What Next?

As I was writing this, I realised that everyone seems to focus on the perfect image, instead of perfect imperfection. This is my slighgtly choatic desk, it has been worse.

There is a strange moment at the end of a busy season when you look at the calendar and realise that the great, roaring beast you have been riding for months has finally begun to slow down.

For weeks, perhaps months, life has been measured in departure times, flight numbers, hotel rooms, sound checks, stage calls and hastily eaten meals. There have been festivals, performances, workshops, long drives and longer days. There have been crowds spilling through gates, children pulling their parents towards the noise, vendors setting up before sunrise, performers transforming themselves in car parks and portable toilets, and organisers trying to hold the whole beautiful, chaotic thing together with cable ties, coffee and sheer force of will.

Then, almost without warning, it goes quiet.

Not completely quiet. There are still a few things left in my diary. A couple of smaller events. Workshops. A medieval faire. Some story tours. Halloween storytelling, when the nights draw in and people once again remember that gathering in the dark to hear frightening tales is one of the finest things human beings have ever invented.

But the main rush is passing. The suitcases are being put away. The costumes are hanging back in the wardrobe. The microphone is no longer permanently sitting beside the front door, waiting to be thrown into the car. The constant movement begins to settle.

And the question arrives.

What next?

When the Noise Stops

It is difficult to explain the silence after a performance season to someone who has never lived inside one.

From the outside, performers appear to live in a world of excitement. People see the stage, the photographs, the costumes, the lights and the smiling faces. They see the moments when everything is working. They see me with a microphone in my hand, being bombastic, big and bold, calling a crowd together or sending a story rolling across a field. They see the festival banners, the road trips and the wonderfully strange people I have the privilege of working beside.

They do not always see what happens afterwards.

There is no applause in the car on the drive home. There is no audience waiting when you carry the equipment through the door. The adrenaline drains away, the voice grows quiet, and suddenly the world feels much smaller than it did only a few hours before.

At the height of the season, I can spend a day surrounded by thousands of people. I can be the voice of an event, the man filling the gaps, keeping the energy moving and making sure the audience knows where to look next. Then I come home and the loudest sound may be the heating clicking on.

That change can be brutal.

Performance gives you a clear purpose. Be ready at this time. Stand here. Tell this story. Introduce that act. Hold the crowd. Fix the silence. Keep things moving. You are useful, visible and needed.

Then the booking ends, and nobody is telling you where to stand.

The next morning there is no stage manager, no running order and no crowd. There is just you, a cup of tea and a laptop full of tasks that have been patiently breeding while you were away.

This is where the less glamorous season begins.

The Dark Months

Here in Canada, winter does not gently suggest that you might like to spend a little more time indoors. It arrives with authority.

The snow thickly covers the ground. The cold creeps in under the door and searches for any part of the house you believed was properly sealed. Daylight becomes a limited resource. The roads change, the sky changes and the rhythm of life changes with them.

For outdoor performers and festival people, the landscape of opportunity changes too. Stages disappear beneath snow. Crowds retreat indoors. Event calendars thin. The great summer gatherings become photographs, memories and promises that we will all do it again next year.

So what do we do?

What do storytellers, musicians, actors, emcees, street performers and independent artists do when the season that makes us feel most alive goes into hibernation?

Some take other jobs. Some teach. Some write. Some build new shows. Some disappear for a while because they are exhausted and have earned the right to do absolutely nothing. Some stare at the diary and pretend they are not worried by all that empty white space.

Most of us do a mixture of all of it.

There is a temptation to see the quieter months as dead time, as if the year contains a bright, useful half and a dark, empty half. I understand that feeling. When your identity is tied to performance, a lack of performances can feel like a lack of purpose. If nobody is booking you, watching you or applauding you, are you still a performer?

Of course you are.

But knowing that in your head and feeling it in your bones are two entirely different things.

The winter asks difficult questions. It takes away some of the noise we use to avoid them. It asks whether the work is sustainable. It asks where the next audience will come from. It asks whether we are growing or simply repeating what worked before. It asks whether our website still represents who we are, whether our message is clear, whether our skills can take us somewhere new and whether anybody outside our immediate circle knows what we actually offer.

Those are uncomfortable questions.

They are also necessary ones.

The Work Nobody Applauds

For me, the months ahead will involve building a new website, promoting my business and creating social media strategies that I will actually follow.

That final part matters.

Performers are often very good at having ideas. We can invent an entire show while driving home from another one. We can imagine podcasts, touring productions, workshops, books, videos, memberships and online storytelling nights before we have even taken off our boots. Inspiration is rarely the problem.

Consistency is the problem.

A strategy written in a notebook is not a strategy. A content calendar that is enthusiastically followed for nine days and then abandoned is not building an audience. A website nobody can navigate is not helping clients book you, no matter how poetic the wording may be.

The work of winter is often the work nobody applauds.

It is sitting in sweatpants at the kitchen table, adjusting a paragraph on a services page for the fifteenth time. It is sorting through photographs and discovering that almost every good picture contains someone standing directly in front of you. It is resizing images, checking links, learning keywords, writing descriptions and trying to explain in one clear sentence what you have spent fifteen years becoming.

It is sending emails that may never receive replies.

It is following up without wanting to be a nuisance. It is researching festivals whose application deadlines arrive six months before the festival itself. It is writing proposals for people who do not yet know they need you. It is trying to understand algorithms, analytics, mailing lists, video formats, website speed and why a platform has suddenly changed the one feature you had finally learned how to use.

There is not much glitz in it.

There is even less glamour.

No one takes a photograph of the performer at 10:47 on a Tuesday morning, surrounded by cold tea, tangled cables and three unfinished versions of the same biography. Nobody cheers when the contact form finally works. There is no standing ovation for completing your accounts.

Yet this work matters.

The performances people see in summer are often built during the months when nobody is watching.

Building a Door People Can Find

A new website is more than a digital coat of paint. At least, it should be.

My business has grown and shifted over the years. I am a storyteller, but I am also an event host, public speaker, workshop facilitator and voice artist. Each part is connected by the same central craft: using voice, story, humour and human connection to hold attention and make people feel something.

The challenge is making that clear.

A potential client should not have to dig through ten pages to discover whether I can host their festival, speak at their conference or deliver a workshop. They should not have to solve a riddle to find the booking button. They need to understand who I am, what I do, how it will help their event and what they need to do next.

That sounds simple. It is not.

When you have spent years building a career from many different strands, every strand feels important. Every old show carries memories. Every photograph represents a place, a crowd or a version of yourself. Cutting anything feels like denying that it mattered.

But a website is not a museum. It cannot simply display everything I have ever done and expect a client to assemble the meaning for themselves. It needs to be a doorway.

My job is to build that doorway clearly enough that the right people recognise it and step through.

That means making decisions. It means placing bookings at the centre rather than treating them as an afterthought. It means letting the images show the energy while the words explain the value. It means asking whether each page serves the visitor or merely satisfies my desire to include another story.

For a storyteller, cutting words can feel unnatural. We are not famous for saying less.

But clarity is its own kind of storytelling.

Learning to Be Seen Between Performances

Then there is social media.

Ah, social media: the place where everyone appears to have a successful career, a spotless kitchen, perfect lighting and a detailed content plan prepared three months in advance.

Meanwhile, many performers are posting a blurry picture from last Saturday with the caption, “Had a great time,” and hoping a festival director somehow recognises the full depth of their professional abilities.

I have done it too.

The problem is that a performance disappears the moment it ends unless we find a way to carry part of it forward. The people who were there may remember it, but the future client was probably not standing in that crowd. They need another way to see the work.

So the winter task is not simply to post more. It is to post with purpose.

That means sharing the stories behind the performance, the lessons learned on the road and the thinking that goes into holding a room or guiding an audience. It means letting people see the different sides of the business without turning every post into a desperate cry of “Please book me.”

It means video.

For someone who has spent years speaking live, video should be easy. There is no audience to interrupt, no rain pouring sideways and no nearby blacksmith striking metal at the precise moment you reach the quietest line of a story.

Yet a small lens can be far more intimidating than a crowd.

A crowd gives something back. You can feel when they are with you. You hear laughter, sense attention and adjust as you go. A camera offers nothing. It stares. You finish a perfectly respectable take, watch it back and immediately become aware of every blink, breath and peculiar movement of your face.

Then you record it again.

And again.

This too is part of the work. Recording stories, making videos and building a body of material that allows people to experience what I do even when I am not standing in front of them. The goal is not to become polished beyond recognition. It is to find a way of carrying the honesty and energy of live storytelling through a screen.

That will take practice. Most worthwhile things do.

Finding Another Use for the Voice

I am also trying to break into voice-over.

It feels both entirely natural and completely new.

My voice has been one of the main tools of my working life. It has called crowds across festival fields, guided visitors through old streets, introduced jousters, carried folktales and filled rooms without always needing a microphone. Clients have asked me to record radio promotions and narration. I know how to tell a story. I know how to find rhythm in words and how to make an audience lean closer.

But voice-over is its own craft.

The microphone hears differently from a crowd. It catches the breath, the mouth noise, the tiny hesitation and the moment the thought stops being truthful. There are no sweeping gestures to help you. No costume. No raised eyebrow visible to the listener. Everything must live in the voice.

Breaking in also means auditioning—again and again—without any guarantee that effort will become work.

You record. You edit. You submit. You wait.

Sometimes you are shortlisted. Often you hear nothing. You begin to wonder whether your sound is wrong, your delivery is wrong, your equipment is wrong or the entire idea is wrong. Then another script arrives, and you step back into the booth because the only certain way not to succeed is to stop.

There is humility in becoming a beginner again.

After years of knowing how to manage a live audience, I am learning a new room. It is a very small room, lined with sound treatment, containing a microphone that notices everything. There are no thousands passing through the gate. Sometimes there is not even another person present.

But there is possibility.

The dark months may close one kind of stage, but perhaps they open another.

Looking for the Vital Element

Behind all these tasks is a search for something difficult to name.

The vital element.

The spark that connects with clients.

Every independent performer knows this search. We try a new page, a new video, a different photograph or another way of describing the work. We change the opening line. We rewrite the email. We study what other people are doing and wonder whether we should do the same, while also knowing that imitation will never reveal what is distinct about us.

Sometimes the difference between silence and a booking is obvious. The right person saw the right clip at the right moment. Someone recommended your name in a meeting you did not know was happening. An organiser remembered how you handled a difficult crowd three years earlier.

More often, the connection is invisible.

A client may visit your website, leave, see a video weeks later, hear your name from a colleague and then return months after that. What looks like one enquiry may be the result of a dozen small encounters. That is why consistency matters. Each post, page, recording and conversation leaves another marker on the road that can lead someone back to you.

The temptation is to hunt for a single magic answer. Perhaps this platform will change everything. Perhaps this showreel will unlock the door. Perhaps one perfectly worded post will travel across the internet and deliver a year of bookings.

Perhaps.

But careers are rarely built on one spark alone. They are built by tending the fire.

The website matters. The videos matter. The emails matter. The relationships matter. The quality of the work matters most of all. No single piece needs to carry the entire business, but each needs to point in the same direction.

The vital element may not be a trick or tactic. It may simply be the clearest, most honest expression of who I am and what I bring: a Scottish storyteller with years of experience, a sense of humour, a powerful voice and a belief that people still need to gather, listen and feel connected.

That is not a marketing invention. It is the thread running through everything.

My task is to make it visible.

Rest Is Part of the Work

There is another truth I am trying to remember: not every gap must be filled.

The end of a busy season leaves an emptiness, and the instinct is to stuff it immediately with plans. If there is no performance, create content. If there is no booking, send proposals. If there is no deadline, invent one.

Some of that is necessary. Bills do not hibernate, and neither can a business.

But exhaustion can disguise itself as ambition.

After months of travel and performance, the body needs time to catch up. The voice needs quiet. The mind needs space in which it is not planning the next introduction or checking the time before another stage call. Rest is not evidence that I have lost momentum. It is part of preparing for whatever comes next.

That is difficult for performers because stillness can feel too much like being forgotten.

We are used to measuring our worth through reaction. A laugh tells us the line worked. Applause tells us the audience enjoyed the show. A booking tells us someone values what we do. Rest offers no immediate proof of value.

Yet a field left permanently in harvest will eventually give nothing back.

The quiet season must include actual quiet. Time with family. Walks when the weather allows it. Books read for no strategic reason. Stories enjoyed without asking how they could become content. Evenings when the laptop stays closed.

The work must support a life, not consume it.

So, What Next?

I do not have one grand answer.

Perhaps that is the point.

What comes next is not a dramatic reinvention revealed in a burst of winter lightning. It is a collection of smaller choices.

Finish the website.

Send the email.

Record the story.

Make the video.

Submit the audition.

Follow the strategy for long enough to discover whether it works.

Rest when rest is needed.

Then begin again.

There are still events ahead. There are workshops to deliver, a medieval faire to bring to life, story tours to guide and Halloween tales waiting in the dark. I am not finished with this season yet.

But I can feel the change coming. Soon the snow will cover the ground. The cold will creep beneath the door. The crowds will be elsewhere, and the work will move behind the scenes.

I will be at the desk in my sweatpants, wrestling with website copy and wondering why one image refuses to sit where I put it. I will be speaking to a camera that gives nothing back. I will be recording stories, auditioning for voices and trying to find the words that help a future client understand what I can bring to their event.

It will not look glamorous.

It may not feel exciting.

But beneath the admin, the doubt and the endless learning, something important will be happening. The next season will be taking shape.

Because the quiet is not the end of the story.

It is the place where the next one begins.