"Use the best quality tinned tomatoes you can afford"

That's a reference to something dumb people say in recipes sometimes

I haven’t written because I don’t have any money. And I spend all my time trying to get money. Almost all I think about these days is money. That’s just how it goes with money; if you don’t have enough, it’s all there is. I live in a nice terrace house in Walthamstow and occasionally buy Mutti tomatoes when they’re on offer, so I’m not looking for you to crank up the justgiving page, I’m fine, I just think it’s interesting and worthwhile to talk about how draining on the old brainpipe financial stress can be. Because I know it’s not just me.

I’ve been professionally stressed about money for a good 2.5 years now, the entirety of my smallest child’s life. I take quite a lot of pride in my big Aldi shops and my point blank refusal to buy after-school ice creams from the horribly overpriced park cafe, but it isn’t enough for us to stop feeling uncomfortable. It feels bad sometimes because of the ways the kids are “missing out”. These are entirely tiny and stupid ways like I can’t afford to take them to the theatre or to lunch in the school holidays and I can’t afford for the little one to do “tots ballet” and we’re always the family Not On Holiday at half term. But we are here with the oil pastels and tuna sandwiches and the good garden. No one is suffering. We’re fine.

But I suppose I do wonder how it must be to live with two parents who are stressed about money. And can all the “being around” before and after school we do ever make up for the way we are always pulsating with anxiety, on our last pound and our last nerve?

I am doing copywriting for money because it’s all I know and I’m not sure where I’d find the hours or the money or the energy to train in something new, and I’m not sure what the something new would be, or how much the something new would remove me from my kids. Currently, I don’t need to be removed from them, and we have a charmed 3-7pm compared to a lot of families who are battling complicated logistics and commutes and quick cold sausage teas on the hop.

But copywriting only barely exists. Some of the work I’m doing at the moment pays 18.5p per word. When I started at the Sunday Times Travel Magazine 19 years ago, we paid 35p per word, and we used to say, sorry, we know that’s a bit low, but hopefully you can get a free holiday out of it. To find myself here at 40, working for half the fee, with two extra mouths to feed and weekly shops that can easily cost £170 (which is actually average), is stressful.

There are some full-time copywriting jobs on LinkedIn that pay £28,000 and when I think about pro-rata-ing that so that I can actually make the hours work with my life, it’s barely worth being one of the 500+ applicants.

I work all the hours I have, and then I normally work a bit once the kids are in bed. I get to the end of what feels like a massive slog of deadlines, an absolute mountain of words I have plucked from my human brain, and I can’t relax. I can’t take a minute to feel proud or like that was a job well done, because it simply doesn’t pay enough for me to stop.

At the end of last year, I spent hours and weeks and nights and days on two massive grant applications and a book proposal in an attempt to throw shit at the wall, the last shit I had in me for 2024. I didn’t get either of the grants and now I just have this book proposal. In the best case scenario, someone might want the book. They will want it for significantly less money than it will cost me to write. They need the money to give to David Walliams. What will I do then? I’m not sure. Did you know most people who write books have a secret source of income? It’s a spouse or a parent or a second job. I remember when my agent was selling my first book she would be forced to say out loud: “Laura actually writes for a living”.

I guess I am writing this down because a) until I’ve written the fog of it down I won’t be able to write anything that’s behind it and b) people need to start being honest about what they’re actually getting for their books and c) I’ve paused paid subscriptions because the gnawing feeling that I’m not writing this thing enough is not good for me.

Thanks for reading. And message me if you need a copywriter. Or a food writer. Or an editor. Or a ghostwriter. Or a proofreader. Or if you think I have any skills you could use for money. Or if you work for Mutti. Love.