I've given up on the copywriting thing.
It took me taking a break from chasing freelance clients whilst I moved house to realise that I really could not be bothered to start up again. And that led to a deeper conversation with my partner where he essentially told me the hard truth that he'd known me for 10 years and in those 10 years I have constantly been saying "I need to make money elsewhere to support my writing," but maybe that excuse has run its course.
We've got our mortgage, we're making money, we're in a safe position for me to not worry about chasing extra income. Which means, I have no excuse to not focus on writing. A strange feeling. It makes me realise how many obstacles I've been putting in my own way to hold back the inevitable time when I have to spend time doing the thing I claim I wish I had more time to do. Well, it's here. I have the time.
I've decided to take on a more methodical approach to writing this time around. I've got a list of topics and I've gathered resources for each of those. I'm then going to follow this structure that I found on reddit which encourages you to think of each topic as if you were on a university course. I'm going to spend time writing with each topic as a focus as well as looking for close readings that illustrate that topic and writing mini-essays on places where this technique is used well/not so well. Whilst doing that I'll try and share work online to open it up to criticism. This seems a much better way of improving as before I'd always struggled to judge my progress.
Let's see how this goes. Time to put the work in.