Hey Reader!

Talking about the weather is a trope, right? Like, the most boring conversation of all time?

In college my friend Valerie and I used to make fun of our parents for bringing the weather into every conversation. 🙄 I mean, for real. Didn’t they have anything interesting to say?

My family was stuck in gray, blustery New Hampshire while we lived and learned in gorgeously sunny Colorado. They were likely angling for a chance to remind me that their weather was pretty much always worse than ours.

Her parents lived on the Florida coast ☀️ and may have been looking for bragging rights more than commiseration, but whatever the case, weather was inevitably on the conversational menu.

Now we laugh at ourselves, because we go on and on and ON about the weather.

Which just goes to show you that A) we get boring when we get old or B) your habits and interests change over time or C) the weather is more interesting than it used to be.

Or D: Context matters.

Weather inhibits me in a way it did not when I was 20 and would brave any temps or type of precipitation in the pursuit of fun.

Blizzard coming? ❄️ No problem. I’d jump in my dirt-streaked white Corolla and haul my friends to whatever party we’d heard about through the pre-internet social grapevine.

Now that I’d generally prefer to stay home, and gray skies put me into a fugue state, the meteorological reality matters more. Thus we change and have to put up with the knowledge that our future selves would look upon us with disdain. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Back when my business was helping people declutter I wrote a weekly email, of course. 😁 And there were certainly days when I thought, “What on earth could I possibly say about decluttering that I haven’t already said 10 times?”

And yet, people kept opening those emails, kept reading them, kept telling me they were helpful. 🏆

I might not have taught them anything new that week, but I was there reminding them that at some point they wanted to get rid of their clutter and I’d support them in taking a little stab at it.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, or come up with a completely novel way of communicating what you do.

It’s helpful to let people know how your way of doing it is different from how other people do it, but you don’t have to come up with some groundbreaking way of ‘positioning’ yourself.

Your message matters. Your audience wants to know how you can help. So keep telling them! 🗣️

CONSISTENCY is more important than brilliance OR novelty. I’ll die on that hill, though I hope I don’t have to.

In January I’ll be offering a thing that will help you stay consistent in your writing, whether that’s newsletters, web copy, blog posts or horror-facing screenplays. You’ll be hearing all about it in the next few weeks and it will be great. 😁

Want to be the first to know when it drops? Click here to put yourself on the interest list.

Remember: maybe your adolescent children will make fun of you for replaying your greatest hits, but your readers won’t.

And don’t worry, the kids'll get theirs. Possibly in the form of their future children reminding them that they’re old and uncool.

Yours in standing steady,

Julia

​Red Hot Chili Peppers can’t stop, won’t stop, and neither will this email. Forward it to someone who wants to keep showing up.

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