The Story of My Life

At the start of this week, I noticed a lot of people reintroducing themselves on social media, in a transparent attempt to get new people to follow them, so that this could be their year. And because it’s impossible for me to see other people doing something without feeling like I should be doing it too, here I am doing it too, for the benefit of those of you who’ve just signed up, and think all I ever do is get called up for jury duty and listen to Taylor Swift.

Well, as it happens, I don’t only do those things. I mean, I do mostly just do those exact things, but I also do things like regularly flooding my house, and touching electric fences, say. Oh, and I used to live next door to an International Man of Mystery. True story.1

You wouldn’t necessarily know any of that from my newsletter, though (although, to be fair, the electric fence thing probably does sound like the kind of thing I’d do…), which is why I’ve decided to jump aboard the ‘reintroduce yourself’ train with this post, which, in my customary style, I’ve made way too long, mostly because I never really know what people are going to find interesting, or want to know more about, and, honestly, it would be really helpful for me to know that kind of thing in order for me to become a Substack bestseller, and change my life.

In a bid to make this post very slightly shorter, however, I’ve written my life story in the form of bullet points; a decision which, in retrospect, is a bit weird, really, but I’ve done it now, so let’s just go with it. Before you get started, however, I want to just quickly give a couple of trigger warnings and caveats, because although this is Substack, a.k.a. The More Reasonable Part of the Internet, it is still the internet, which means it would be very easy for me to inadvertently annoy you even though I think I’m just telling a random anecdote about my life. As an example of this, on January 1st I posted a photo of the snow outside my village on Threads, and a man called Jim spent the rest of the day trying to convince me that I don’t live where I think I live. I really, really don’t want that kind of thing to happen here, so, first up:

a) I wish I could say this was a quick, lighthearted read, but, as with any life story, there are some Bad Things too, so I need you to be aware that this post mentions (although doesn’t go into detail on) things like pregnancy loss, plus serious illness and death. Please feel free to skip it if any of those things are likely to be triggering for you.

b) Although all of those things are mentioned in the post, I don’t want anyone to walk away with the impression that I’m trying to garner sympathy here, or claim that my experiences have been worse than anyone else’s, because they have not, and there are people starving out there, Kim. So, I’m not trying to compare myself to anyone with this post, I’m literally just listing the things that have happened to me /my family— both good and bad — that I thought some of you might find at least mildly interesting, or that have helped make me who I am. It’s not any deeper than that.

So, here we go…

My life, in a list…

* I was born in Scotland, and have lived here my entire life. Although parts of it are very beautiful, I have the misfortune to live in one of the bits that isn’t, and I also really hate the weather here, so my life’s ambition has always (literally for as long as I can remember) been to move somewhere warm, or at least dry. I have yet to achieve this, but continue to think about it at least 17x per day — more on weekends.

* I was given my first diary when I was ten years old, and I’ve been ruthlessly documenting my life ever since: first in a series of paper diaries, then via Livejournal, my blog, and my newsletter. It’s literally the only thing I know how to do. I can’t imagine experiencing something and not instantly wanting to write about it. What is that like, I wonder?

* I have a degree in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh. I know, you really wouldn’t think it, would you?

*  I decided to do English Lit purely because I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I figured that way I’d at least get to spend four years reading books while I figured it out. That worked out quite well for me, though, because now I write books for a living, so who says English Lit degrees are useless?

* My first job was in McDonalds. I lasted two weeks.

* My second job was in the Sky TV call centre, where I worked weekends while I was at university, and for a couple of years after I graduated, too, because by that point I’d already developed a shopping addiction that persists to this day, and my day job didn’t pay well enough to finance it.

* I met my husband while we were both working at the call centre. It was hate at first sight — so a real ‘enemies-to-lovers’ arc, to be sure. Someone should write a book about that.

* Terry is an extrovert; I’m a fairly extreme introvert, who also suffers from social anxiety. I genuinely have no idea how we’ve stayed together so long.

*  My first job(s) after graduating were in local journalism; I worked for two local newspapers, rising to the giddy heights of ‘chief reporter’ on the second, although, to be fair, I was also the only reporter for most of that time, so it was less impressive than it sounds.

*  I took voluntary redundancy after a couple of years of this, when the paper decided to reduce its staff and move its headquarters to Edinburgh. I’d already figured out by that point that news reporting wasn’t for me, but I still had no idea what would be for me, which kind of sucked, really.

*  I spent the next three months living with my parents while merrily spending my redundancy money on clothes, and obsessively updating my Livejournal, which was the only thing other than reading that I actually enjoyed / was good at. But, of course, no one would ever pay me to write a diary about my life, sadly <FORESHADOWING>, so, when the redundancy money ran out, I took a job in the PR department of the local council.

* I hated it.

*  Terry and I bought a house.

*  And a dog.

*  And a holiday to Las Vegas, which included a trip to the Grand Canyon, where we got engaged with a group of Japanese tourists in the background, and my dad surreptitiously filming us from a short distance away, while my mum said, “Has he done it yet, John?” on repeat. It was the 15th of December. This will be important later. 

* Two weeks later, Terry was diagnosed with end-stage kidney failure — on Boxing Day, no less. It was not a great Christmas; especially not the bit where the doctor told us that unless Terry started dialysis right away, he would die. 0/10, would not recommend.

* Terry started dialysis right away, naturally. So he did not die, as you’ve probably guessed, but he was very, very ill, and, in the space of just a fortnight, our entire future seemed to disappear. It was very, very, scary and depressing.

*  Terry was too sick to work, which meant I was now supporting us both, with sole responsibility for the mortgage, and all of our outgoings. This was like putting a toddler in charge of the government, basically, and, after a few months of it, I was signed off work due to stress. This was even more scary and depressing. BUT!

*  To pass the time on dialysis, Terry decided to learn web design. He turned out to be quite good at it.

*  The firm my mum worked for happened to be looking for a new website at the time. Terry designed them one on spec. They liked it, and paid him an amount that wasn’t huge, in the great scheme of things, but which would — if we were very, very careful — cover our bills for a good few months.

*  After thinking about it for roughly three seconds, I quit my job at the council, and we launched our own company, with Terry doing web design and me doing copywriting. I also started doing some freelance journalism, which I hated, but which was still 100x better than what I’d been doing previously. It was hard, because Terry was still very sick, but, for the first time in a long time, we started to feel a bit of hope for the future.

* Terry finally got his transplant exactly two years to the day we got engaged (December 15th, which we now call T-Day…), with the kidney being donated by his brother, John, a.k.a. Our Hero.

*  He got out of hospital on Christmas day.

*  We got married just over a year later.

* Our business was doing okay at this point, but I was bored rigid with copywriting and the freelancing I was doing, which was mostly on topics like property development, and how to prepare your car for winter.

One day, however, I somehow stumbled upon a job advert for freelance bloggers for a new blog network called Shiny Media — run by Katie Lee — which sounded interesting. By this point, I’d moved from Livejournal to WordPress, and had started my own blog, Forever Amber, plus… um, a blog I’d started for my dog. No, I’m not joking. Both blogs were just hobbies (because, seriously, who would pay to read a BLOG? Especially one purporting to be written by a DOG?), but I sent the links to Katie, and thought no more about it.

*  Bizarrely, she liked them, and offered me a job, writing for Shiny Media’s TV blog.

*  This was kind of awkward, really, because I didn’t really watch much TV at the time.

*  I took it anyway, and wrote mostly about Neighbours and Big Brother, until Katie took pity on me, and moved me to some of their fashion sites, of which there were many.

*  I LOVED this. FINALLY I had found something I actually enjoyed doing.

*  I freelanced for Shiny Media for a good couple of years, and it was here that I got to know people like Keris Fox, Diane Shipley, and Alexandra Goldstein, who — along with Katie herself — remain some of my very favourite writers to this day.

*  By now, we were firmly into the ‘golden age’ of blogging. New sites were springing up every day, and attracting huge readerships, apparently without much effort. Much to my surprise, my own blog, Forever Amber, had started to attract a steady readership, and, after a while, I decided to start a couple of others, using Terry’s web design skills, and everything I’d learned about blogging.

*  Over the next few years, I launched at least three more blogs — although it’s possible I’ve forgotten a couple — all of them focusing on topics I loved, like fashion and beauty. One in particular — The Fashion Police — really took off, and, after a while, I was able to stop freelancing and focus on my own sites; TFP (ugly fashion), ShoperWoman (shoes), Hey, Dollface! (beauty), and, of course, Forever Amber, which was still basically just my diary.

*  Again, I absolutely LOVED this, however, it wasn’t nearly as easy as most people assumed. At its height, The Fashion Police was getting almost a million hits per month, and maintaining that number required constant updates (I think we were up to about 15 posts per day at one point, and 10 on ShoeperWoman), and a team of freelance writers to help run it.

*  As much as I enjoyed all of this, after a few years I’d become seriously burned out by the constant cycle of content production, so we made the decision to sell The Fashion Police, merge Hey, Dollface (which was by far the least successful of the sites) with Forever Amber, and concentrate on it and ShoeperWoman, my shoe site.

*  By now, ShoeperWoman was doing really well; however, it was my personal blog, Forever Amber, that I really loved writing, so I worked hard on that, starting to include some fashion and beauty posts along with the more personal ones. This worked well, and, by 2015, I had signed with an agent, who was able to get me steady work in the form of sponsored posts on Forever Amber. The site was also popular enough that I was getting a huge amount of freebies — including holidays, which was completely incredible to me — and I gradually started reducing the time I was spending on ShoeperWoman in favour of building up Forever Amber, which was now focused mostly on personal style, along with my usual random stories about my life.

*  Things were going great; so much so that we were able to buy a much bigger house, in a small village not far from where my parents live. BUT…

*  At the very end of 2015 (on what was to become Max’s birthday, actually…), my mother-in-law’s ex parter was arrested and charged with child abuse. The majority of this story is not mine to tell, but suffice it to say that the months and years that followed were some of the worst of our lives, and it took a very long time for things to feel even close to ‘normal’ again.

*  Life, however, went on somehow, and in 2016, after a lifetime of declaring ourselves to be childfree (Mostly because I was absolutely terrified of pregnancy and childbirth), Terry and I decided we might quite like a baby, actually.

*  This was tricky, because not only did I think I was probably too old to get pregnant easily by this point, I was also absolutely convinced that, if I did get pregnant, it would be ectopic, and I’d die. To be fair, this had almost happened to my mum a couple of years after she had me, so it wasn’t quite as random a fear as it probably sounds. It was still, however, quite a random fear, and I was assured that the odds of it actually happening to me were pretty low <FORESHADOWING>, so we decided that I’d come off birth control and ‘just see what happened’.

* What happened was that I got pregnant almost immediately …

* … but miscarried at 6 weeks.

* I was devastated in a way that absolutely nothing could have prepared me for. But…

* … I was pregnant again within two months…

* … and this time it was, indeed, ectopic,  just as the prophecies had foretold.

* OK, there was just one prophecy, and it had come from me. But, I mean, you have to admit, that was really freaking unfair, right? 

*  Now that my literal worst fear had come to pass, I completely broke down. In addition to my ongoing anxiety, I have a crippling fear of hospitals and a full-blown phobia of having to have a general anesthetic (Yes, I know it’s weird, but that’s kind of how phobias, work, really…), and so the next few weeks, while I received methotrexate to resolve the ectopic, all the time knowing that if it didn’t work, I’d have to have surgery, were some of the worst of my life; not helped by the fact that it was now December again, as it had been both when Terry was diagnosed AND when he’d had his transplant — so this was the third Christmas season we were spending in and out of hospitals. 

* That Christmas really, really sucked, as did our anniversary on December 15th, which was, once again, spent in a hospital. Would really love for this to stop being a theme of my life, tbh.

* Once it was all over, I decided I wouldn’t be trying a third time, as the first two experiences had been horrific enough, thanks very much, and given that my body appeared to be just cycling through all of the terrible things that can happen during pregnancy, there was absolutely no chance of me sticking it out to find out what it could come up with next.

* In March 2017, our little dog, Rubin, died.

* We were, of course, devastated; more than that, though, I felt like all of the good things in my life were in the past now, and there was nothing to look forward to. It was a dark, dark time, but, because of this, we decided that maybe we should give pregnancy one last shot, after all …

* Once again, I was pregnant within two months, and this time it wasn’t ectopic. However, my anxiety about all of the bad things I knew could still happen dominated the pregnancy, and I spent most of it in a low-level (and sometimes very high-level) state of panic, which was fun for absolutely no one.

* I got to 12 weeks. We told the family, and I announced the pregnancy on my blog, even though I was still utterly convinced something terrible was about to happen.

* Two days later, Terry’s mum was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer.

* She was given six months to live; I had six more months of pregnancy to go.

* Words can’t even describe how awful this was. However, Soula was absolutely determined that she would live to meet her 7th grandchild, so she started chemo, in a bid to prolong her life.

* My pregnancy progressed. Although I was physically fine, I remained absolutely batshit terrified throughout, Soula, meanwhile, really struggled with chemo, and was constantly in and out of hospital, so much of our time was spent there too, either visiting her, or, in my case, having counseling in a bid to help me deal with my extreme anxiety.

* The counseling didn’t help me get over my fear of childbirth, so, with the support of my midwife, I requested an elective c-section, which was granted.

* We spent yet another December in and out of hospital, for both me, with my regular appointments, and for Terry’s mum, who was by now extremely frail.

* Max was born on December 29, 2017. Soula was at the hospital, along with my parents, and was one of the first people to hold him.

* A week later, she was admitted to hospice, for end-of-life care.

* She passed away three weeks later, when Max was just four weeks old. Again, there are no words.

* Terry and I both really struggled with the demands of new parenthood, which we were having to juggle with work, because, being self-employed, I had no paid maternity leave.

* Although I’d scheduled some posts for my two remaining blogs, to give myself some time off after Max was born, it very quickly became apparent that I wasn’t going to be able to continue working the way I had been before, and, in May 2018, we made the decision to sell ShoeperWoman, leaving me with just Forever Amber.

* This was fine, we told ourselves; the blog wasn’t doing quite as well as it had been (I’d lost a huge amount of followers when I announced my pregnancy; which was understandable, but still a bit of a blow, obviously…), but I would now be able to pivot from fashion blogging to parenting, and all would be well.

* All was not well.

* While some of my followers stuck around, it seemed the majority of them had been there for the fashion and beauty content which I was no longer able to produce: not only did my old clothes no longer fit me, but heels and dresses were no longer practical for my new lifestyle as a mum, and, more importantly, I didn’t really want to have to get dressed up every day just to take photos of myself.

* I lost more followers.

* Despite this, I still wasn’t terribly worried. The blog wasn’t doing as well as it had been a couple of years earlier, but it was still making enough to keep us afloat, so I told myself this was just a rough patch, and that once Max was a little older, I’d have more time for it again, and would be able to pull it out of the slump. <Spoiler alert: NO)

* Terry’s mum’s ex-partner finally appeared in court, where he was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to three years in jail (he ended up only serving 18 months of this, due to some loophole in Scottish law that means some sentences are automatically halved…). 

* With him in jail, we figured we could finally try to put the last few awful years behind us, and focus on getting our business back on track.

* Then the pandemic hit.

* Almost overnight, Terry (Who had continued to design websites throughout all of this, and had been pretty successful at it) lost most of his client base, which had mostly consisted of small businesses and start-ups. Of course, no one wanted to risk starting a new business, or investing in a website, at such an uncertain time, so we lost 80% of our income from that side of the business right away, with no way of knowing if or when we’d be able to get it back.

* I also lost a bunch of planned blog collaborations, because, again, no one wanted to risk spending money on advertising at a time when people couldn’t afford to shop.

* I continued blogging as best I could, but it was trickier than ever because we now had no help with childcare, and Max had never been the kind of child to play quietly on his own for even a few minutes. We did our best to tag-team childcare, but most of the work had to wait until Max was in bed. This, plus the fact that we weren’t ever going anywhere, made it completely impossible for me to go back to doing the outfit photos which I knew my readers had been missing ever since Max was born.

* Because Terry is a transplant recipient, he was classed as extremely vulnerable to covid, and advised to ‘shield’; which meant not leaving the house at all — not even for the daily walk that non-vulnerable people were ‘allowed’. In order for this to be effective, Max and I obviously had to shield with him, so none of us left the house for weeks — which, as well as making us all incredibly depressed, left me with very little to blog about.

* Despite this, my traffic actually increased during the first few months of the pandemic, presumably because so many people were stuck at home, and the internet was one of their only sources of entertainment. Once the restrictions started to be lifted, though, it went into decline again; at the same time, TikTok and Instagram were more popular than ever, and a lot of the bloggers I’d known for years had switched to social media instead of blogging. For the first time, I started to think that maybe the blogging ‘bubble’ really was about to burst.

*  By mid 2021, our income had dropped by so much that we were living mostly on credit cards, and it was obvious something was going to have to change. Terry had managed to regain some of the work he’d lost during the pandemic, but the blog’s traffic and earnings were in free-fall, and so was my social media following (I’d joined Instagram in 2011, but had never been particularly successful at it, and had no idea how to change that…) so I reluctantly signed up to Upwork, which is a freelance marketplace, and applied for some copywriting jobs.

* I did manage to land a few jobs, but I hated copywriting (And, to be honest, I’m not very good at it…), so I was bored rigid, and pretty despondent at the thought of being effectively right back where I started: doing a job I hated (albeit from home this time), and not even earning very much from it.

* Then, one day, while I was browsing the job listings on Upwork, I found an advert for a Victorian romance ghostwriter. I have absolutely no idea what made me decide to apply for it; I’d never written Victorian romance in my life, and the few attempts I’d made at writing fiction had all ended after the first few chapters, when I realised I was basically just writing my own life story, and that no one would want to read it. Still, though, Victorian romance sounded a lot more fun than writing about car insurance, or whatever other dull topics I’d be asked to write about as a copywriter, so I sent off an application, with a link to my blog, admitting that I had no fiction writing experience whatsoever, but was keen to give it a go.

* To my great surprise, the woman who’d posted the advert agreed to give me a (paid) trial.

*  To my even greater surprise, I aced it, and was commissioned to write a 50,000 word novella about a Victorian orphan who found love with, like a chimney sweep or something, I genuinely can’t remember. (This is probably where my ongoing obsession with the workhouse comes from, just FYI).

* Luckily for me, the plot was provided forme, so all I had to do was write the story. I found it pretty easy, and it was a lot more interesting than car insurance (Which isn’t saying much, tbf…), so, once that project was done, I started applying for more, and ended up ghostwriting around half a dozen full-length novels, including two which I wrote simultaneously, and two which – bizarrely – both featured lead characters with only one eye. 

*  Although the writing itself wasn’t too challenging, however, I soon found that the deadlines were incredibly tight, no time off was allowed, and the pay was pretty abysmal. I had to write thousands of words every week just to make any kind of money at all, and I very quickly got completely burnt out from this, and kind of resentful of the fact that I was doing all this work, but the client was the one making money from it. (Also, my hands got really sore from all the typing, and that sucked, too…)

* Why not just write and publish the books for myself, then, I thought?

* So, that’s what I did.

* While watching TV one night, I’d come up with the germ of an idea for a romance novel involving a woman who’s mistaken for someone else, and decides to just run with it, rather than ‘fessing up. I worked out a few more details, then sat down with Terry and fleshed out the rest of the plot, which I then wrote.

* The Accidental Impostor was published in August 2022, and, since then, I’ve written 6 more books — all romantic comedies, and so far all featuring characters who still have both eyes, although I might throw a one-eyed man into one soon, just for the sake of it.  (IMPORTANT: This is not to imply that there’s anything wrong with having only one eye, or that books shouldn’t be representative; it’s literally just that I got sick of having to write ‘she gazed into his eye’ and mentioning what his patch looked like all the time, and I needed a break…)

* From 2022 until about July 2024, I earned almost nothing from this.

* From the end of July until the start of October, I suddenly started making an amount of money that had me looking at houses on Rightmove, and setting the filter ‘high to low’, while smirking to myself about all the money I would soon have, and how I would spend it. I even invited some of our friends to ‘summer’ with us in our villa in the south of France, even though we do not, and probably never will have, a villa in the south of France. (Also, while drunk at a party just before Christmas, I announced that I’d be hiring the house of my dreams for December 15th this year, and hosting a fantastic party in it. This was, in fact, a lie.)

* Then the money stopped. Well, sort of.

* At the time of writing, I’m making more than I was pre-July 2024, but not nearly as much as I was in the Golden Era of July – October. This sucks. I’d mentally — and actually — already spent that money, people. FFS.

* Will things ever improve? Will I achieve my dream of one day living somewhere warm, or owning a pair of Apple Airpods Max, which, OK, has only been ‘my dream’ for a few weeks now, but which still counts? Or will I be sent to the fictional Victorian workhouse, to live out the rest of my days copywriting dull pieces of SEO content about car insurance? Well, friends, that’s what we’re about to find out. To continue the story, just enter your email address in the box below…