January can be quite a busy month for most people. New goals, new mindsets, new plans. I have always loved January as it is my birthday month, as well as many of my friends’ birthdays. The month has already flown by! I celebrated NYE in Newcastle with a uni friend then returned to work in London. Despite being known to be a “slower month” in the industry, I managed to stay busy! I have taken a week to continue my birthday celebrations, a few days in York with my mum and a trip to Lisbon with a friend. I don’t want the fun to end!
In more exciting and relevant news, my BBC Sounds audio piece is live! It went up on 16th January and started to gain traction on Instagram on 22nd January. I am yet to post about it on my personal social channels and may not get round to that until February, so stay tuned! I have mentioned the piece before, but for anyone who doesn’t know, this is how the BBC have described it:
I have flown the family nest for the bright lights of London. I usually don’t realise I miss home until I hear the Geordie accent in an unexpected place. A park, a coffee shop, the tube. My parents are polar opposites. Mum is the life and soul of the party, usually connected to a telephone, but as for Dad… He’s a poet. Some artists appear out of the blue. My 58-year-old Scottish father deals with the passing of a friend, his wife’s endless diets and his children’s travels abroad by putting pen to paper. His spelling is awful and the rhyming can be questionable but it definitely brings a laugh to anyone that has the pleasure of hearing them!. And he uses his autobiographical poetic content to communicate with the rest of the family. Through family conversation and anecdotal comedic poems, this piece will remind you that some of the best moments can happen in the home. My Dad is a poet and he really didn’t know it. New Creatives is supported by Arts Council England and BBC Arts.
This has been about a year in the making, with my initial application to the programme occurring when I was working in Seville between January and April 2019. I am so happy with the progress I made completing the BBC New Creatives scheme, learning about how to distribute and market my own audio work. This has been difficult to carry out when applying for many different jobs and then once more after moving to London for a full-time job. I hope that this audio piece can lead to more increasingly exciting opportunities in the near future! I know my Dad would love for his work to be picked up and published! I had always suggested he make a book with all his poems, but a podcast is another fun alternative!
You can find a link to my work here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/
Best of luck to everyone’s 2020 endeavours!