I did a bad thing

Bless me father for I have sinned. I have done a bad thing that I have never, ever done before. But I don't feel guilty, I feel pretty good about it.

So what is this bad thing I have done? I have let someone who commissioned me to do some work down.

I took it on in good faith, I really intended to do it to my usual high standard. I hate letting people down and I am a very conscientious writer who never, ever misses a deadline. You can ask any editor I have ever worked for, I will always go the extra mile. Give up that weekend or evening so I can get copy in to them, or make amends to ensure that it hits the brief exactly.

In all my 20 years as a journalist, I have never said no to any changes, any crazy shifts in perspective, any mad deadlines. I pride myself on being 100% reliable.

But a couple of days ago I emailed an editor who had commissioned me and said to her that I simply didn't have the time or energy to complete the writing task I had accepted.

I admit that I do bear some guilt in this. I should have said no from the outset, but it is so ingrained in me to accept any commission, I foolishly agreed to do this piece of work. I am heartily sorry for that. I know I made her life more difficult as a result and that was never my intention.

But what makes me feel a whole lot better about my shoddy behaviour is the difference between this and any of my other commissions. I was asked to write it for free.

So when I shamefacedly emailed her to say that actually, when push comes to shove, I am going to prioritise my job that pays me and my family that loves me, over scrambling to write up copy for nothing, I didn't feel nearly as bad as I probably should have.

This little epiphany in my life comes on top of a huge response to the editor of the Huff Po stating that he is proud not to pay writers, as those who write for free do it for the love of writing rather than  shabby commercial gain.

So I take it that he is more than happy to edit this online model of moral crusading for free? I mean it would just demean his position to actually, like, get paid to do it. If he is taking a salary then how can we know that he really is choosing the best, most enlightening and unbiased writing for our delight. I am just not sure I can trust him if I feel that he is being paid to do his job.

Come to think of it, why on earth did I pay the builder who renovated my house last year. Surely he is a craftsman and by giving him money I was sullying his art? He would surely have done a much better job of the loft extension if I had refused to pay him and insisted that the exposure it would provide for him, as it jutted proudly into the sky above all my neighbours, was reward enough for his toil? What a fool I have been to dirty all the transactions I have made throughout my life with the taint of money.

Next time I am in M&S I shall insist they donate my lunch to me for free, otherwise how do I know that my tuna and sweetcorn sandwich has been made with love, instead of the base desire of the person who made it to be paid for their work. Charlatans the lot of them.

So I am not sorry for the bad thing I did, but I am truly sorry for ever having considered writing for a commercial organisation for free. I'm ashamed that I was stupid enough to play along with the idea that writers should donate their words in return for exposure. After all I know just what that is worth, I have been on the cover of the Daily Mail twice, my stories have led on their website, with its 100 million readers many times, and yet still people think I should write for them for free, so what was that exposure worth in the end? Sweet FA.

Let this be a cautionary tale to all those writers who do consider their words so worthless that they are happy to give them away in return for that most ephemeral of concepts; 'exposure'. By gifting your words you are not paving the way to some distant point where someone will have a eureka moment and realise that actually your prose is worth paying for. Instead you are slowly hacking the heart out of the business of writing, killing dead the idea that it is a skill and craft that should be rewarded. Thanks for that.

Kicking ass and other office survival skills

So it turns out that a few months as vice chair of the PTA is about as adequate preparation for survival in the modern office as playing a few rounds of Angry Birds would be for a career as a rocket scientist. The mild bickering over whether to send another chiding letter to the parents over the paucity of prizes for the tombola is child's play compared to the 'push back' required to protect yourself at work.

Indeed, even the terms used are designed to befuddle the uninitiated, for 'push back' is apparently code for telling someone to bugger off and stop trying to offload their work onto you just because you are new and naive.

Problem is years as a freelance and a mummy has left me with an ingrained fear of saying no. No matter how outlandish, unreasonable or downright insane the demand of a child/editor, woe betide the mother/writer who turned them down. In either case it could only lead to tears, in the case of the children on both sides, with editors it was probably only me.

So it became anathema to me to say no. A stupidly tight deadline? No problem. An impossible to find case study? Let me help you out. It's already 6pm and you need quote from an expert on the other side of the world by tomorrow? Please allow me to stay up until the early hours. Really it's my pleasure. You need a pink straw to go in that milk, not a blue one? Anything for a quiet life. A Tardis must be created from egg boxes and cardboard by tomorrow morning? Pass me the glue. You need the toilet NOW? Let me hold you out behind a tree to relieve yourself.

Work out for yourselves which that last one applies to - editor or child?

The thing is as both a freelance and a mum, saying yes is just so much easier.

With editors it is the only right answer, and there are no second chances if you get it wrong. After all there's always a queue of eager beaver interns who will happily botch up the job for nothing, or even more chilling, do a far better job for nothing.

With children, particularly young ones, you are dealing with power crazed despots. They are quite happy to make your life a living hell should you refuse to turn the car round the moment you reach your destination and drive back home to pick up their favourite sippy cup. Should you serve the wrong food their wrath knows no bounds and if you think you are going to go shopping then you best not deny them unfettered access to snacks or you will pay.

Adding no back into my vocabulary is proving somewhat tricky though, as I still have that reflexive yes on the tip of my tongue. So when someone approaches my desk with that chancer's glint in their eye, with an oh so casual request for me to 'Whip something up', my knee-jerk reaction is to agree instantly, rather than question them closely as to what exactly it is they need whipping up.

In general the answer is some time-consuming task that they could probably complete much more competently that this wet-behind-the-ears newbie, but that they hope I won't identify as such.

After so many years as a yes woman I am just too soft, but no more. Recently a colleague, no doubt sick of my grumbling about my workload, snapped that I needed to grow a pair. Light dawned and I realised she is quite right. It's time for this mother to toughen up and learn to kick ass again.

Maybe I will even learn to say no to the children too.

#jesuischarlie

Tonight I can't sleep. Now insomnia and I are no strangers to one another. I have wasted many a witching hour tossing and turning, reading, piecing together jigsaws with bleary eyes trained on the clock watching the hours tick by until I need to be up again. But tonight the reason for my sleeplessness is much more real than a racing mind caught up in knots over its own inability to capture the silken web of slumber.

Yesterday saw terrorists gun down a group of journalists as they held their editorial meeting and I can't help but picture the scene on and endless, horrific loop. I imagine it was the first time the team will have met after the New Year. The would shamble to seats in a cramped meeting room, coffees and notebooks in hand, exchanging the odd Bonne Annee, discussing food eaten, parties attended, nights spent slumped in front of the television rather than revelling to celebrate the arrival of 2015.

Then down to business, this was a satirical magazine, so I imagine the order of the day was which political or religious bubble would be burst by their rapier pens. Now I make no claim to have known about Charlie Hebdo before today, and after a cursory glance at its work its not a publication that would particularly appeal to me.

The cartoons are too graphic, gross and yes, offensive for my taste. But what resonates with me is the familiarity of the circumstances in which this magazine would have come to life. I spent most of my 20s working for magazines. They weren't as high profile and or as contentious as Charlie Hebdo, but I can't help but think that the environment would have been pretty similar to the one into which bullets came flying and blood was shed.

Magazines are laid back places to work, the people who work on them tend to be pretty cynical, iconaclastic - if not they would probably have got proper jobs working as accountants or management consultants. Instead they were the ones messing around at the back of the class, refusing to take what they were told at face value and poking fun at those who did. They are bright, quick witted and more than a little bit disaffected.

This was my happy home for over a decade and even after I left I continued to work as a freelance journalist so I feel a kinship that makes what happened in Paris somehow more personal and painful, more difficult to forget in favour of a good night's sleep. The idea of those slacker writers and fastidious subs being ripped to pieces by a rain of bullets from a military trained terrorist just jars my brain. The juxtaposition between these acerbic cartoonists armed only with their wit and a smart drawing pen and combat ready maniacs wielding AK-47s just doesn't make sense to me.

While I have never raised my head above the parapet to do anything remotely worthwhile with my own career I have admiration for those who have chosen to use their exposure in the press to push forward an agenda that forces us to continue to look beyond trite philosophies spoon fed to us by those in authority. It was what I meant to do, but never really had the balls to follow through on.

It is heartbreaking that anyone would want to see that way of life smashed and silenced by a rain of bullets. That the way such warped thinkers wish to repay a country whose very tolerance is the reason they and their families were able to make a life there is by trying to extinguish it.

Of course I am aware that life is not always easy for immigrants and their descendants in any society, but what I find so confusing is that rather than try to find a way to work within the country that they have made their home, they seek to destroy it and all its values. This surely makes them as guilty as the 'infidels' who they despise so much, as the very reason they hate the West is that it meddles in the affairs of countries that are really none of its business.

While I suspect logic plays no part in it, perhaps we are reaching back in to the medieval way of thinking where an eye is demanded for an eye. But even if can accept this rationale I still cannot understand why the lives of innocent journalists, who almost undoubtedly held no more respect for their political leaders who dragged them into foreign conflicts than they did for religious fanatics who opposed them. These men were not the establishment, they were anything but. They didn't reserve their scorn for one religious or political faction, everyone was fair game and this is as it should be in a country where freedom of speech and of the press is a cornerstone of its society.

I am sure that the ramblings of a half asleep woman waiting for the pills to kick in so I can get some shut eye add not an iota to the debate that will rage about the implications and causes of this atrocity, but perhaps I can find a little peace for having blurted my thoughts out onto the glowing void of the internet.

A good night to you all and may those killed in the Charlie Hebdo attack rest more peacefully than I tonight.

#jesuischarlie