My day job as I like to call it is making promos for television shows and cable networks. I often pretend I watch TV for a living. And that truly is a large part of my job. The other part is convincing people to watch things they might not want to watch. It’s a lot easier for me to promote television than it is for me to promote myself. I have a better chance of getting you to watch an all-day Sandra Bullock movie marathon than, say, convincing you to buy all of my books at once and in all formats. But I digress.

I am freelance, though for a couple of years now I’ve been working steadily at a channel I really like with shows I actually do watch. And this is big because I don’t watch much. For a long time I worked at different women’s networks where we would ring in the new year with some variation on the following campaign – “New Year, New You.”  We did this every year at numerous channels again and again. It was a thing. Advertisers bought into it. With resolutions and gym memberships and a million and one ways to quit smoking, people and especially the fairer sex are always pressured or nudged to transform into someone else – someone newer, skinnier, better.

I was not immune to this. Last year my first week of January resolution to “work out more” led to overzealous squats and then a whole year of random hip pain the likes of which I didn’t expect to feel until I had grandchildren. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t successful. The new me felt like an old biddy.

I’m done with all that. read more >>