For a change of pace – short fiction

I’m sitting in an airport, it reminds me of the waiting area at Dulles where I bought the shrimp tempura waiting for my flight to Paris. My flight isn’t leaving for another two hours, and the place is crowded. “May I sit here?” a voice asks, and I look up to see a tall man with wild wavy hair, very artsy, smiling.

“Yes” I say, thinking I wish I had met him 20 to 30 years ago! He shrugs off his coat and he is obviously going to be flying first class by the looks of it, very well dressed. I wonder why he didn’t go to the VIP lounge.

He asks where I am headed, and I answer “Paris”. I wonder why I’ve gone back there in time. I guess this is what it could have been in an alternate reality, in a parallel universe. We chat and he tells me that his flight leaves soon, he’s heading to Nice. I wonder if there are direct flights, and then he says he will be stopping over in Paris.  

“Why don’t you come with me?” he says.

I can’t help it, I burst out laughing. First of all, the pick-up line, and second, I am no 30 something, and he is probably between 40 and 50.

 “Why are you laughing?” he says with a smile, and I just shake my head.

“You’re beautiful when you laugh.”

He grabs his coat; his flight is being called. As I guessed, first class boarding being called first.  He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet and hands me a business card.

“Call me sometime” he says and walks away.      

 I close my eyes wondering when my flight will be called and open them with a start. I am sitting on a bench in the park, I had been dreaming. Well, it was a nice dream I think to myself and stand up, looking around me.  I drop something and bend over, to see a business card, gold embossed, just like the one in my dream.

© Stephanie Hunt-Crowley 2021

My thoughts for this morning, for the season

What’s on my mind? Remember when we had long lists of people that were on our Christmas card list, and we spent hours selecting special cards for some and big boxes to be shared with others, all hand signed, and put in the post? Then along came the internet and we were able to send e-cards through Blue Mountain and many others. 20 years on and that is now vanishing, I think the only one left now is for Jackie – or Jacqui – Lawson cards. Now people are making their own using Bot help and post to their Facebook Friends (FBFs). I wonder how many people remember who these FBFs are, or if they ever see the greeting?

Stephanie Hunt Crowley, 23 December 2023

Tooting my own horn !

Yes, I have decided to toot my own horn!

I have been submitting posts to my blogs here on WordPress because I had something to say. I did not expect any revenue from it or rewards from any merchants, I just wrote what I felt like writing and things that I wanted to share. I had no input from anyone else, and it was never edited or proofread by anyone else. At school in England, I had a strict education from a young age, we were expected to spell things correctly and we were taught language structure and grammar. In my adult life whether I was writing for an employer or on a freelance assignment, the expectation was that any piece of work should be delivered with no spelling errors or other flaws.  If you didn’t, you lost your job, it was as simple as that.

That was my background, and it has stood me in good stead in my working life.  I have now decided to put those skills to good use and offer my services for proofreading and copy editing.  My working language is English, but I can work for anyone in any country as I work online from home. If English is not your first language, and you have drafted out what you want to say in English but want to make sure it’s written correctly, I can do that for you. If you have been using AI and need something proofread and copyedited, I can do that too.

You can contact me by e-mail at shuntcrowley@yahoo.com or via Facebook Messenger at Stephanie Hunt Crowley (no hyphen) or through my new Facebook Page: Proofreading Matters.

© Stephanie Hunt-Crowley

Has social media reached its tipping point?

Social media has now become a ubiquitous part of our personal and business lives. It all started 25 years ago with the arrival of the PC in homes and offices. The emerging method of communication started with bulletin boards, followed by e-mail groups, Facebook and YouTube. If you look at what has happened in the last 20 years,

 social media exploded into a vast conglomeration of different platforms and channels from which we can choose. There was Twitter and Linked In and channels that most people cannot name. Today new websites pop up like mushrooms on a wet night. Some are political, some are not – and some have malicious intent.

There are so many options out there now that businesses and celebrities have to hire a social media manager or support team – and some are now using Chat bots as the volume of traffic is too great. So, what makes me mention having a tipping point? I think it’s now too vast and beyond what one person can handle. I know from my own personal experience there’s only so much I can do in a day and there’s only so many platforms where I can spend time if I am going to have any other kind of life or ability to work. I know my personal limits and keep it lean, my blogs like this one, Facebook and LinkedIn. I will watch the occasional YouTube video, but I do not yet have a channel.  No Instagram or Tik Tok or any of the other possible venues. I have signed up for some e-mail newsletters, and on Facebook we have coaches and marketers offering their courses on how to earn thousands every month.

We have “best-selling” authors selling $0.99 books by the 1000, telling us how to create a funnel as a means of gaining thousands of followers, hoping that eventually a few of them could become clients or customers. In the meantime, we are swamped, we have no idea who is qualified to write these “best-selling” books, we have no idea if they have ever worked at what they are offering. They may simply have taken a course on how to create a course that they can sell. When bubbles get too big, they tend to burst, the housing bubbles are an example. My question is – when will we reach the tipping point, will the social media bubble burst and implode at some point in the future? Could this be today, tomorrow, next year – or 50 years from now? I don’t know. What do you think?

©  Stephanie Hunt-Crowley, October 2023.

Reminiscing – the way it is, and the way they were

I was reminiscing and thinking back to how it was, once upon a time.. Long ago, in the 18th century and then the 19^th and the early 20th century, musicians, poets and painters and writers that we now revere congregated in social groups.  We read of how they all met in a cafe in Paris, or a restaurant in London, and how they associated with and supported each other. None of that happens today. We may know faceless people over the Internet, but do we ever get to know them? Do we ever get to meet them?  Today we may never speak to them, even using a telephone or any other medium for voice transmission. I doubt many people do.  I certainly don’t. Do any of us have a circle of friends that we can meet to sit down over an early breakfast with a coffee and a croissant, or to while away the evening with a long and slow dinner? No, we have social media and know about as little of each as we do the mail lady – and she probably knows more about us!

 I was pondering how many of those famous people of the past would have become famous had it not been for the friendship and support of their peers, or would they have been starving artists in a garret, or unknown authors whose manuscripts were found after their death? I think that is a very great possibility. How many artistic masterpieces have we never seen because the artist was never able to promote them, and how many wonderful books have we never seen? I have two delightful hand drawn cartoon story books for children that were given to my father during WWII that he wanted to see published, but that never happened – I have been unable to trace any family members and had no idea if he were dead or alive after the war. They were in my father’s desk after he died and came to me.

Today there are dozens of groups on Facebook and other sites, and I have joined a few, but none of them are small enough to be truly social. That is no longer desired, success is to be gained by having thousands of unknown followers. Some provide excellent advice but many of those groups are only there to promote the creator’s business, and not to encourage a group of friends.

I have been visualizing those famed artists and creators of the past and how those breakfasts at dawn, or dinners at dusk must have been enveloped in the energies of those days. The closest we will ever come is when someone makes a movie of it.

© Stephanie Hunt Crowley September 4, 2023

FREELANCING POST-COVID

When I first started freelancing it meant working for yourself and not for any company or organization.  It wasn’t a category in itself within the profession of writing, but things have changed a lot since then. One of the first things I noticed when I went back to work was that people would ask me, “You’re a writer. What kind of writing do you do?” There was a time that when you were a writer you would do many things, for different people and different types of businesses. Now you are expected to have specialized. I had interviewed people for magazine articles, I had visited businesses for  promotional articles in a magazine, and I had worked on marketing plans for clients of a financial consultant. In between I did whatever came my way, but always working directly with the client and not through an agency. Today the “freelance” market is dominated by content marketing and by the agencies which provide freelancers who will do the work.

COVID has been the other major influence. When I first joined Linked In a few years ago, it was all about making connections, and one assumed that meant people connecting with people. When I moved from the US to France I lost my old LI account which was tied to a defunct e-mail address, so I created a new one just before the emergence of COVID Since then I have been able to watch the changes. More and more people started working from home, many of whom preferred it that way.  Businesses discovered that new employees did not need to live close to their place of business, if they had the required skills, they could work remotely. Agencies were happy to supply the market.

The ”job boards” have also evolved. When I first started checking them out, they were pretty soul destroying, which was why I rejoined LI. Too many 3^rd world companies offering pay scales that were in single digits per hour, and businesses looking for the lowest price per word or per hour. Now that the boards have people offering their services using AI, they can afford to offer insanely fast turnarounds for pennies on the dollar.

So where does that leave those of us who want to contact our potential clients directly, know who they are, and work with them and not through an anonymous Hiring Manager at a large agency?

© Stephanie Hunt-Crowley

Age boxes!

I have hated “age boxes” since I first read magazines where women were categorised as to what they should wear, how their hair should be cut, what kind of make-up they should use in their 20s, 30s, 40s etc. I hated it then and I hate it now. It was as if they had to throw out all their make-up and clothes at 1 minute to midnight on the last day of their decade birthday.

I also detest the name given to the UK retirement pension …. “Old age pensioner” spoken with a quavering voice as the poor old dear shuffles around. When I was growing up people were written off as “old” at 60 or 65 and were depicted in cartoons in stock images. Bent over old women with coats down to their ankles. I have always hated and refused to buy birthday cards with negative wording about getting older with cartoons about Gramps with his teeth in a jar …..

I have declined to share my birth date with anyone other than my astrologer. When people used to ask me my reply was “Even my Mother doesn’t know – she lies too!” Though her method was to add and subtract the years as the need arose. When I was young, she was younger, shaving off 4 or 5 years. Later in life she was older and played the poor aging widow.

Why does age have to matter? I have a friend, she is 52, and has been trying for 2 years to find employment, a well qualified office employee. Sadly women over 50 are side-lined even though they could be the most reliable.

Why did America adopt the British habit of listing a person’s age after their name in any news story?

“A truck skidded on the highway north of Fudgepitt early this morning and lost its load of cabbages. The driver, Joe Farmer (23) was waiting for assistance when a car driven by Mrs Ina Rush (56) crashed into 6 crates of cabbages”.

Why?

© Stephanie Hunt Crowley

Communicator or Separator?

Facebook was created in a dorm room as a way for their creators to meet and befriend others – but from the great communicator, the platform has become the great separator.

I say this from personal experience. In the early days of adoption, a “Facebook friend” was someone you knew already. Then it grew and spread to people who might be interested in the same interests as you, or your business. As time moved on and the number of your friends increased, you probably held on to your old habits for a time and kept their contact information in a telephone and address book or diary.

Fast forward to the 21^st century – and you probably forgot!  You probably have no idea where most of your friends live or how to contact them if the internet goes down! This happened to me recently. I had no way to contact most of my friends! They were just names online, whether they lived in the next town or another country. I now have to go out and buy another address book – just for Facebook!

© Stephanie Hunt-Crowley July 1, 2023

Ageism in the workplace – and everywhere – needs to go!

This morning I read a post on Linked in about Ageism in the workplace, referring to the generation of mature women. This was my response,

You do not have to belong to any specific “generation” for this to apply. I have hated what I called being put in boxes from the time I was in my 20s. You were told that at 20 years 11 months and 29 days you had to replace all your clothes and cut your hair to match the correct style for your 30s. The same was said for all those reaching their next decade birthday. Way beyond fashion, ageism has been rampant in the employment field for decades. Worse, the idea of age being an inevitable decline has been reinforced by every cartoon, birthday card and assumption by society in general. ALL of that needs to change, for every living generation.

Stephanie Hunt-Crowley

Content! I am not content, and yes, that is a pun.

CONTENT!  

That is what I want to talk about. Everything these days is all about “content”. A blog is no longer a blog the way it was ten, fifteen or twenty years ago, that was when writers had things to say, information to provide, opinions to give. It required and meant good writing by good writers, or nobody would follow them. Blogs could be found on more than one blogging site, they were self-published and were a category of their own. Today a blog is for marketing a product or service. It could be a technology company or someone selling crafts or baked goods from their home, but what they have to do these days is to provide “content”.

The writer must create paragraphs of no more, but possibly less, of word salad that will connect one picture or headline to the next and the one after. It doesn’t really matter what those words say, but they must connect two important things – headlines and clickable links.

I read a week or two ago that statistics have shown that most people do not read the text,  76% of them read the headline and nothing more. Now content writers are required to fill those spaces with SEO optimised content as fast as they can, and at lower cost where possible. With the arrival of Ais, that pushes the limits even further.

I live in France but read the overnight news from the US with my coffee. I usually start off with the MSN aggregator, but I could also go over to Yahoo News. The thing that really dismays me is to see so much bad writing on sites that provide “content” where you cannot tell whether it’s done by human or AI, verbiage that is puffed up, bloated, and tells you very little. I have been looking at news stories, clicked the headline and when it comes to the story there are no details on what the headline was about. If you are connected to a slideshow the accompanying text is so puffed up that all 20 images could have been described in a single paragraph.

I was a writer before content was even a named concept, let alone the primary purpose. That was when writing had to be clear and concise and with no additional, useless wording, but today it seems that it no longer matters. Content writing is now in high demand but the very idea, to me, is depressing, and I just can’t do it.

Now are you going to ask what I think of turning this all over to an AI ?

© Stephanie Hunt-Crowley, January 30, 2023