hours later, it hasn’t fallen off. I’ll take the win.
  4. Think of a number, double it, then treble it, and you might end up with an approximation of the number of hours you need to allocate to this rewarding endeavour. 
  5. If you are a quitter, don’t bother. You need a backbone of Titanium— wait, make that Tungsten—and the determination of a terrier up a drainpipe after a rat to put this sucker together. 
  6. If you have high blood pressure or a heart condition, don’t bother. 
  7. On no account, try it alone. Even if the other person is as bewildered by the entire thing as you are, you need—nay must have—moral support, or you’ll risk insanity. 
  8. Flatpacks are a new level of pain, even if you’re a legend at DIY. I’ve done a fair amount of DIY in my time—hanging shelves, painting rooms, etc.—with reasonable results. Well, apart from that one time when I nearly electrocuted myself trying to wire up a small chandelier. Even this shocking experience had nothing on yesterday’s ordeal.  
  9. If you thought you were a ‘potty mouth’ before you started, you’ll discover profanities you didn’t know you knew before you finish.
  10. The opportunity loss is immense—so many other things you could be doing instead of breaking your hands and mental equilibrium, grovelling about on the floor, perspiring and cursing the gods of convenience as your body curses your choice. 

While researching for this post, I came across the previously unknown concept of flatpack assembly services. I felt immensely vindicated because if there are flatpack alchemists who can come to your rescue and transmute the base parts to furniture gold, that means flatpacks are impossible to put together—it’s not just me. How I wish I’d known. But OMG, the irony of paying someone to do what the manufacturers have offloaded—you pay less for the convenience of buying it in bits only to pay someone to put the bits together. Is the affordability thing, therefore, a delusion? Have we been suckered?  

Unless you are a DIY Wizard or professional carpenter (why would you need a flatpack item in the first place), my best advice is to buy the made-up version, get help from someone who knows what they are doing or even bring in a paid professional, however much it hurts to do so. In my case, note to self: never buy another flatpack. 

Serendipity rewards the prepared

Published on by Frances Manwaring2 Comments

When’s the last time you thought I just had one of the best days of my life? It’s easy when we look back to overload the scales with the things we’re not proud of or might do differently. Things that have caused us distress, harm or sorrow. Missed opportunities. Resolutions that didn’t make it to the end of January. The self-pitying seduction of the might-have-been is powerful.  

Everyone around me was weary in the run-up to the holidays this year. Not unhappy, just a bit over it. By it, I mean 2023. There seemed to be a sort of collective consciousness willing the year away—a profound desire to close the door behind us on a confused, conflicted and curiously flat year and move on to the undoubted sunlit uplands[1] of 2024. 

Human psychology is an interesting beast. Nothing changes with a new year. The seasons come and go; time moves inexorably on. A year is simply a construct designed to enable us to plan, record and be productive. There’s no alchemy about it. But the transition from one to the next has a symbolic importance that’s hard to ignore. It offers a valuable ‘moment’ for reflection and re-calibration. A holiday-induced pause (for those lucky enough to have them) to take stock and re-set, sometimes even take the extreme option of reverting to factory settings. 

Ringing in the new with a resolution or two is as engrained in humans as chewing slippers is in puppies. The Babylonians were the first people recorded as celebrating each new year through a twelve-day festival, Akitu, marking the start of the spring planting season. Akitu included making resolutions to their gods, like loyalty to the king, paying debts and giving stuff they’d borrowed back to their rightful owners. You’d have to think they might also have included the usual suspects. Stop killing so many ‘fatted calves’ so they could shed a few sheckles (Babylonian kilos). Spend more quality time with the family. Read a few of those papyrus scrolls gathering dust in the study. Re-gild and polish the chariot and get back into the racing circuit. 

New Year’s resolutions have been around since Adam was a boy. While they undoubtedly are an excellent option for some, I don’t go big on them because I’m a planner and a natural goal-setter. I enjoy the reflective time over the holidays, the headspace to go deep. I also like the feeling of optimism that is triggered by a New Year, which reinforces my commitment to pushing further.

But whether you’re a resolver or not, planning and resolutions only take you so far. Sticking rigidly to the programme shuts down the random twists and turns that become our tales of the unexpected. Those thrilling, surprising convergences when a heap of seemingly unrelated stuff coalesces as if by magic and makes something incredible happen. The times when you are looking for one thing and find something else entirely along the way. Being open to the unexpected.

At the end of October, I published a professional book—Brands with Moxie: Eight Steps to A Winning Brand. I was beyond delighted as this was the culmination of two years of commitment and hard work, which, at times, felt like a black hole sucking every fibre of my being into its relentless vacuum. It certainly hoovered up all my spare time. But it finally got done, and when the first copies arrived, I felt as proud as any new parent of my creation. I then, not unpredictably, got sick—or maybe I was just exhausted—and had some enforced time to ponder life’s big questions. This episode of navel-gazing confirmed what I’d always known. I want to write. More than anything. It’s my thing. I have a lot to say. I like entertaining people. I’m an essayist at heart. But the bonus was that I realised I had most of the content for another book comprising a non-fiction collection of opinion pieces in the style of and named after this blog—Never Succumb to Beige and Other Rules for a Colourful Life. It’s opinion meets autobiography meets history in a tongue-and-cheek way. It draws heavily on my not-uncolourful life experiences. I then worked like a demented being to finish it before the end of the year. 

This somewhat accidental book triggered a sequence of serendipity that makes me smile as I write. Serendipity is, of course, the beneficial occurrences and developments that happen by chance. Or, as American crime writer Lawrence Block said, “Serendipity is when you look for something, find something else, and realise that what you’ve found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for”.  

I decided early on to go the ‘indie publisher’ route and quickly realised success with the brand book would need coalitions of the able and willing. In this mindset, I amazingly unearthed a printer I didn’t know about in my own backyard with a business division supporting indies like me. I set up a meeting to discuss my brand book, but decided to also show the person I met my Beige manuscript. Her response blew me away—she loved it and thought it had broad appeal. She was also a fountain of knowledge about book publishing. From this one contact, others have flowed. I now have an editor and a top publicist who has agreed to work with me towards an April/May launch. I’ve also found new, like-minded people prepared to swop insights and discoveries. The happy dance goes on and on. 

Although this happened quickly, it’s not as accidental as it seems. I have been writing for years, but not in a particularly joined-up way. I’ve ghosted a book on sales success, co-written a column—Sects in the City—reviewing business networking events and how to get the most out of them and clocked up several other decent notches on my writer’s headboard. But I’ve always seen writing as a ‘side hustle’. While I don’t intend to give up my day job any time soon, I’ve now got a way to elevate writing and content production to a central role in my business practice, and I have at least two other books ready to roll after Beige.

I’ve wished on many stars over the years but often struggled with the self-belief to reach up and grab one. Serendipity walks hand in hand with risk and trust. Without taking risks, you won’t grow; you don’t take risks without trust. Without either, the beautiful possibilities of the unimaginable remain in the wings, and you risk missing out on all sorts of good things. When I look back, the highlights are often the unplanned events and people that seem to have landed in my path out of the blue. Luck, you might say. Maybe. But serendipity has also been described as intention unmasked. I like that concept. This most recent demonstration of serendipity in my life is a long-standing intention finally unmasked. 

It’s also said that serendipity rewards the prepared. A bit like fortune favouring the bold. Fate is more likely to step in when you’ve already put yourself in its path. I was prepared for my brand book to be the change I wanted to see, and it’s doing everything I envisaged, particularly as the foundation for a new direction for my business. I was rewarded with so very much more.

So, I’m excited about what the New Year will bring. I’m moving forward with optimism and confidence in my plans. But I hope there will also be serendipitous twists and turns I haven’t planned for. Like the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver, I’m keeping some room in my heart for the unimaginable.

Best wishes for a 2024 journey that includes surprise, serendipity and adventure.

[1] Winston Churchill used the phrase “sunlit uplands” in his “their finest hour” speech delivered in the House of Commons on 18 June 1940, a month after he took over as Prime Minister leading an all-party coalition sketching a picture of an idealised or longed-for future time of happiness, prosperity, good fortune, etc.

So, you want to write a professional book?

Published on by Frances ManwaringLeave a comment

Every seasoned professional should have their book, right? I read that in Forbes Magazine article back in the mists of 2016. For a moment, I was tempted to give it a go, but it wasn’t the right moment, and I wasn’t very filled with get-up, let alone go at the time, so I filed the idea in my rainy-day basket and got on with my life.

Fast forward to a couple of years ago. My get-up gene was flexing its muscles, and I was ready to have a go at something new. I have always loved writing — I’m an essayist at heart — this blog has provided the perfect vehicle for a bit of wry self-expression. I’ve written a swag of other stuff over the years, some of which has been published, some not. I had one of those ‘aha moments’ in this go-getting Renaissance.If life gives you lemons, make lemonade,I thought, closely followed by I’m a writer and know a thing or two about branding, why don’t I write a book about brand development? 

By way of background, as co-owner of boutique creative agency for nearly 15 years, I’ve worked with people and organisations of every type — start-ups, small businesses, corporates, leading charities, local and national government entities, and social enterprises — to help them create and manage standout, impactful brands.

I’ve also been on the other side of the equation. At the start of my career, I worked for two dynamic start-ups that became global brands. Their trajectory instilled a deep understanding of the role of a strong brand as a springboard to success. I’ve experienced first-hand the competitive advantage standout brands bring and the value at each stage, from business planning and development, capital raising and growth, to exit.

Combining this with my writing and comms skills, I figured I had the chops to give it a go. These combined lemons would surely make a lot of lemonade. My vision was to take what I know and create a practical, hands-on resource to help people shape their brand thinking and maximise their brand’s value.

I tried the book idea out on a few clever people, including my business partner and a trusted adviser. Not only did they encourage this rush of blood to the head, but Paul (adviser) with a love of brands and a lot of experience in developing them, offered to help review and shape the content. I also identified and tested the concept with target audiences, who seemed to think this could fill a gap in the market. Game on! In a tsunami of creative energy and determination, supported by a how-hard-can-this-be approach, I started scoping the structure of this new creation.

 Seriously, you start with a proven brand development process that’s worked for people and organisations of all sorts and you re-tread that into book format. A walk in the park you’d think. Think again. In some ways it was easy because I already had a structure for the book from the steps in our process. I’ve done loads of brand workshops in my time and a lot of reading around the subject so I wasn’t starting from ground zero. Despite my initial confidence and my starting knowledge base, it was remarkably difficult to take that and make it into a book. In my agency’s branding work, we do all the heavy lifting, whereas the book had the different focus of supporting people to do it themselves.  

Although I thought I had a lot of content, when it came down to it, there wasn’t much. At least not much that was usable — I couldn’t ethically include client case studies, so I had to find relevant examples that fit the narrative through the book. Luckily, I was able to draw on my experiences with branding the start-ups I’ve co-founded as examples and my varied career has kicked up a wealth of anecdotes and insights. Creating meaningful exercises that would push people’s thinking was a whole new world of pain, although once I got into my stride, I enjoyed compiling them.

Even for someone who enjoys writing, this was a beast. I struggled big time with the opening and rewrote that entirely many times. Paul was a rock throughout, reviewing each chapter as we went along — his feedback was on the money every time and kept me putting one word in front of another. I had some other very useful feedback from a couple of other people who offered to be ‘tame readers’.

Two years on, what can I say? It was hard. There were days when I viscerally understood the old maxim: the only way out is through. I bled time. Thinking about it, sometimes I just bled. I stalled a couple of times when I realised the latest rewrite didn’t cut it. But I come from a long line of brace-up and get on with it types, so I braced-up, got on with it, and the result is Brands with Moxie: Eight Steps to a Winning Brand. I was and still am thrilled to have finished the writing — it was one of the biggest challenges of my life, but in terms of my own standards, I nailed it.

 Writing it, of course, wasn’t the end of the story. It needed to be professionally proof read, designed and laid out. How convenient to have a creative team in my orbit! Even so, we had to find a creative direction for the design and overall look and feel of the book. Ultimately we went with a complex option which included a hand-painted illustration style. Nothing like making a rod for your own creative back.

Then there were other BIG decisions to be made. The first — and it was a doozie — was whether to go it alone or try and find a publisher. I did a lot of research into the pros and cons of each. Getting a name publisher to take you on has its appeal in terms of third-party endorsement and overall credibility. Publishers take many practical issues away but also take away a fair amount of control and earning potential. Many publishers also expect the authors they take on to have an ‘author platform’ — i.e. a ready-made, online following to boost the marketing.

These days, ‘Going Indie’ doesn’t have the stigma it used to — many leading authors self-publish, and no one is shrieking ‘vanity’ at them. Self-publishing on Amazon and or the other platforms is seductive. You’re instantly in the publishing business once you’ve got a complete manuscript in the proper format. The downside is that all the promotion and marketing is on you. Theoretically, you do better financially from any sales, but it’s not a level playing field.

Ultimately, what tipped me into the Indie camp was time. I don’t have much of it at this stage in my career, and waiting a further, possibly three years or more, after the two I’ve already sunk into writing and production, just seemed ludicrous in these days of convenience and instant everything—that’s if you even get accepted at all. It seems so random and a game with rules known only to insiders. So, Indie it was.

That decision made, I had to consider which platform to go with. I decided to launch on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, which is still the biggest and then add others once I’d got the hang of it. Next, what format was going to work best? Kindle only? Kindle and paperback? Hardback as well? Coming out of a creative studio, the book needed to be visually exciting, so a paperback version was a ‘must have’. I also opted for a simpler Kindle version. It’s ended up at 280-pages, so I ruled out a hardback version as it would have been too big and too expensive. Kindle and paperback are quite different propositions, which meant creating the book in two formats because the designerly paperback wouldn’t work in the Kindle world of ePub and the need to be responsive to different reading devices — each one needed discrete sets of skills to produce.

Then how would I sell it? Another curve ball and another war chest to find. I got help and took on experts to set up the launch campaign on Google and social media because these aren’t my bag.

Even with help, a lot of the publicity and promotional activities are on me. Shameless self-promotion doesn’t come naturally to everyone. I’m no exception. The brace-up conditioning I mentioned earlier walked hand in hand with the self-deprecating British thing. But for the Indie Publisher, it’s just part of the deal and I accepted that I would have to move out of my comfort zone and into this competitive arena to succeed. It’s also another time sink hole. 

What else? Well, for anyone who believes they have a book in them, here are my outtakes.

1.     If you know your stuff, you can write a book. Even if you don’t think you have anything special to say, you likely know more than you think, and your thinking and insights are different to anyone else’s.

2.     Although challenging, writing a book is a great way of reinforcing what you know and building confidence and self-belief. If you’ve ever suffered from Imposter Syndrome — I certainly have on occasion — it’s a great antidote.

3.     The first draft of anything is generally sh1t … so are the next xxxx … but digging deep gets results, and the satisfaction from finally landing it is immense.

4.     The ability to ‘slash and burn’ will become a top skill worthy of inclusion in your CV.

5.     However long you estimate it will take, quadruple it, then quadruple it again and don’t expect to have a life as your new obsession takes it over.

6.     It’s like living through a lengthy illness — you don’t realise how sick you are until you’re not, and it’s done.

7.     Procrastination doesn’t qualify as writer’s block. I dedicated a two-hour block early each morning and great chunks of my weekends to keeping my book moving. That worked for me because I’ve long been an early bird, and I could get stuck in before my colleagues arrived, and the business day took over my headspace. It really is a question of JFDI, baby!

8.     Loading a fancy paperback book into the Kindle Direct Publishing portal might make you lose the will to live. We’re experts at producing high-quality print publications, and it took us about six stressful attempts over a week to crack it.

9.     You need a great team around you and understanding friends and relation. Without expert help it would be a la big mountain to climb and I am eternally in debt to my team of understanding cheer leaders who offered unconditional support no matter what.

10.  When your new ‘baby’ is finally born — the Amazon stork delivered mine yesterday — all the stresses and sacrifice melt in a surge of love and awe at the achievement. My colleague Katie Williams , who created the gorgeous design, and I were the proudest parents on the block, I can tell you. 

Seriously, it was an amazing voyage of discovery, growth, and affirmation and I’m so glad I stuck with it. It’s opened fresh thinking and reinforced the best of the old. If that weren’t enough, according to the Forbes article I referenced at the beginning, having a book makes you more cool at cocktail parties. That, of course, makes all the difference. 

A Halloween Dinner to Dye For

Published on by Frances ManwaringLeave a comment

A chilling scream rang out. The guests, already spooked after the reading, looked at each other horrified in the darkened room, lit only by a Hellish red glow as a fiendish fog crept slowly along the hall. 

I have always loved the concept of Halloween. I love it almost as much as I despise what it’s become, so I sort of span both sides of the argument. I think devoting all of October to peddling tacky Halloween merch is an obscenity. I see today that even Google has succumbed with little animated ghosts floating up my screen when I hit the search bar. Very cute. 

And the shops? Maybe if the Rider of the Apocalypse could do a circuit of each high street, it might cool the shopping frenzy. Then again, it might fuel it further, as people would think the Riders just another prop instead of the ultimate omen of death and destruction.

A visiting alien might be forgiven for thinking that Halloween is a craft way for retailers to fleece the gullible public. Tacky or fun, to me, it opens boundless imaginative creativity. I find the concept of ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night horrifyingly mesmeric.

Halloween (Hallowe’en) or All Hallows Eve was initially celebrated on the Eve of the Western Christian feast of All Saints’ Day. It began with the observance of All Hallowtide, the time in the Church year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints, martyrs, and all the faithful departed. It’s still an important occasion for the Christian Church. 

It’s not hard to make the leap from a night remembering the dead to ‘guising’, which is how we celebrated Halloween in Scotland, where I grew up. Guising is dressing up as magical or frightening creatures or characters from a story, waiting till dark and lighting up your pumpkin lantern, and hitting the trail of neighbouring houses to fill your bag with sweets or money as a reward for the dress-ups. Thinking about it, we didn’t have pumpkin lanterns; we had to make do with turnips, but they were just as convincingly scary. 

We didn’t know about ‘trick or treating’, and there was no Halloween merch to be had, so we made, or rather my mother made, costumes for my sister and me. We were lucky because Mum was a fantastic dressmaker and created some stand-out costumes. One year, I was radiant as Marie-Antoinette, dressed as a shepherdess complete with powdered wig and crook. My mother wasn’t sufficiently gruesome to provide a bleeding, detached head, but I’m sure people got the idea. We revelled (literally) in the whole thing.

Lit by our creepy turnip lantern, all costumed up, we’d creep out into the pitch-black Highland night on our way to what adventure and riches—or at least a handful of Quality Street chocolates—scaring ourselves witless by telling ghost stories between house visits.

Where we got from there to today’s almighty homage to the God of Landfill, only perhaps only their nemesis in the fiery realm can say. In any case, it got me thinking about memorable Halloween’s past. One stood out from my London days when I was a rebounding divorcee in my early thirties enjoying the party scene. I decided to host an intimate Halloween dinner party for eight. I then got into it with the gusto of Mephistopheles in search of souls to barter. I figured I’d share my blueprint. 

While it was a small gathering, I saw a total immersion experience from the initial invite to the menu to what they saw when they came through my front door to an after-dinner spooky story session. With help from my designer sister, a sufficiently macabre invite materialised—people were invited to A Dinner to Dye For—in a demoniac script in dripping blood. I offered a prize for the best costume to get people focused. 

Creating a menu that rose diabolically to the occasion was fun. I decided on three courses, but they all needed to be reasonably simple and preferably dishes I could prepare in advance as I had a lot of other alchemy to work on the night. But they also needed to have creep quotient. Here’s where I landed:

Starter:   Devils on Horseback (what else?)

Main:     Bat out of Hell Pie 

Dessert: Mordor Mess

To add hellaciousness to the Devils on Horseback—baked prunes or dates wrapped in bacon— they sat on an inferno of chopped red chillies. As an aside, the first mention of the dish was in an American magazine, The Country Gentleman, in 1885. They were called devils because they were served devilishly hot. 

Bat out of Hell Pie gave meaning to the invite as it literally was to dye for. I turned the potato topping fiery red with cochineal and picked out a bat on top using sliced black olives. Adding cayenne pepper brought additional fire and brimstone to the dish, achieving the desired hot as Hades temperature.

I based the Mordor Mess on the better-known Eaton one. More cochineal here, turning the cream as black as the vacuum in the Nazgûl king’s eyes (or as close as I could get). The accompanying summer fruits (frozen given the time of year) needed no help, and I used edible food paint to transform the (bought) meringues from cream to flame red and orange.

The whole ungodly shebang could be prepared and assembled in advance. The mess was cold, and the first two courses were ready to be reheated in the oven. So far, so good.  

Next, for spooktacular staging. I was living in a beautiful Victorian ground-floor flat at the time. The main rooms led off the front section of the hallway, which had a slight dog-leg and two steps down to the dining room and galley kitchen to its rear. It was a perfect setting for an amateur to ‘stage’ because guests could see the dining room from the front door. 

Mood music as people arrived— there was no choice here. It had to be Saint Saen’s spectacular, Dans Macabre, on a taped loop (no smart devices in those days as it’s only about seven minutes in length. My ghostly, ghoulish, and horrific props included the usual suspects—red light bulbs in every light fitting, a massive sprayed-on cobweb with a beastly black spider at the centre covering the dining room door frame. 

The piece de resistance was intended to be deploying dry ice (solid carbon dioxide)—the stuff used in theatres to create an effect of low-lying fog- and I imagined fogging up my hallway to add to the sinister impression. Epic fail! With no Internet or time for research, I had no earthly idea how to use the damned stuff, no one to ask. I bought it from some medical supplies shop, and they weren’t exactly up on the theatrical potential of their product. Of course, professionals use a machine. All I knew was that you added water to achieve the fog but couldn’t figure out how to disperse it. I tried using a blow heater, but that only made the fog rise and ruined the vibe.

Running out of time, I gave up on that idea and just put blocks of the dry ice and quickly improvised ‘cauldrons’ …double, double toil and trouble…on a plinth at the dog leg in the hallway and on the mantelpiece in the dining room. The one in the dining room had evil-looking snakes spilling over the sides. When I added water, the fog rolled out over the edges of the ice bucket and cascaded to the floor. It looked incredible, but you had to keep adding water to maintain the effect. My guests were happy to oblige with this because it was so cool.

At one point, some of the ice landed in the kitchen sink, and someone had the wit to make a tray of faux-foaming cocktails at one point. Throughout the evening, finding innovative ways of using the ice became something of a competition. It was wicked fun! Of course, there was a pumpkin lantern as the table centrepiece—a pity it didn’t occurred to us to insert a block of dry ice

Everyone’s got a ghost story, right? So, the main after-dinner event was to get the guests to share theirs and di, they are ever. We heard about close encounters of the spectral kind, apparitions, photos that captured mysterious figures and other tales of the scarily unexpected. 

The final part of the entertainment leading up to the Witching Hour was reading The Horla, French writer Guy de Maupassant’s 1987 very dark story about a supernatural presence that torments the protagonist. In the form of a journal, the narrator, an upper-class, unmarried bourgeois man, conveys his troubled thoughts and feelings of anguish. This anguish occurs for four days after he sees a “superb three-mast” Brazilian ship and impulsively waves to it, unconsciously inviting the supernatural being aboard the boat to haunt his home. It gets creepier and creepier, but I won’t do a spoiler alert and just leave the rest to your imagination.[1]

I split the journal entries between the guests so everyone read parts in rotation. I’d timed it so that the telling would end just before midnight. Almost as soon as we’d finished, a piercing scream rang out, which tailed off into a ghostly wail. My guest nearly jumped out of their seats. I’d taped the scream at the end of a cassette and set it to play before we started the read. It was the perfect end to the dinner, although we went on for some time after that. 

The final thing was a secret ballot for best costume; my friend B won it. B’s costume was a masterpiece of macabre. He transformed himself into Charon the Ferryman, who, in Greek mythology, carried the souls of the dead across the rivers Styx and Acheron to the underworld, which separated the world of the living and dead. He had whited out his face and used black and grey makeup to transform his eyes into shadows. A long black hooded robe and lantern on a pole completed the terrifyingly Hadean ensemble.

It truly was a Halloween dinner to dye for. It was so much fun…apart from having to find a way to remove splatters of Mordor Mess from my dining room curtains the next day. How in Hell did that happen?

Sadly we forgot to take photos, so any thanks to the following for the inspiring images:

  • Lovely Greens showing how to make incredible turnip lanterns—www. lovely greens.com
  • HGTV for an incredible and sometimes improbably number of ways to use dry ice—www.hgtv.com/lifestyle/holidays/halloween-magic-make-a-wicked-wine-cauldron

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horla