Tag: Honest Blogging

Trial and Ellie

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

I didn’t know whether to post this here, on my blog, or on my newsletter; so I’m sharing it in both places and hoping that doesn’t bug anyone. As I will cover below, I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, I’m merely trying.

Where do I begin? That is the question. And the issue is that I don’t feel ready, but I’ve come to understand that “ready” is a fallacy. We’re never ready for whatever life has to throw at us, because we can’t be. Not fully. The important thing, though, is that we try.

That’s what this post about. And, honestly, that’s what my life is about. Trying my best, f**king up, and trying again. Because I want to make the most of things. I don’t want to wake up one day at sixty or seventy or eighty years old and lament all the things I could have done if only I’d had more time, or more money, or more energy; if only more people had believed in me, or whatever other excuse/reason I’m currently hanging on to.

All we have is the moment we’re in, and the most we can give is our best. It might not be enough, and probably it isn’t, but what’s the alternative? Give up? Never find out “what if?” Screw that! Even though it’s scary, and even though I don’t fully know what I’m doing, or if I’m going to do it right, I want to try. I *need* to try. I can’t live my life thinking that some elusive tomorrow is when I’m going to give my goals my best shot.

So, in the words of Taylor Swift, this is me, trying.

Tune in tomorrow to see what that actually means in the harsh light of day.

 

Perceptions and Pivoting

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

Around this time last year, I met a friend for coffee. And I remember telling that friend about how deflated I felt. I listed off all of the things I’d applied for. All of the opportunities I’d tried to get and failed to even secure an interview for.

I’d shot for the moon but had very much not landed among the stars.

Between now and then, so many bigger life changes have happened. Mental health breakdowns, friends leaving, a death in the family. Shit to put creative setbacks in perspective.

At this point, I can’t even remember what most of last year’s setbacks even were. But I do remember how they felt, especially now, as I’m in the midst of a fresh batch of rejection emails.

It’s so easy to feel defeated. To want to give up. I have cried literal tears on more than a few occasions. But I’m still glad I applied for the things I didn’t get. That I tried.

It’s so hard to get an outside perspective on yourself, but I’ve had people tell me that I come across as successful. As thriving. My writing and art flourishing.

They see the social media posts about the acceptances. The publications. The events.

Unless you’re also trying to ‘make it’, you have no idea that for everything that falls into place, there are five things that fall flat. And even if you are also in the same boat, it’s easy to think you’re alone there, because hardly anybody talks about the shit days.

The key is to keep pivoting. When something fails, you adjust your plan and make a new attempt. Then do it again, and again, and again, and––and someday, you hope to get where you’ve been aiming for the entire time. Or maybe a new place, that’s even better. But until then, as someone told me recently, it’s so important to remember why you got started in the first place.

You pick up a paintbrush, or a pen, or a camera not for possible awards, or gallery shows, or publishing deals. You do it because you need to express yourself. Need to feel the peace that comes only when you have let that expression happen.

This is a note to my future self, to not quit.

To listen to the friends who see your success and want to cheer you on. Friends who will listen to you moan and whine and complain on coffee dates. Friends who remind you of the important things. Because they are the important things.

Crowdfunding Stats

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

If you were ever curious about how the crowdfunding thing works behind the scenes, I’m here to lift back the curtain. Purely because I think transparency is important and the taboo around money needs to die.

So, let’s dive in.

On the surface, the crowdfunding campaign for my novel raised six-hundred-and-twenty (620) pounds. What I actually got in my bank account, after fees, was £535.51.

That’s a lot of fees, you might say to yourself, and I agree. IndieGoGo (my crowdfunding platform of choice) has two different types of campaign. Why I picked them is because they offer an option to get the funds you raise, even if you don’t reach your target. I think that if you picked the more standard method, of only getting funded if you reached your full goal, has a different set of fees. So there’s pluses and minuses to both.

What is the same with both is that the minimum goal amount you can set is 500, whether that is euro, dollars, or pounds––you choose whichever is most relevant for your country.

Charges deducted from my total were a £31 platform fee, a £28.49 payment processing fee (2.9% + £0.30 fee per transaction), and a £25 bank delivery fee, which I believe varies depending what country you’re in.

If I’d had over £1,000 pledged, the site would have also held some of my funds in reserve.

As you can see from the pie chart above, the funds came from four different countries: £280 from the UK, £250 from the US, £50 from New Zealand, and £40 from Canada.

When I set the campaign up, I think the guidance notes said, on average, most people get 30% of their pledges from family and friends, but for the 23 people who backed my campaign, 22 of them were my friends. There’s just one person who’s identity is a mystery to me, though likey I do know them, too, just don’t recognise their username. (The campaign page says I had 24 backers, but one of my friends contributed twice.)

My campaign had 260 total visits, with viewers coming from Facebook primarily, via a direct link in the second instance, and thirdly from Twitter. None of my funds came from people randomly scrolling through IndieGoGo, which I believe is uncommon.

The majority of contributions to my campaign came at the beginning, trailing off towards the end, which I understand is normal. And I think that’s basically all the info. I have to share. I hope it was interesting (I know I love these kinds of breakdowns), but if you have any questions, please let me know.

Thanks again to everyone who helped make my campaign a success.

Health and Fertility Update – June 2020

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

I don’t honestly know if anyone following my blog is interested in updates about my health, but I do know that I myself find them useful to look back on. At any rate, it’s been a year since I voiced my frustrations regarding trying to get pregnant and that was the last real health-related update I shared, so I figured this post was overdue.

In terms of mental health, I have been all over the place, but with everything that’s going on in the world right now, I suspect that’s the same for most people.

I talked before about trying to lose weight, but that’s ground to a halt, partly because of lockdown but also because my local Slimming World group disbanded prior to that and my motivation went out the window when my fertility consultant moved the goalposts on me.

I had been trying to get my BMI down so that I could access fertility treatment, and the entirely arbitrary number they had originally set for me to reach was a real struggle. Then, at my last appointment, I was told that the clinic had their funding cut and so they were moving my target BMI even more out of reach. Like, impossibly out of reach for someone with PCOS and my body type. While this was an obvious blow, I got some clarification over exactly what they had planned for me in the hypothetical situation I did reach the magical number and they told me IVF, which is not something I knew before then. Continue reading →

Festive Musings

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

As I put up our Christmas tree at the start of this month, I found myself getting emotional.

In general, I’m a very emotional person and my hormones often run riot, causing me to cry at the drop of a [Santa] hat, but I wanted to talk a little about this specific instance of emotional-ness.

Christmas can be a difficult time for a lot of people, for a lot of complex – and, often, interconnected – reasons. There’s the ‘winter blues’ brought on by a lack of sunlight/vitamin D. A lot of people are overworked. There’s a lot of social pressure to buy the best gifts and go to ALL OF THE THINGS, and have mountains of time to devote to friends and family. And cooking! The list could go on, but I’ll stop it there because I’m starting to stress myself out just thinking about it. The point is, alongside all of the Christmas cheer and happier things of the season, there are also some rough parts.

As I was decorating our tree, I started to think back to the Christmases of my childhood. Which were… let’s just say, not so good. I thought about the general feeling of stress and aggravation that went along with those holidays, as well as specific unpleasant seasonal memories.

I’m not going to go into those here (saving them up for the memoir I’ll one day write! lol), but I will share this:

My brother and I had a conversation, fifteen or maybe twenty years ago, about how we’d lost the magical feel for the time of year that we used to get as very young kids. We lamented this loss to our mother, who was confused. She’d apparently never experienced the magical feeling, to begin with, so she didn’t know what we were talking about.

That makes me so sad.

But, despite the sadness of that and the gloom of remembering it, I wasn’t just sad as I fiddled with lights and tinsel; I was grateful that those days were behind me, and overwhelmed with positive feelings for the Christmases I spend with my husband now.

I might never have the elusive magical, festive feeling of a five-year-old ever again, but I have something better. I have emotional security. I have physical safety. I have love.

To anyone reading this who is struggling right now, particularly with family… I’m sorry.

I wish for you the happiness I’ve now found, and share these thoughts in the hope that they will bring, well… hope. Life can get better. If thinking of the past, or even the present, is too painful, try and imagine a future where you’re free from the things (or people) currently dragging you down. Don’t give up, and you stand a real chance of getting to that point.

I’m worried that will come across as cheesy and insincere, but I mean it. I’m writing this because it’s what I wish my younger self would have been able to read, and take solace in.

Please, dear readers, stay safe this holiday season. Don’t let the muggles get you down x

School Days

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

During the intro session to my most recent round of counselling, I was asked (amongst other things) what my experience at school had been like. Terrible, I said.

In a previous blog post, I described a little of what happened around the implosion of my time at university. Elsewhere, I made reference to not being diagnosed with things (mainly, dyslexia and a sleep disorder) until much later that also definitely had a part to play in the terribleness of way back when.

Then, most recently, I listed ‘studying’ as something I wanted to in my autumn goals.

I have not, thus far, went into any of that in any great detail or brought all of those threads together to tell the full story of my failed studies and my plan for (hopefully) successful studies going forward. Today, that’s what I want to blog about. Or definitely that first part, because I don’t want this thing to be a million words long. I’ll tell you about my academic history here, and then I’ll come back and detail my future study plan in a separate post. Sound good? Good.

Okay, so… *takes deep breath* where to begin? Being a March baby, I was always one of the younger ones in my classes, starting school at age four. As far as I can remember (which isn’t very far at all), I had one year of playschool before Primary One.

In Northern Ireland, primary school is seven years (P1-7), high/secondary school is five years (1st to 5th form), and then sixth-form (two years: lower sixth and upper sixth) can optionally be studied at that same high school or at a college or “tech.”

I did three years at one primary school before my parents decided to move me to a different one for P4-7. This was a really great move and one I’m very thankful for. As I’ve said already, I don’t remember a lot of my early childhood, but I do know that I hated that first primary school. I vaguely recall getting in trouble a few times and struggling a lot with my reading and writing. In hindsight, struggling with reading and writing was probably a big reason why I got into trouble.

I still had my issues with reading and writing in my second primary school (I had them all the way up until university, in fact), but the environment of that second school was entirely different. I stopped being yelled at by teachers for being a kid and I started to thrive. I wasn’t very well-liked by the other school kids, but I was too oblivious to actually realise it at the time.

I was ignorant. It was blissful. I look back on those four years with affection.

Then high school happened. Continue reading →

On Being Privileged

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

Life is complex and often full of contradictions. I think most people accept this on some intellectual level but, when faced with a single fact or data point, it can be all too easy to jump from it to one conclusion and then the next without stopping to ponder what alternatives might exist as part of a more nuanced story.

That’s a lot of big words to express what perhaps seems a lofty idea, so let me give you a realistic example to truly get to the heart of what I’m talking about: in my previous post, What I Make As a Writer, I broke down the facts and figures of how I’ve survived as a disabled self-employed person so far. On the one hand, I have had to manage on welfare payments. On the other hand, I talk about having lived rent-free with my parents while I got on my feet.

Receiving welfare is, in some ways, a privilege because – while necessary for basic survival – it’s not something open to everyone in need for a myriad of reasons. Compared to the people who need it but can’t access it, we’re lucky. Yet, at the same time, we’re unfortunate to need it in the first place.

Living with my parents sounds like a more clear-cut thing. Yes, my existence there was rent-free. In some ways, that gave me financial freedom. But not when you understand what a toxic, neglectful, and downright abusive environment that place was. Most weeks, I had £10 to live on. Ten pounds to call my own after I paid the minimum amount off my credit card and student overdraft. An overdraft I was privileged to get in the first place, get disadvantaged enough to need. Continue reading →

What I Make As a Writer

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

Some people are oversensitive about money. Some people will be scandalised that I’m about to break taboo in talking about it.

Some people, in my humble opinion, need to get over themselves.

I mean, yes, this stuff matters to some extent (I wouldn’t be blogging about it otherwise) but, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not half as important as we make it out to be.

It was back in May that I promised to lift the lid on my personal income but, all of the above said, I’ve actually gotten a slight case of cold feet between then and now.

Please understand that, when I criticise people for focusing on things that maybe don’t matter so much, I’m including myself in that too.

In my first post I was all like, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna be radical and awesome, breaking down barriers and laying all my sh*t bare!’ And then, having calmed down and thought about it some more, worry started to set in that people would see how little money we’re actually talking about and write me off as barely a professional.

I asked myself if I should wait until I was earning more before sharing my figures. Then I remembered that I was entirely missing my own point. I’m not making this blog post to be impressive, I’m doing it because I genuinely believe more open and honest discourse is needed and that everyone would be better off for it.

So, without further ado, here’s me putting my money where my mouth is:

I started freelancing during tax year 2013/2014 – the best part of six years ago. I’d just quit a “normal” job from hell (it was a call centre. Enough said.) and didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was enthusiastic. Foolhardy.

I was also living rent-free with my parents, which is a depressing yet important piece of contextual information.

For the first eight months, I earned nothing. Not a single penny. I call this my ‘year zero.’ Continue reading →

Soakings and Seizures: A Day in the Life

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

Oh, what a morning. Afternoon. Would some people call half-five evening? Probably.

Whatever. As far as me and my sleep disorder are concerned, it’s morning.

I woke up an hour ago in the middle of a thunderstorm. My dog stretched and toddled over to me, then keeled over in one of his seizures. I lifted and cradled him to my chest until it passed, tried calling my husband in the bed next to me.

Unresponsive. He’d, evidently, had a seizure too.

I watched him for a minute, figuring it would be a while before I could reach him. The rain was still hammering down.

I went downstairs, puppy still in hand, and got him settled in his downstairs bed with some food. Next was the super fun part. I had to go out in all of the rain to fetch the wheely bin, praying I’d find it in the alley.

Our last bin was stolen. The one before that was blown up by some kids with fireworks.

It has not been an easy month.

I went out, got soaked, but did retrieve the bin. A small win, but important.

Hands washed and feet wiped, I went back to check on Steve. He was vaguely aware of my presence. The seizure had passed and now he’s into the extreme fatigue of recovery. Another good thing.

It’s still ridiculously warm, despite all the rain. The heat makes it all worse: my health, Steve’s, and the dog’s.

On my way back downstairs again, I can see the cat has destroyed more wallpaper. Great. She’s set about stripping a whole section, no matter how many deterrents we try or alternatives we offer.

Steve and I are supposed to be getting ready to go to Slimming World but it’s clearly not going to happen. Another week missed. Another fee incurred. But maybe it’s for the best. We’re in between payments again and can’t really afford it right now.

I need to go out for milk but am already feeling the day weigh me down. I’ve felt ill for a month– no, wait. Backtrack. Clarify: I’ve felt ill all my life. This past month, maybe two, I’ve felt worse than usual.

This would have been another day for not leaving the house at all, but I must get that milk.

The funny part is, this is me taking a break. I’ve been ‘taking it easy’ for the past few days. Which means still dealing with all this, and housework – dishes, laundry, cooking – but not really writing or editing. I haven’t had the brainpower.

When people ask me how I am, I say I’m “getting there.” I don’t know what else to say. I love my work, when I can get to it, I love my husband and my pets. Our home is the loving, accepting atmosphere I’ve always craved. On the whole, I do not have a bad life.

A lot of the time, though, this life is made of days like these. I’m getting through them. This isn’t me complaining, really, about any of it. I do want people to understand, however.

I don’t live a conventional life and I’m fine with that, but sometimes I do want to open up a window and show people what it’s like.

This is it.

On Lack of Success, Taboo, & Transparency

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

This post has been brewing for a while and, in that time, some other people have touched on similar points. Linked here you will find a post by Kelly McCaughrain (which references a thread by Claire Hennessy) which talks about rejection.

Rejection is something everyone faces, but ‘creatives’ most of all. The more art you make, the more you put yourself out there, and the more you’ll experience the full spectrum of reactions, from awe to apathy to the aforementioned rejection.

Statistically speaking, the apathy and rejections will far outway acceptance and adoration. As Kelly and Claire point out, that goes for published writers just as much as those who have never been in print. It’s something you will need to make your peace with if you’re to carry on submitting.

We all have wobbles – days where we doubt ourselves and our work – but, personally, I’ve made my peace best I can. To do this, I have two things in my arsenal: regular pep talks and a philosophy:

Lack of success does not necessarily equal failure.

What I mean by this, is that for every publication and showcase and competition and whatever else, there are a finite number of winners. There are also, almost always, an infinite number of entries.

It is literally impossible for everyone to be accepted and, therefore, when your piece inevitably isn’t accepted, it means just that: it hasn’t been accepted. What it does not mean is that you and your work have been actively rejected.

Yes, that’s a semantic difference, but it makes sense to me and – most importantly – it keeps me sane.

When I don’t win the thing I’ve entered, don’t get shortlisted, or even longlisted, I am sad. Of course I am. But I know deep down it’s not the end of the world. I really recommend forging a similar attitude and/or coping mechanism for yourself, if you can. (Yes, it’s one of those horrible ‘easier said than done’ things.)

I also have a slightly more daring suggestion: be honest when you’re struggling. Talk about your lack of success. Insecurities thrive in the dark, so drag them into public kicking and screaming. We’d probably all be better for it. Continue reading →