A long time ago, I realised I love writing. I also love dogs.

For a long time, I was a dog behaviourist, and I wrote a lot.

I started writing on Medium. I wrote all about dogs and dog behaviour over there. It was so easy. I felt important and like my words would mean something. I wrote about snippets of my life, too.

I then wrote a book about dog behaviour.

I started a Substack. I wrote about dog behaviour here too.

In between working with hundreds of dogs in person and thousands more online, helping them with their anxious and fearful behaviours, I wrote.

Then, my life changed, and I was forced to change careers.

Grief.

I kept losing family members, which almost broke me. It was relentless.

My darling heart dog Moo and my Nan died on the same day. My dog was the reason I got into behaviour, and I helped look after my Nan, who had been my closest family member for a lifetime. This left an enormous hole in my world and ripped out my soul for a while.

Then an aunt and two uncles.

My poor Dad, who was lost to Parkinson’s and Dementia, right as he should have been retiring and enjoying his life.

(Then, more recently, I’ve also lost another uncle, who also happened to be my Godfather.)

All within four years.

Adenomyosis.

On top of that, I had adenomyosis, and the bleeding got so bad that I was scared to stand in a field or sit on a client’s sofa for fear of that dreaded gush of blood, which often made an appearance running down my thighs. (I’ve had an operation since then, which helped but has not solved the situation entirely.)

My writing became less focused and more chaotic over time, and eventually it fell by the wayside. I was embarrassed to call myself a writer. I burned out and could barely write a sentence, and even then it took me enormous willpower to bother. Eventually, I cracked and deleted everything. All of the body of work that I had built up over most of a decade was gone in a few clicks of a button. Websites full of work, blogs of thousands of carefully SEO optimised words, PDF resources, instructional videos, everything just gone.

Do I regret it? No. I needed to reset, without it all hanging around my neck like a noose, reminding me of how hard I had worked and how I had to move on.

But recently, I have missed writing. Not for work reasons. I teach ESL online and have another Substack for my Confidence-First English™️approach. Writing for work doesn’t scratch the creative itch. But for my own thoughts, journaling, and ranting about whatever got on my wick that particular day.

I will also confess to speeding up the writing process for work by using AI as an editor. My work is always my own, but work is work, and being creative is being creative, and it’s too easy to confuse the two things and burn out. So if AI helps me get my work done quickly on my work pages, and rambling incoherently helps me get my thoughts on a personal page, then I will continue to shamelessly do both concurrently.

Medium Exists.

So I half-heartedly rehashed my personal Substack, this one, back together and started spluttering the odd story onto it. But Medium exists, and I can never make up my mind which I prefer. Medium or Substack.

I put together a Medium account today.

No idea what I want to use it for. I only know that I want to write again. Being greedy, I can’t decide between the two websites, so I choose both. I could use a personal blog, but I like the community aspects of Substack and the replies on posts that come with using Medium.

What do other bloggers and writers use?

I’ve seen so many writers who use both, but why? What is the benefit of using more than one platform?

Medium.

Medium has a built-in audience. You do not need to chase readers, and you can easily read hundreds of stories about things that interest you. You can leave replies to the stories, highlight parts that you found interesting, and share to social media, etc as you see fit.

There are also monetisation options. If you pay a monthly fee, you can read paywalled stories, and if you have been a member for more than three months and have published more than six stories, then you can also easily paywall your own work.

You can pay extra for the “friends” tier, and that will mean that writers get MORE money from your read than they would from a normal member. So they flock to your profile, which will have a handy heart badge to show you are worth commenting on more often, giving you a larger audience more quickly. Or maybe that is just me being cynical?

Some writers do OK at it, but I’ve yet to hear of anyone who makes a living from Medium alone. Many use it as a vehicle to sell other products through a Gumroad store or similar platform.

Readers can also “clap” your work to show they liked it.

Sadly, the app has never worked properly on my phone, and while I can read stories, I can only reply to them while on a laptop.

Also, you do not own your email list, and should you ever be kicked off, leave, or the website disappears, your readership might well disappear with it.

Substack.

Substack is great if you enjoy the “Notes” aspect, want chat features, want to upload/create videos and blog posts, and have a page of your own that feels more like a website. Many people use it successfully as a website, and the newsletters sent to your email list are great not only for article writing but also for education and for selling to existing readers and subscribers.

Monetisation is easy, and you set your own terms on what you monetise. Want people to pay for video content but to be able to read the written part of your newsletter? Easy. Want to create a paid publication to coexist with your free one -go for it. Paid chat with exclusive access to you? Done. Set your own prices and bonuses, and do it as often as you please.

There is one reasonable payment to make if you want to use your own domain, and Substack will not charge you anything thereafter. Well, at least until you have paid subscribers, at which point it takes a small cut from your subscriptions at source. You do not pay for anything else personally.

The drawback is that you have to work your tits off to gain an audience; no matter who tells you it’s easy, I promise it is not.

Both.

Many people use both. They use Medium to grow their audience, then send them to Substack, where they can collect their email addresses, send more content, and ultimately build stronger relationships with them as either readers or clients.

None of this matters.

None of this matters a jot if you are simply writing for the sake of writing, as getting an audience would not really matter. But we all secretly hope to become the next big author, even if we do not admit it, and we all want a bit of validation from time to time. If we didn’t, we would be writing somewhere away from the public eye and not using Grammarly to double-check our spelling as we go.

Do YOU have both Medium and Substack?

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We have now had our Bongo for 4 months, and in that time we have spent the princely sum of about £6,000 on repairs. We wanted a project, but quite frankly, if we had known how much of a project it was going to be, we might have thought twice. But we are here now, and we have come this far, and with every thing we get mended, the more we love it that bit more. I’ll tell you all about the repairs we have had done in a future post.

We’ve had a total of two nights away in her at our local campsite.

The first time we went with no dog, no bed, inadequate sleeping bags, and a -1C night outside, which was a little chilly. At least it was chilly for him, since I have a fancy sleeping bag* that’s toasty and has extra legroom for my late-night restless leg syndrome.

The toilet* I insisted on buying before we even brought the van home was very handy that night, as the campsite had not yet opened for the season and therefore shut the loos at 11 pm. Any woman of a middle-aged variety knows that getting up for wee-wees in the middle of the night is unavoidable, and women with adenomyosis know even more firmly that a toilet is a necessity and not a luxury. Luckily, my partner is very forgiving at 3 am and giggled himself back to sleep as I perched carefully at the end of the cabin with the bag, trying to tie it up without spilling it. I’m told cat litter is the best solution to this problem in future, and so I will be stocking the van with some.

By the time our second night away rolled around, we had been gifted a back-seat bench that folds flat and slides forward on rails towards the front seats. I treated the Snug Bug to a gorgeous throw*, and my partner bought her some cushions so she looks super cosy. The front seats also fold flat, creating a nice surface for us to sleep on. We took Twyla the Springador with us this time, and she thought it was great, snuggled up with us in our bed. Eventually, we want to buy a big ottoman for storage that doubles as part of the bed, so we can sleep farther back in the van.

Next, we need to get the MOT done, which is rather scary, and then we are looking forward to a summer of van-based adventures in our Snug Bug.

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We bought ourselves a Mazda Bongo Friendee.

We named her “The Snug Bug”.

She is filthy. She is rusty in places a girl should not feel rusty. She has a missing door handle. A bit of her tailpipe fell off. The tent roof is mouldy. She may or may not have a few leaks. The tyres need changing soon.

Oh boy, we are in love with her.

The bumpy ride home across the fens, with its sunken, twisty roads and potholes the size of a small lake, in a rear-wheel-drive van, was a bit of an eye-opener for me. I’ve only ever driven two cars leading up to this point, and to say I was cacking myself is an understatement. I was shaking as I pulled away. By the time we got home, I was having the time of my life, singing along to my music and loving the ride. Who knew driving high up was so much fun?

We plan to restore her over time, making her our second home on beach trips with the dog. Our shelter when we travel south to see my partner’s family. Our romantic getaway vehicle. Our special place in the world, wherever we may be.

This little campervan is going to cost us a fortune and will be a labour of love, but we already knew that. We just need to work out what to fix first.

We learned to open a window.

Owning a new vehicle is always a learning curve. Owning a camper for the first time, with nobody around to show us how to do anything, even the simplest of tasks like opening the back door or the side windows, is an even bigger learning curve.

I’m not kidding, it took two of us at least five whole minutes to work out that we had to pull a latch open to the side of the window.

You would think these things would be common sense, but we appear to be lacking in that department. But what we lack in common sense, we make up for in keenness, and we have only had her a day. If only we were not so afraid of breaking her (even more than she already is!).

I’m not even going to go into the confusion about how to switch on the diesel heater…

My partner did give the outside of her a good scrub, which she thoroughly enjoyed and now looks quite shiny and lovely without all the bird shit, so we’ve made a start.

Being practical.

Being financially challenged is what ultimately made us choose a doer-upper in the first place. That, and we can hopefully decide how she will look as we fix her, so we can customise as we go along. We could never afford a finished van, so we needed one we could start working on in smaller pieces instead.

I suppose the first step would be to take her to my local garage to make her a little more road-safe, before we start thinking about trips further afield to our local Bongo specialist, Pitstop Autos, about an hour and a half away. With Christmas approaching, they are likely to be very busy. And why does everything seem to cost twice as much this time of year? But safety first and all that.

Besides, I’m terrified of breaking down on the motorway.

See you in the next “thrilling” instalment, where we will hopefully have started doing something useful.

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When I was a little girl, my Dad had a campervan. He had always wanted to buy another and go off around the coast in it during his retirement. Sadly, Parkinson’s and Dementia robbed him of that chance.

I was always fascinated with the idea of having my own one day, but I have never had the financial means to do so. Last year, my Dad passed away. He left me a little bit of money, not loads, but enough so that now I’m thinking of buying a beat-up old camper and doing it up.

The van I’m going to look at is a shell. It has nothing in the back, apart from a manky, infested-looking bed, which we plan to dump at the tip on the way home, should we purchase the van.

Now, I’m no expert on the Japanese-imported van market, but I’m reliably told that rust is an issue because they don't salt their roads and therefore don't treat vans with rust-prevention treatments. The vans make the long trip across the salty sea and the damp, misty air to reach England, where the weather generally piddles down for nine months of the year, and the cold months require salty grit to be added to the road. For the other three months, we all go back to the salty-aired coast. So, in all that salt, they disintegrate into a puff of rust like a Wicked Witch after a bucket of water, immediately on arrival in the UK.

Plus cooling-system issues, the head gasket, and a whole pile of other things I can name but know sod all about, and the fact these beauties are like 25 or 30 years old and discontinued, so sourcing parts will leave me skint for the rest of my life.

But I want one. I want one so badly I can see myself driving it. I have the inside colour scheme picked out in my head and I’m looking at solar power units and gas heaters. It seems there's a massive community of people out there who want or already have these brick-shaped, pop-topped items of gorgeousness and are very keen to see me join the gang.

Will I get the van tomorrow? I have no idea. I have decided I am going to get one if it kills me, though. My Dad didn’t get to live out his dream. Since it's my dream too, I’m going to do it for both of us, and know that he’ll be looking down and laughing as my van-to-be showers oil and coolant all over the place in a spectacular explosion on an A-road full of boy racers and Audi drivers somewhere busy.

It will be called “The Snug Bug”. All vans should have names.

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At 44, I knew what I was doing and was set to do it for life. At 45, my life has changed again.

I am no longer teaching dogs. Struggles with my health (Adenomyosis) and (I’m not gonna lie) finances have made me come to the point where I can’t do it any more.

So, to avoid confusion, I’m starting my newsletter all over again. I took the drastic step of shutting down the old ones, so that the deluge of “I need some help for my cockerpoo” emails will slow down, and I can write about anything I like.

I now offer dog-sitting services at a premium price for dogs requiring a high-end service. Additionally, I've retrained as a TEFL Tutor, allowing me to work from anywhere with a comfy chair and an internet connection.

I don't care if I get lots of readers or if people like my stuff. I’m writing for me, and me alone. I need to get a heap of shit off my chest, and this is where I will be putting it. (But if you do want to read, then may your coffee always be the right temperature and your chocolate always have that lovely snap in your mouth between your teeth when you take the first bite.)

I’m looking forward to not having a writing schedule, no need to get paid for my writing, and no “look at me, I’m a brilliant writer” posts. Just writing for the sake of it, about anything that takes my fancy, because I can.

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