The last couple of years have been a continuous rollercoaster – and I hate rollercoasters at the best of times!
As you’ll know if you also have a business of any size or stage, your personal and professional lives are very intertwined and very hard to separate. So when something happens in one, it impacts the other. Various somethings have been happening on both sides of that equation – and I never was very good at maths!
The last few years have held my Gran moving in with my Mum, and Mum and I taking on caring roles for her, some significant deaths, a studio move and some health stuff, including my ADHD diagnosis and more recently hitting perimenopause with a bang.
In that time we’ve also closed the subscription side of Ink Drops after 12 years, and Annastasia and I are now relaunching as a sole trader partnership and an online boutique, because we both burnt out. And my family business TEMPRD Chocolate is growing gloriously from its 2020 start, but battling insane rises in costs of vital things like cocoa. Add in the everyday madness of running my photography businesses, writing & publishing my first book, and trying to keep up with general life and it’s maybe not surprising I’ve been a bit quiet online!
In the midst of all that chaos, while still shooting regularly for clients and intermittently for myself, I lost my writing voice and my blogging mojo. I had the thoughts and ideas, but found myself completely unable to get them written down and into the world.
As 2025 marks 21 years since I first started blogging and sending emails to lovely humans like you, I was thoroughly fed up with writer’s block, and some journalling and conversations with friends led to a realisation that overwhelm was my chief enemy, and trying to write for four or five places at once meant I wrote for none of them. (I have no clue why that came as a surprise!)
So with a bit of streamlining and a bit of common sense, I am now using the Colourful Magical Weirdo brand & accounts to talk about everything and anything – and it’s been a revelation!
I’m keeping the mailing lists for both sides of my photography – brand magic over here and art / fantasy magic over at Carla Watkins Photography – and also for Ink Drops and TEMPRD, plus some upcoming exciting new things – but I’m leaning into the freedom of writing where I don’t have to remember which brand or bucket things fit into, and am on Substack more often at the moment.
I’m certain I won’t have any kind of consistent schedule, but I would love to be writing more regularly again, so am excited for the adventure!
If you’d like to follow along, you can visit my Substack, and also follow on Instagram and YouTube.
