Category Archives: People

mush – a new app that brings mums together

Posted on by

mush-a-new-app-that-brings-mums-together

Becoming a mother can be incredibly isolating. Which is why Frost got very excited to hear about mush, a free app that lets mothers find each other. It is basically Tinder for mums.

mush is a new free app for mums that was born out of the difficulty its two founders had after having their second babies. Katie was fresh back from New York and Sarah had beaten her other mum friends to a second baby. They awkwardly exchanged numbers in a cold playground on their first chance meeting. Both of them needed to find someone to share those difficult days at home with small children, and felt that the serendipitous approach to making mum friends was just not good enough in 2016 in a world that was so well serviced with other ‘dating’ apps. mush has been described as Tinder meets mother’s group and matches mums according to their location, kids’ ages and mutual friends.

 

The mush app has three core functions:

 

  • Mushmatcher – to find mums based on an algorithm of kids’ ages, location and mutual friends
  • Let’s mush- to plan events with mums and organise your mummy diary, seeing who is free to play right now
  • Mushguides – content written by mum for mums, to inspire mums to make their lives easier and have more fun

 

mush will show which of your connections are free right now, based on the insight that it’s hard to plan ahead with small kids. It will also allow you to create groups of mums for messaging and support as well as having a content hub designed to give practical and positive information to parents and parents-to-be.

 

mush has received backing from a number of private investors and a social impact fund and is available to download from the app store and google play.

 

A survey of 4000 mums showed the following:

  • half of mums find it hard to plan with kids
  • 80% of mums prefer to go to playgroup with a friend
  • 22% mums only have one local mum friend (62% have 4 or less local mum friends)
  • half go to the shops primarily for adult interraction
  • half find it hard to make local mum friends
  • 60% of mums go a full day without adult interaction
  • 82% of mums thinks having mum friends makes you a happier. more positive mum

 

Find out more at www.letsmush.com.

 

More about the founders.

 

Katie Massie-Taylor, 33, Mortlake, London

Katie was an equity derivatives broker in the City having graduated from Bristol University in BA Hons Spanish. She was one of  8 female brokers on a thousand-strong male trading floor, so learnt pretty early that she needed to hustle for her business wins (though not literally, that would be illegal). She joined a currency trading start-up as her first foray into the entrepreneur world, then tried a number of other industries when she tired of the busy City entertaining circus. She worked in a PR agency, a member network subscription service and most recently as a matchmaker in New York for high end clients looking for love.  Mush is an amalgamation of all of her previous skills, having always known she would end up with a business of her own.

She met her husband aged 13 (her brother’s best friend) and got married in 2011. Simon is Commercial Director at England RFU. She has two little girls Tilly, 3 and Lyla, 1. They have lived around South West London and in New York. It was her experience of moving twice with babies that made her realise the world was crying out for mush.

Sarah Hesz, 34, East Sheen, London

Sarah’s experience is from the world of advertising where she led business development and worked with global brands spanning the likes of Unilever and Dell. She has always dreamed of having a start up and previously launched an award-winning marketing agency. She has two kids (Rosie, 3 and Leo,1).

 

How they met

Sarah & Katie met in a playground on a cold and rainy day. They had 2 week old babies strapped to their fronts and sub-2 year olds hanging precariously from climbing frames. Katie was close to tears having moved back from New York, and Sarah was mateless in Mortlake having had babies in quick succession. Sarah approached Katie and asked for her number, with no preamble, which she jokes is the only chat-up line she has ever used. They kept each other sane for the weeks and months that followed, having realised they had facebook friends in common, lived three streets away and had kids of identical ages. Over one celebratory tea time eating pizza and drinking prosecco (celebrating their survival of that ‘fourth trimester’) they talked about the dream of setting up a company together and both landed on the loneliness issue they had experienced.. Mush was born. And then began the adventure.

Working around ad hoc childcare, the first few months were a blur of last minute meetings, breastfeeding and business plans. They secured funding a year after that celebratory tea, and launched in April 2016.

 

The mush start-up story

Mush is the lovechild of Sarah & Katie’s vision that no mum does it alone. They raised money (250k GBP) pre- product from various angel investors (only a few of whom they knew before the journey began- read they kissed a lot of frogs!) with their passion and their pitch deck. One institutional seed investor was Mustard Seed Social Impact, who focusses on companies who do social good.

 

Their app was developed in the Ukraine, and launched in April, and the app got immediate take up locally in SW London from a few flyers and posters in playgrounds. The majority of the 25,000 mush mums are in the UK, with groundswells of activity in New York and Melbourne.

 

Mush has opened its next round of funding for 950k GBP, which they will raise their angel investors and a Crowdcube campaign starting in November 2016. It will allow them to reach their goal: to be the biggest global social media platform for mums.

 

 

BUSINESS OF BOOKS: FIRST, LAST, EVERYTHING – AUTHOR JOHN JACKSON

Posted on by

Kicking off a new series for 2018, Jane Cable talks to romantic novelist and former seafarer John Jackson

What was the first writing advice you were ever given?

The first piece was one I worked out for myself before starting to write fiction.

In a previous life, I spent many years preparing safety manuals, policies and procedures. In the main, these were for non-native English-speaking ship’s crew, from the Philippines, Burma, Poland and the like.

Back in the day, companies, especially shipping companies, all thought that the only good manual was a BIG one. This saw many shipping lines having massive and all-encompassing manuals that nobody read. These weren’t written to help seafarers be better at their jobs, they were written with the sole aim of stopping the Company being sued.

To me, it soon became clear that “It’s useless writing something that nobody can read and understand.”

So, clarity is everything – and it’s a trait that I hope I bring to my fiction writing. Certainly, a feature of Heart of Stone’s reviews is that it is a “fast read” and a “real page turner”

I got into writing fiction at the behest of some friends who happened to be members of the Romantic Novelists Association. Their advice to me, to try and get onto the RNAs “New Writers Scheme” was certainly the best advice I received. As a man trying to make it in a genre dominated by women writers, I can only thank the RNA and its members for the unconditional help and support I have been given.

What was the most recent writing advice you were given?

With just one published book to my name, I know I am still “learning my craft.” Publishing, with all the ancillary professions, such as editors and agents, is an enormous and diverse business.

It is also a business that is changing and changing fast. Writing is a famously lonely occupation. In many ways, we are the bottom men on the totem pole. It is also very easy to forget that this is a BUSINESS. We might write because it’s just something that we want or have to do, but for everyone else, it’s a business, and their only decision is “can they make money from your work.”

This might not be advice that anyone would give you directly, but it is true, nonetheless.

Self-publishing and the rise of Amazon has also shrunk the market for the other professionals; it has made them even more reluctant to take on any but the most immediately marketable authors. The days of a publisher taking on a young author and nurturing their career in the hope of a bestseller down the line are long gone. Self-publishing is no longer considered vanity publishing. It is a valid and popular method of getting your work to market.

What is the piece of advice you’d most like to pass on? (writing or otherwise!)

Every manuscript needs a good editor. It is someone else’s eyes giving a professional and fresh look at your work. So many self-published books show very early in the read that they have never been properly edited.

I am very lucky in that Sue, my editor, is also a friend, and we work together well. Other friends are not so lucky, especially when contracted to one of the major publishing houses. Sometimes you may have to fight for what you want, but always remember – this is YOUR story, You have to have faith in it.

That’s what we are doing Telling a story – and everything you write should be towards that end. We are not writing textbooks or reference works, we are STORYTELLERS!

Keep the faith! Your writing WILL get better, and you WILL succeed. Sometimes this is hard but you need to believe in yourself.

Keep up with John on Twitter @jjackson42

 

BUSINESS OF BOOKS: TAKE FOUR WRITERS – INTRODUCING ANGELA PETCH

Posted on by

Hi! … can’t believe I’m on here. I’m excited, apprehensive and honoured to share in this venture.

I love reading. I don’t think you can be a writer without being a bookworm. I panic if I’m coming to the end of a good book and feel bereft until I’m lost in another story. Although I loved English at school, my degree is in Italian. I lived in Rome as a child, worked in Sicily, met my half-Italian husband there and now, in our retirement, we spend six months of each year in Tuscany, where we run a small holiday business. Although I’ve always written, only now that our three children are independent have I been able to settle seriously to the craft. I self-published two novels set in Tuscany and they’ve been taken on by Endeavour Press. Last year I had seven stories accepted by women’s magazines and I enjoy the discipline of this genre too, so hopefully I will sell more in 2018.

However, this year I am becoming a hybrid author and returning down the indie route to self-publish “something completely different”.

In 2006 my best friend discovered she was suffering from ovarian cancer. We did lots together, including hunting for bargains in charity shops and at auctions, nicknaming each other Mavis and Dot. She was extremely brave, but she had her darker moments too and I tried to cheer her up by writing silly stories about Mavis and Dot. They made her laugh and she drew cartoon sketches of the characters, which I still have hanging on the back of our loo door. Sadly, she didn’t recover from this silent killer and I filed away my anecdotes. A couple of years ago I pulled one out to read at a writing group and raised a laugh. So, I decided to develop the stories and put together a novella. There will be illustrations and I’m busy searching for the right artist as I type.

I feel rather wobbly about Mavis and Dot, but I dearly want them to succeed as I intend to donate any profits to Cancer Research. Humour is notoriously hard to pull off and my usual style is literary, so I have to banish the goblin from my shoulder telling me I am writing drivel that nobody will find amusing. My launch date is mid-November, but I know time whizzes by faster than a bargain snatched off a charity shop shelf. So, I need to get down to business. And that is the main cause of my wobbles. Going indie again means getting my act together with social media and marketing. When I see telecom engineers at the side of the road working on control panels, plugging wires into holes, it makes me think of me procrastinating over algorithms, metadata, BISAC codes, author platforms and networking. Which hole should I connect with, – when and how? However, I have also made virtual friends on-line with a whole bunch of supportive authors and bloggers in the past months and, although there’s a mountain to climb, I want to scale this peak.

Time is the thing, isn’t it? And discipline. We are blessed with three children and four very young grandchildren (with another on the way), and when we are in England during our six winter months they keep us busy.   I will stop bleating about that because I know there are many authors who burn the midnight oil and squeeze their writing into fewer hours than I have. Wish me luck, nevertheless. “Live where you fear to live”, said the 13th century poet, Rumi.

 

 

Plus One is The Loneliest Number: On The Loneliness of Motherhood

Posted on by

lonely, loneliness of motherhood, loneliness of parenthood. the loneliness of being a parent, parenting, There are many hard things about parenthood. Some are obvious: sleepless nights, exhaustion, lack of me time, endless nappies. But there is one that is not talked about as much and that should be, and that is the crippling loneliness of motherhood (or fatherhood if the man is the stay-at-home parent). Now some people may wonder how you can be lonely when you are looking after a baby but here is the thing: they cannot talk. Even when they do start to talk you still crave adult company. You yearn for a decent conversation. A moment to relate to another human being can feel like a life-saving moment.

Since I had my son almost two years ago I have had moments of loneliness that were so extreme I felt like they might suffocate me. I have worked from home for years but I also went to a lot of events and reviewed restaurants. I talked to people, I interviewed people. I was important. Now I am just someone’s mother and the only person I have proper conversations with for weeks on end is my husband. I have always been a social person and there were times when I thought the isolation might break me. My family live in Scotland which I have found hard since having a child. My friends mostly work normal working hours.

It is not that I have not tried to make friends with other parents. We moved when my son was a baby and by the time I found groups to take him to people had already formed cliques. I tried to join in and be friends but the mean girl vibe does not wane when (some) women grow up and become mothers. Other times I would connect with someone and think we were going to become friends, only to never see them again. It wasn’t that I did not try. I really put myself out there and the constant rejection only made it worse.

I believe we have to talk more about how lonely being a parent can be. There are thousands of parents struggling to just get through the day. They are isolated and can go for weeks without any other human contact. There are now apps for mothers to meet up like Mush which is a tinder style app for mothers to meet up with each other. It is growing in popularity and I hope every mother who needs someone to talk to joins up.

Now that my son is nearly two I feel I have come out the other side. I take him to numerous events. He has a better social life than I do. Recently I have found that I have become friends with the other mothers from one of the groups I take him to. The mean girls have fallen away, leaving only a hard core group who go at least once a week. Last week we all talked for hours as our children played. I could tell that it made these mothers happy to have someone to talk to. Some were shocked when I started talking to them properly but we quickly got into the swing of it. We even shared tips for making more mum friends. It was a wonderful moment and a long time coming. I hope it is only the start.

 

This article was originally published on Feb 21, 2017. We republished it because it was popular.

Frost Loves: Gender Neutral Baby Grows From Twisted Twee

Posted on by

equalopportunitybabygrow babatudeboutique unnamedFrost loves these gender neutral baby grows. They are not only gorgeous, but also super soft. The material feels divine: perfect for delicate baby skin. They are climate neutral ‘FairWear’ product made from 100% organic cotton.

Twisted Twee are the leading UK producer of sustainable, carbon neutral, organic, fair trade, energy saving stuff and have a fireplace of awards to prove it.

If you’re fed up with the colour stereotyping of babies, then this presents a refreshing alternative. They come in a blue digger for a girl and a pink deer for a boy. They certainly make a statement. They make a perfect gift. Cheerfully sardonic childrenswear from Twisted Twee. Clever, fun, and well made.

genderneautral babyclothes

The babygrows come in long sleeved and short sleeved. They are fabulous quality and the print will not crack, peel, fade or misbehave in any way even after constant washing. The print is also puffed, so has a lovely squashy 3D texture.

Orders are packed inside a bright, bijou canvas gift bag and can include a gift messages on request.

Boy (with pink deer)

Girl (with blue digger)

Sizes from newborn to 24 months

£16.00

www.twistedtwee.co.uk

 

 
 

BUSINESS OF BOOKS: TAKE FOUR WRITERS – INTRODUCING LUCY COLEMAN

Posted on by

New year – new opportunities and a new name! Life doesn’t get much better, does it?

My first book – The French Adventure with Aria Fiction (Head of Zeus) – is due for release on 1 February 2018 and I’m elated! The launch of a new book is usually the culmination of more than a year’s work from penning the manuscript, going through the editing and proofing processes and preparations for the marketing to begin.

Now, this isn’t my first book – it’s my twelfth, full-length novel – throw in a couple of non-fiction titles and three novellas and that’s my writing career in a nutshell. But Christmas 2016 was a turning point for me. I remember going to a Romantic Novelists’ Association chapter meeting in Hereford a few months beforehand and someone raised the subject of submitting to agents. Had it crossed my mind before that? Well, yes, but I didn’t feel ready. I had successfully submitted and signed contracts with Endeavour Press, Harper Impulse and Choc Lit at that stage. The turning point for me was triggered by two things. The first one is that contracts aren’t easy to read and secondly, I was beginning to feel more and more like a team of one doing the best I can to steer my career. But secretly I was longing for a little professional guidance.

Now, I have a fantastic relationship with my editors and their support, nurturing and constant pushing to get me to up the bar has been a blessing. But I felt it was time to find that elusive someone who could help me look at my career on a longer-term basis. Up until that point I’d only considered it one manuscript at a time.

So, literally a couple of days before Christmas 2016 I submitted to three agents and by early March 2017 I had signed with the awesome Sara Keane, from the Keane Kataria Literary Agency. It wasn’t long before I was signing my first, four-book deal with Aria Fiction. As I’m still writing for Harper Impulse as Linn B. Halton, my books for Aria Fiction will go out under my new pen name of Lucy Coleman.

Having Sara in my corner, helping me to work on my finished manuscripts to make them the best they can be and introducing my work to Aria Fiction, has sharpened my focus. I’m no longer thinking one book at a time, but forward planning. As each day passes I’m feeling more and more like a Lucy, as well as a Linn … and 2018 promises to be frenetic, fun and fabulous!

It just took a little over a year in the planning, but it was a year well-spent and I can’t wait to begin promoting ‘The French Adventure‘.

Oh, and throw in the added little flurry of activity as my husband and I moved to a new house, in a new area, on 19th December 2017. A paint brush is never far from my hand these days, so it’s handy that I’m good at multi-tasking. The next stage of the journey is about to begin.

Happy New 2018, all!

Anna And Elsa From Frozen Are Related To Tarzan. Yes, Really

Posted on by

Okay people, you might want to hold onto your hat for this one; it turns out that Anna and Elsa from Frozen are related to Tarzan. WTF I hear you say, well it is true because Frozen director, Chris Buck, has confirmed the fan theories. Many Disney films have subtle links to each other. Aladdin’s lamp is in The Princess and the Frog and Rapunzel makes an appearance in Frozen. Chris explained all in an interview with MTV:

 

In Frozen we see Anna and Elsa become orphans when their parents appeared to die during a shipwreck.

However, Chris told MTV that they lived, swam to safety and ended up in the jungle. The mother then gave birth to a baby boy.

 

Chris said: ‘They end up building a tree house and a leopard kills them, so their baby boy is raised by gorillas.

So in my little head, Anna and Elsa’s brother is Tarzan.’

 

You didn’t see that coming, did you?

 

BUSINESS OF BOOKS: TAKE FOUR WRITERS – INTRODUCING JACKIE BALDWIN

Posted on by

Hello everyone! I’m so excited to be sharing with you all the steps towards publication of my second crime novel, Perfect Dead. I’m a Scottish crime writer and live in Dumfries, SW Scotland which is where my series is set. For most of my working life I was a solicitor practicing in family and criminal law but for the last five years I’ve been working as a hypnotherapist which I really enjoy. I’m married and have two grown up kids and two golden retrievers. This is a great area to walk dogs as it has an abundance of forests, rivers and coastline to let them run free. Consequently, I spend a fair bit of time spattered in mud and with twigs tangled in my hair. Don’t be fooled by my author photo!

Writing my second book was very different to writing my first one. Writing a first book you can take all the time in the world. And I did! About 12 years to be precise, including three years when I didn’t write a single word. Friends and family viewed the whole tortured process as a harmless eccentricity. After a final rewrite I sent it to Killer Reads, a digital imprint of Harper Collins. Two weeks later I was holding an acceptance. I didn’t stop shaking until the next day. It was such a shock!

So, to go from that timescale to writing the second book in less than a year took some doing! It didn’t help that last February I developed angina culminating in a blocked coronary artery which required 3 stents in August. I have to say that my editor at Killer Reads was fantastic, no pressure whatsoever. The pressure came from within. Readers were asking for the next book in the series and I didn’t want to let them or my publisher down.

My first novel, Dead Man’s Prayer, I had plotted in advance of writing but, just to make life harder, I started the second novel deliberately with no idea of who had committed the crimes. This resulted in a bad case of ‘saggy middle’ where I had a complete crisis as my plot strands threatened to spiral out of control. It was time to commit and knit it all together. ‘It can’t be done,’ I wailed, adding my echo of despair to all the writers before me. I swear there have been times when I felt the words of this novel were bleeding onto the page a drop at a time, progress seemed so slow. But, to my surprise, and to the relief of my long suffering husband, it all came together in the end.

Perfect Dead will be published in ebook on 15th June and the POD paperback will be available on 23rd August. The action mainly takes place in the ‘Artists’ Town’ of Kirkcudbright, (Kircoobray). DI Farrell is faced with the apparent suicide of a promising young artist shortlisted for a major art prize. Human remains are then discovered on a MoD firing range. Both victims are connected to a shadowy Art Collective. The local police are further stretched investigating a forgery ring. Both investigations are hampered at every turn by secrets people will do anything to keep hidden. DI Farrell and his team are pushed to breaking point as they strive to catch a callous killer before he strikes again, this time much closer to home.

As you read this, I am waiting for my editor’s Notes to arrive so that I can start editing. A rather scary prospect! See you next month!