Hello and welcome back to The Overthinker’s Guide To Sex, a (for now) sex and relationships newsletter by journalist Franki Cookney.
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Friends, we need to talk.
As you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of this newsletter. I wrote in March about the money side of things, and I said then that unfortunately the amount of time and effort I was putting into writing OTGS wasn’t sustainable. But I said I was going to keep going until I hit the one year mark and then review. I also said I was going to make the next six months really fucking good. Now, here I am, two months later, dialling back on those promises.
TL;DR I’m taking a little break while I decide what I want to do with this newsletter. If you want to stick around and see, I’d love that. But if you decide to go, I understand that too.
It’s obviously not just about the money. I never expected one platform to fulfil all my needs and desires. I’m okay with the idea that I need multiple outlets, multiple clients, multiple projects, multiple revenue streams. But there has to be a balance. I need to feel that running a newsletter is enriching my life in other ways. And sometimes I do! I’ve truly adored the conversations I’ve had this year with Sophie K Rosa, Erica Smith, and Gigi Engle, conversations I might not have had the opportunity to have otherwise. I’ve loved having the space to play with ideas, to do what I like to think of as “showing my working”. I spent a really good chunk of my life terrified of doing this, believing that I had to show up as a fully formed and coherent person, with all the right answers, correct opinions, and absolutely no public messiness. Writing this newsletter (well, that, and ten years of therapy lol) has helped prove to me that, actually, some of the most interesting, beautiful, exciting things happen in the margins and that there’s real value in sharing that with people.
I surprised myself, for example, by how much I enjoyed dunking on Is it ever just sex? and was similarly surprised and delighted by how much you enjoyed it as well. I bashed out a polemic about my relationship with texting, almost on a whim, and was bowled over by people’s response. I had the opportunity to finally get down on paper why I don’t want to fuck my friends but would very much like to be friends with the people I fuck and what, precisely, I consider the difference to be—a topic I’ve thought about on and off for many years but until now had not been pressed into fully articulating. I poured my heart and soul into describing the compression of self I experienced after having my second child, an essay I badly needed to write, but which I doubt I would ever have pitched to a traditional outlet. And I wrote about film! Even though I don’t write about film. And every time I did I said “I don’t write about film,” but still it crept into my work because cinema has become a conscious part of my life over the last year and so of course, of course, it’s feeding into my writing and that’s been really interesting to observe.
Here’s something else: I have a new idea for a book. You see, in writing a weekly newsletter, in doing a monthly round-up of Links and Overthinks, I’ve been able to spot patterns. I’ve noticed myself being drawn to certain subjects, discovered there are certain issues I just can’t let go of. This was absolutely not something I foresaw! It was definitely not a strategy. Realising it really could work that way, that a newsletter really could be an incubator for ideas, that I could feed random bits and bobs of half-baked thoughts into it and eight months later I would see something real forming, was wild! It honestly felt like a kind of magic. I don’t want to say too much more about that for now, because I haven’t yet decided how to proceed, and there’s still a limit on how much working I feel comfortable showing, but I want to use this as an example of what a newsletter can be, even when it is not, by any sensible definition, a revenue stream.
And then there’s you. When Substack boasts about facilitating genuine relationships between writers and their readers, it is not wrong. I really do feel like I’ve had the opportunity to get to know you (my paid subscribers) this year and I feel like you’ve got to know me better too. When you message and comment and reply and I think “oh shit, you really get me” that’s an amazing feeling. Likewise when you tell me something I wrote spoke to you. It’s an undeniably cool thing we have the opportunity to build, and I’m interested in what else we could do here.
So I have no intention of sacking it off. Still, it isn’t quite working for me, and so I’ve been thinking about where I want it to go, what I want it to be, who I want to be, and I’ve realised it’s time to say something out loud: I don’t want to be a sex writer any more. To be honest, this is something I’ve known for a while. Certainly it was brewing the whole time I was on mat leave with my baby daughter, but I put my ambivalence down to, well, being on mat leave. When I came back to work it seemed insane to ditch my specialism just as I was trying to rebuild my client base and get going again. Starting this newsletter up again was, in some ways, an experiment in seeing whether I could rekindle my relationship with the subject. And I have! But in doing so it’s become clear to me that that relationship has shifted. Or perhaps it hasn’t shifted, it’s more that I am able to put words to it in a way I wasn’t before. And those words include the phrase, I don’t want to.
There’s a lot—a LOT—I could say about this and perhaps I will in another newsletter but for now let’s just leave it as follows: I am obviously still interested in sex and relationships but they are not the only things I am interested in, and I want and need to give myself space to explore other subjects. So rather than end the newsletter, I am working on redefining the relationship. Or, to put it in content creator language, I’m rebranding. However, I am not yet sure what I am rebranding to. That’s something I’m still thinking about/workshopping in my notes app. As always, I welcome your suggestions! The new version of the newsletter will inevitably have a very similar style and tone to this one (curiosity and compassion cut through with scepticism) and it will continue to offer explorations of feelings and experiences, analysis of human behaviour, and deep dives into culture and society but while some of them will almost certainly have to do with sex and relationships, they won’t all be about that. I also can’t guarantee I will write every week. I will aim to, of course, but it’s become really clear to me that I need some flexibility around that. So for now I’m not going to promise anything at all. I’m giving myself permission to fuck around and find out.
If that sounds like something you’re interested in supporting and sticking around for, then it goes without saying I’d love to have you here. I’ll obviously pause subscriptions while I’m mulling, but if you’d rather cancel your subscription altogether, I will totally understand. Those of you who paid for a year will be refunded whatever is left of that. In the meantime, I’m taking the rest of May off and maybe a bit of June. This is for several reasons. Firstly, I’m skint, and I need to focus on finding some proper paid work (Need any copy or editing? Hmu!) Secondly, I’m working on a new (unpaid! lol) podcast which I’m really excited about and which I am looking forward to telling you about. Thirdly, because I have a few different ideas for long-form projects, including the book I mentioned above, and I need some space to figure out which ones to prioritise and where to go with them. And fourthly, because my childcare situation is all over the shop and it’s all just too much to juggle at the minute. Hopefully as and when I come back in June I will have a clearer sense of direction for myself and for this newsletter too.
See you then?
A new newsletter needs a new name. Got an idea for what I should call it? Let me know!
You write superbly, with pace and passion. You make me laugh, wince, blush and above all think. Yet we all need to eat (and when you have kids and a partner just to find a bit of time to think). What you do and who you are both have real value and by opening up a space to just be for a bit you may be surprised by how the stars and moon align. Good luck - very interested to see what comes next. Take your time and stay light.
This is super validating. Especially the part about not wanting to be a sex writer anymore. I spent years building “The Sober Sexpert” and writing my book and now I’m so sick of talking about sex. I also relate to the rebranding and newsletter charging dilemma. Just subscribed. Excited to see what you do next.
PS Have you read Emily Nagoski’s new book? I found it validating that she, too, talks about how being a sex writer negatively impacted her sex love.