Announcements: The Rest of The Year

Hallo lovely Patreonites!

For those who missed the salons; I did make bullet points, and will try to recreate the content faithfully here.

• From some time in mid October (exact date TBC) I will be taking six weeks of maternity leave. To have a baby. That’s what it’s for. I mean it won’t take me six weeks to have the baby, (I hope) but I’m reliably informed that it’s an absorbing adjustment period.
• This will not affect The Gargle, as we are pre-recording special collectors’ edition episodes, and let me tell you, they are hilarious.
• It may slightly affect Tea With Alice. I am banking episodes in advance, so it won’t be the full six weeks of offness. But the process of getting those up is much more me-based (no Producer Chris to do the legwork), I can’t make guarantees about how many eps will come out in that six week period! After that it will be back to normal though.
• The Last Post is drawing to a close in October. This is partly to do with complications with our original co-producer being bought up by a bigger company with Opinions and partly because I feel like after it stopped being daily and went monthly it hasn’t been the same thing. Because I’m so proud of what I achieved with it last year, I’d rather end it than keep it around as a monthly ghost of itself, and the timing of the Big Company Causing Trouble and The Baby Arriving Soon seemed too right to ignore. I will find a way to keep D’Ancey La Guarde alive, in one form or another. Stay subscribed to The Last Post feed though, as we’ll be launching a NEW SHOW on that feed in January 2022.
• I will still do posts here during the six week hiatus, but they might be very weird and sleep deprived. I’ve never had a baby before! After that, back to “business” as “usual”.

I was weirdly nervous to make this announcement, and thinking about it in response to some of the salon questions, I think it’s because I feel so lucky to have built such an incredible audience around me. When I started out, a number of more senior people whose opinions I valued at the time told me that I had to pick one thing to be. That I should pick a thing and be that thing because to be multiple things was not marketable. Find a box and tick that box, end of story. People want to know what they’re going to get.

This is true to a certain extent, and certainly at the beginning it was hard to ‘sell’ what it is that I am and do. But I’ve always cringed at the idea of my onstage persona being a ticked box, one singular expression of an identity. Because that’s not my experience of what it’s like to be a person.

I wasn’t interested in spending my professional time inhabiting a persona that felt like a lie, so I stuck to my guns. And an audience found me. Now, with this audience (you), I can be the Alice Fraser that does The Last Post AND Savage AND Tea With Alice AND bestselling Audible Documentaries AND Silly Banjo Songs, and that’s an incredible privilege. To be messily outside the box, answering yes to all the multiple choice options.

So I think my nervousness about announcing this motherhood thing is that Motherhood is a massive identity. It’s a big box that’s full of baggage. Everyone has Ideas about what motherhood is, and I worried that by announcing it, I would have this layered selfhood overwritten in bold text in your minds. Maybe it would change the way you engage with my work.

Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. But either way, that’s my announcement!

We have a Discord Server, as well, for which the link is this:

https://discord.gg/NsgVCMMM

Head over there to talk to other good people who like good/my stuff.

I’m not sure how interested you will all be on my reflections on the process or if you’d rather I kept Musings On Parenthood part of my private life; if you want to know if I have any interesting insights do let me know in the comments here (or in DMs if you don’t want to be publicly pro or anti-baby-content).

Xx

A

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As ever, if you like any of my work, do share it around. It makes a big difference. Also, industry people do pay attention to numbers of views and followers and 5 star ratings and so on, so to those of you who make the effort to drop any of those things around the place, I’m constantly and persistently grateful. Keep getting hijacked by waves gratitude while I’m getting about my business TBH, it’s really quite the inconvenience.