Hello,
Happy 2024!
Maybe it’s because I am a millennial woman.
I came of age at the time when Girlbossing was the done thing. Everyone had to be a Girlboss. There was proof that women could have it all if they just worked hard enough and built up their own mini empire.
Everyone was becoming a content creator/influencer, especially women, and that was the way they were making a living. They were going on all these fancy trips and getting all these swanky PR packages. They were all Girlbossing. Plugging skincare and make up. Or talking about how eating courgette spiralised into pasta was the best thing in the world. Eventually a lot of them pivoted into giving terrible and maybe dangerous fitness advice because they weren’t actually qualified in anything they just kind of knew their way around the gym. People gained thousands of followers and their job was basically the internet.
So naturally I wanted a bit of that pie for myself and the key to getting a seat at the table with the pie (other than being white and middle class) was having a brand. Everything always came back to the brand. The brand being yourself.
The brand had to stand out. It needed to make sure that you were going to be seen in a sea of thousands. It had to be bold and vibrant. Loud. You had to be dedicated to it.
And so a portion of my 20s was spent trying to figure out how to brand myself. And then re-branding myself. And then doing it again and again until suddenly I found myself re-branded into a corner and I still wasn’t standing out in a crowd. I still hadn’t Girlbossed my way to the top. In fact it became abundantly clear that I had no desire to Girlboss my way anywhere.
I didn’t want to be a brand, however I could see why the branding of something was important and I’d spent so much time trying to figure out how to ‘stand out’ that I had been kind of blind to anything else.
Sometime in the last quarter of the 2023, R sent me an old video of us. In it, I was wearing a lot of orange and I joked that we have known each other for so long that she has seen me go from wearing dark colours to bright and bold colours, back to neutral/dark tones.
It was a joke, but it is also true.
For a long time people said that black couldn’t be my favourite colour because it wasn’t a real colour or some shit like that. So I settled for purple. That was my brand.
It was bold but not too bold. There are a lot of shades of purple which make it great for branding because you could have the range. I spent about a decade playing in that sandbox. Messing around with all things purple but still trying to find a way to make it pop. Make it stand out. Get me noticed. Seen by thousands.
Until some random day in November I got bored of looking at all my purple visuals. It’s not that I liked them any less, I just wasn’t excited by them anymore because I looked at them and wondered who they belonged to. So I started playing around.
I played around with neutral colours. I played around with graphics and fonts. I originally thought khaki and then remembered that khaki is not my vibe and I would probably hate looking at that more than all the purple. I looked at numerous colour palettes and eventually settled on one.
One that is all rich browns and gentle creams. Bold-ish fonts but ones that are also clean. One that looks like rich hot chocolate but has shades of a really good coffee thrown into the balance as well. One that soothes me to look at and also just feels like me. Cosy. Autumnal. Honestly, basic. Visually it probably wouldn’t stand out in a crowd but I don’t need it to. I just need the visual that is attached to my words to feel like me and I made the finishing touches to a few designs I realised that I could say that it did feel like me.
I am very aware that what I am describing is basically a ‘rebrand’ in almost all the ways. And I won’t say that you’re wrong to think that it is.
But here’s the thing, for me personally it’s a necessary evil. I want things to feel like they reflect me and I lose basically all motivation when they don’t. Also a small part of my brain is thinking about marketing for a book and I need that identity to be different to the one I exist in day to day. I need it to be a branch of me (actually more accurately, branches) but not me completely.
I always need to have somewhere that I can fall back to that feels like home. And neutrals and browns feels like that for me.
So hello, from my new-ish cosy corner of the internet that has been washed completely of purple and only sometimes includes a little bit of black, happy to have you here.
What can you expect to see from it this year? More musings about writing drafting, editing, almost anything book related and maybe some more personal musings.
Jumpin’ Jumpin’
What I’m reading - I have only been working on reading one book so far this year, it was a book that I had earmarked as my treat for finishing a first draft of The Festive Thing (which I did on December 31st) and that book is Unsteady - Peyton Corrine because it has all the components that I like in a book and I needed something to look forward to while I was in the drafting trenches. Also just started my ARC of A Cruel Twist of Fate - H.F Askwith (out 18th Jan) which I am liking so far. The set up is taking place but the set up is reeling me in and that can only be a good thing
What I’m watching - Below Deck is the current thing I am half watching because my Mum is. I’m not watching all the episodes, but the ones I am watching I get very invested in. Also been watching the Darts World Championships and The Traitors is back. In fact, a lot of shows are back, must be the start of a new year…
Title Inspiration - I know this is not a song by the Glee cast, but Glee and I aligned perfectly in life and so the Glee version is all I know (a lot of Glee versions of songs still live rent free in my head). So it’s This Is the New Year, specifically by the Glee cast (but originally by A Great Big World).
Oh these colours truly are a vibe! Cosy and warm and calming. Lovely to read your reflections on choosing them 🤎