Irene WignallIronic isn’t it?
I know April is not a time we particularly think about Christmas, but last year I decided to turn my attempts at writing into a business that could be a retirement plan for me.
Very grown up, thinking of retirement plans, especially as I still can’t budget from month to month. I do have at least another nine years of police work still to finish so that gives me plenty of time to make my many, many mistakes.
I have just finished book two, ‘Look for the effin Rainbows- A Self-Help guide- Not Really‘, I know, rolls off the tongue doesn’t it? And to be honest I can’t think of much else to write about. You see my writing is all about my life and I have had some very turbulent times and some great times. In all honesty I’m happy with just plodding along for the remainder. But plodding doesn’t give me much writing material.
Book one ‘Look for the effin Rainbows‘ was about my life from aged one to forty-four and book two is about last year and considering jack shit happened last year I’m still amazed I managed to write a book about it.
Book three ‘Look for the effin Rainbows- How I booked myself into Rehab’, could be a potential title. All about when the Stinks are teenagers or when I hit menopause (I’m already peri menopausal now) or about a husband who climbs up the corporate ladder for us to never, ever, ever see him again….(that might be the peri menopause coming out there) and I wouldn’t ever rule out any of that, but right now I would just love a stress free life.
So I’ve decided to park ‘Look for the effin rainbows- How I booked myself into Rehab’ for now and go down the route of creating planners.
Now I love a good planner. I start off with the greatest intentions, my neatest handwriting, my multi coloured highlighters colour coding everything and my ‘you got this girl’ stickers. But generally, come September I can’t read my own writing, my colour coding looks like a unicorn has been sick on the page and rather than a ‘You got this girl’ sticker, there is half a biscuit stuck between September and October, which invariably I will eat as I’m a chubby arse and even an old biscuit wouldn’t deter me.
However, I didn’t want to go down the route of fluffy and flowery planners, there’s hundreds of those out there. I’ve probably bought most of them. I wanted something in keeping with who I am, that is, a mum of two Stinks in my forties, trying to keep my shit together.
Generally I have a million and one ideas in my head, it’s just the execution part that I struggle with. One of the reasons for this is having zero amount of patience to follow anything through and when things become too hard to do, shelving it for a couple of days/ months/ years.
I started easy with my ‘Write it down and throw that shit away’ notepad and a packet of four postcards that make me smile, so I’m hoping would do the same for you. Check me out being all creative, I was on a roll.
As this is my retirement plan I needed to up my game and create the planners. I set to and researched.
I know this must be due to algorithms but Facebook started to show me course after course on how to create planners- I don’t know how algorithms work, I can hardly pronounce the word, but Facebook knew I wanted to create planners, how clever!
The courses claimed to help me create my planner that I would inevitably earn a six figure sum. ‘Six figure sum? Wow. This is a phrase I see so often on social media at the minute. ‘Join this group and you could earn a six figure sum in twenty minutes’, ‘Sign up to this course and that six figure sum will be in your bank account by the close of business’.
Call me sceptical but really? If it was that easy, why wasn’t everyone doing it? The course’s only cost £1000, surely clever investors would be all over this? They never stipulated what this six figure sum was though, was it actually £1000.01? I know I’m no business mogul… yet, but even I know that one pence profit isn’t that great.
As I didn’t have the small amount of £1000 to invest I had to go down the ‘do it yourself’ route. I’ve got YouTube surely that’s all I’ll need.
I downloaded an app. How hard could it possibly be, putting some lines on a page, a bit of wording and a couple of tick boxes? Effin hard that’s how hard it could be!
I set my stall out, a brew, my post it notes with my ideas on them and a laptop. My hair started off down, midway through I had to tie it up due to the sweat trickling down my neck. My e-cigarette had been sucked within an inch of its life and if I hadn’t openly come out to the world the fact I was now tee total I would have been glugging down a gin and tonic, if not the whole bottle.
The more stressed I got the faster my fingers worked. Like when you’re lost in your car and you drive faster and faster. My fingers were on fire, I was deleting boxes by accident like a trigger happy Woody in Toy Story. Why did I think this was a good idea? I have a pension; do I even need a retirement plan? My husband (even though I didn’t see him often I think I could recognise him) will have an even better pension, but still I continued.
I had to step away from the laptop on numerous occasions before I threw it at the wall. I had had a cover designed. I couldn’t even convert that to a PDF. I’ve only just learnt how to use Microsoft Word for God’s sake.
Originally planned I had planned, that because it wouldn’t take long to create I wouldn’t charge much for the planner, but due to the fact it’s probably shaved five years of my life expectancy trying to create a box on the same line as some words, I might revise that.
So as I have ‘sold’ it to you that well, come September when you are finding that old biscuit in between the pages of your current planner, stop and think ‘I need a Christmas planner’ and check out mine, and when you gasp at the price remember, it have taken five years off me.
Coming soon to my collection of planners is my ‘How to keep your shit together whilst creating your how to keep you shit together planner’ planner.
