AliceFraser
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Announcements: The Rest of The Year
🕑 Added 2021-09-03 10:05:53 +0000 UTCHallo lovely Patreonites!
For those who missed the salons; I did make bullet points, and will try to recreate the content faithfully here.
- From some time in mid October (exact date TBC) I will be taking six weeks of maternity leave. To have a baby. That’s what it’s for. I mean it won’t take me six weeks to have the baby, (I hope) but I’m reliably informed that it’s an absorbing adjustment period.
- This will not affect The Gargle, as we are pre-recording special collectors’ edition episodes, and let me tell you, they are hilarious.
- It may slightly affect Tea With Alice. I am banking episodes in advance, so it won’t be the full six weeks of offness. But the process of getting those up is much more me-based (no Producer Chris to do the legwork), I can’t make guarantees about how many eps will come out in that six week period! After that it will be back to normal though.
- The Last Post is drawing to a close in October. This is partly to do with complications with our original co-producer being bought up by a bigger company with Opinions and partly because I feel like after it stopped being daily and went monthly it hasn’t been the same thing. Because I’m so proud of what I achieved with it last year, I’d rather end it than keep it around as a monthly ghost of itself, and the timing of the Big Company Causing Trouble and The Baby Arriving Soon seemed too right to ignore. I will find a way to keep D’Ancey La Guarde alive, in one form or another. Stay subscribed to The Last Post feed though, as we’ll be launching a NEW SHOW on that feed in January 2022.
- I will still do posts here during the six week hiatus, but they might be very weird and sleep deprived. I’ve never had a baby before! After that, back to “business” as “usual”.
I was weirdly nervous to make this announcement, and thinking about it in response to some of the salon questions, I think it’s because I feel so lucky to have built such an incredible audience around me. When I started out, a number of more senior people whose opinions I valued at the time told me that I had to pick one thing to be. That I should pick a thing and be that thing because to be multiple things was not marketable. Find a box and tick that box, end of story. People want to know what they’re going to get.
This is true to a certain extent, and certainly at the beginning it was hard to ‘sell’ what it is that I am and do. But I’ve always cringed at the idea of my onstage persona being a ticked box, one singular expression of an identity. Because that’s not my experience of what it’s like to be a person.
I wasn’t interested in spending my professional time inhabiting a persona that felt like a lie, so I stuck to my guns. And an audience found me. Now, with this audience (you), I can be the Alice Fraser that does The Last Post AND Savage AND Tea With Alice AND bestselling Audible Documentaries AND Silly Banjo Songs, and that’s an incredible privilege. To be messily outside the box, answering yes to all the multiple choice options.
So I think my nervousness about announcing this motherhood thing is that Motherhood is a massive identity. It’s a big box that’s full of baggage. Everyone has Ideas about what motherhood is, and I worried that by announcing it, I would have this layered selfhood overwritten in bold text in your minds. Maybe it would change the way you engage with my work.
Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. But either way, that’s my announcement!
We have a Discord Server, as well, for which the link is this:
Head over there to talk to other good people who like good/my stuff.
I’m not sure how interested you will all be on my reflections on the process or if you’d rather I kept Musings On Parenthood part of my private life; if you want to know if I have any interesting insights do let me know in the comments here (or in DMs if you don’t want to be publicly pro or anti-baby-content).
Xx
A
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As ever, if you like any of my work, do share it around. It makes a big difference. Also, industry people do pay attention to numbers of views and followers and 5 star ratings and so on, so to those of you who make the effort to drop any of those things around the place, I’m constantly and persistently grateful. Keep getting hijacked by waves gratitude while I’m getting about my business TBH, it’s really quite the inconvenience.
Comments
Hahahaha brilliant 👏 I can't wait! I've missed live music and comedy so much, I have no idea how you all must be feeling 💔😔 See you soon ❤
Thankyou! I still have the photo of your tattoo in my ‘cool enough to print out’ album. Should be doing a live gig in early December at the Comedy Store, too! Not sure when I’ll have time to write it though.
Congratulations! Can't believe I missed this news - just read something in your most recent post and scrambled back to find this 😆 🥰❤❤❤❤ P S. I still get comments on my "No-one is going to die, we're all going to die" tattoo 😍 Enjoy your new, extra role 😘
Just found out about your pregnancy via the latest Bugle! That will teach me not to read your Patreon posts. Congratulations. Good luck with everything. Hope you have a nice maternity leave.
Gary W
Delightful news, Alice! All the best wishes for you and your family!
So happy for you and your loved ones Alice. Me and Mrs A so pleased for you. Looking forward to your comparison stories with Felicity Ward!!😳😳
Best wishes in the weeks and months ahead! And an advance welcome to the fellowship of parenthood. It’s a whole new big thing. Much more prestigious than being a lawyer. (But occasionally as monotonous.)
Awww congratulations! I had a baby last October, I spent many nights laying awake listening to the Last Post and The Bugle while pregnant, while baby played kickball with my bladder 😂 I hope to hear more of your thoughts on motherhood, though I understand if you feel like you want to keep that part of your life private. Motherhood has been amazing, and scary, and during this time, isolating, so if you do want to share, know there are others who will listen and feel connected. Best of luck, you will be an amazing Mom ❤️
Peta Thames
Wow Alice, congratulations! And I for one love seeing you about on all sorts of mediums. I'm here as much for your thoughts on Serious Stuff as I am for your Elon Musk jokes and as someone who still doesn't know what she wants to be when she grows up (I'm 45), the more people who normalise the idea of a complex and diverse identity, the better.
Congratulationns!
Hey Alice, I’m super late to this but I wanted to drop in and say congratulations! I totally understand why you might have *feelings* about it but ready to see what you make of motherhood and to hear your thoughts! Good luck!
I'm a little late to the party on this one but congratulations! More than happy for you to ponder/vent/whatever your motherhood experience here. Hope everything goes as smoothy as possible.
Congratulations! Enjoy every stage. They change so quickly. Welcome to the madness of motherhood!
