Hello!

Today, I actually went into work and spent the day working with my colleagues. It was the first ‘normal’ work day I’ve ever had in this job, having worked from home since my first day in January.

It’s about an hour to drive into work and usually I’d listen to my favourite podcast, but I’ve caught up on all the episodes and they’re on hiatus, so I needed something new for my journeys and I don’t fancy music at the moment. So I’m using my Audible free trial and I’m giving audio books a try – I redeemed my free tokens on two books that I really wanted to read and I listened to 8 chapters of ‘The Magpie Society: One For Sorrow’ today and now audio books are all I can think about.

But I can’t write a blog post about the two hours of audio book I listened to today – I can do a whole post about audiobooks when I’ve been listening for a year, but I think I’m getting a little bit overexcited.

It got me thinking though – I’ve been toying with the idea of a podcast for a while, but I’m not famous enough nor do I have enough friends to do a chatty, interview style podcast (which is my favourite kind of podcast to listen to) but audiobooks are kind of like long, fictional podcasts right? And I started fleshing out an idea that could be a short, fictional podcast and I felt so inspired.

I love storytelling. So much. I love listening to stories, reading stories, hearing people’s stories, making stories, writing my own (both in the literal sense of writing something for other’s to read and the more existential, pretentious sense that I’m writing my own history in living my life) – I love it. It’s the basis of everything I do – I studied journalism because I love telling stories and but I didn’t want to study them like I would if I’d picked English, I wanted to write them, make video stories, audio stories, tell stories with photographs. Granted, news stories aren’t my favourite stories but I got to tell them either way (my favourite one was the video about a new KFC burger, what a highlight).

Whether it’s games, TV shows, reminiscing over a drink with friends or writing a Christmas card to someone you don’t see much anymore, it’s all stories.

I was thinking about it the other day – I love performing, and I often think about what my life could look like if I’d properly devoted myself to dance, or music, or theatre, and I thought about what I spent my night’s off doing when I was teenager; I wasn’t practicing dance, I wasn’t practicing music, I was writing. Every spare moment of my childhood went to writing whether it was original fiction, fanfiction or talking to other fangirls on the internet, my priority was writing and storytelling.

So that’s my end goal – it always kind of was anyway, but I’m fired up and ready to do something about it. I do a fair bit of copywriting at work, but I’m going to flesh out this podcast idea, I’m going to find another original fiction idea that I really care about and write another book; this is what I love, telling stories and using what I love and my individual writing style to share that joy with others.

There’s a quote from Doctor Who that says; “We’re all stories in the end.”

Whether we leave behind a legend or a whisper, it’s all stories. And I’ve got a fair few to tell.

Thank you for reading,

Sophie xx