If you’ve never looked at my business page, House of York, I don’t blame you. It’s full of things I am working on and used to work on and plan to work on someday.
Too much, some say. Yet that’s only a fraction of what I’m actually doing.
I complain endlessly about being tired, but when friends tell me to “do less!” my response is “where is the fun in that????”
Yet, ironically, that same impulse stalls me out. I get caught up in the “shoulds” of what I’m doing, which for indie authors and freelancers like me is an endless list of marketing, branding, networking, advertising, and building the business.
That part? Not so much fun.
Which leads, like all roads, back here to the Scriptorium.
Originally a place for me to mess around and just write stuff already it fell into the crevices of “does it fit the BRAND?” and “is it MARKETABLE?” which to be perfectly fucking honest was never what was on the agenda when I started it.
I have plenty of other projects that need that energy, including Serial Nation, my fiction at Bibliotheca and Cooper West, developing the Keely App, and my new sooper seekrit cozy mystery pen name. Should I even mention my foray into my hobby of hyperlocal photography? Probably not.
But writing? I just enjoy it. I love exploring ideas and sharing my progress reports and talking to myself about a lot of different topics.
In short: me no niche good.
But then I watched Jim Kroft’s (The Creative Life) latest YT essay about substack (self-referential FTW!) and he gave me a paradigm shift regarding the concepts of niche and brand. You can find it here but in short:
niche = lens (the perspective you have about a topic)
brand = vibe (the “voice” you bring to your work)
The way this pulls back from sales-talk and into the writerly, creative vision I have for my life really resonated and, honestly, is why I’m writing this post.
I live in the “in between” of thinking and doing, always playing with ideas no matter their provenience. That’s the fun part and what I have been leaving behind when I think about updating YouTube or this blog, haunted by questions like “is it on brand?”
My brand is my vibe, and my vibe is always vibrating with ideas and to-do lists and experiments and fiction and fanfiction and the history of text technology and productivity hacks and…
Time to stop overthinking it and enjoy the process, no matter where it leads.