Hi! It’s just me, Anne Jones, and I’m so happy you stopped by.

My story has been many years in the making with many ups and downs but in 2019 I decided to start a new journey, and so Fifty and Frustrated was created.

I have loved language since I was a child. The way words are put together, the many nuances of meaning they have, and how it can change by what you emphasize or not emphasize.

I grew up in NYC, and I watched my mom work long hours as a typesetter. This was back in the days when they had white boards and used an x-acto knife to cut out a misspelled word, used a typewriter to type up the word correctly, and then cut that correct word out to place where the misspelled word had been. A simply grueling, time-sucking process. One must truly love words to do a job like that.

Most children do not intend to grow up in their parents’ footsteps, yet somehow despite our best efforts we usually do.

I had a love for words from a very young age, devouring my mother’s trove of sci-fi, romance, and other books that I can no longer remember the genre of. Many were TOR books, about 500+ pages long that transported me to other lands with people who wore next to nothing and yet did amazing things.

This led me to writing my own words, mostly journal entries at first, then poems, short stories and then, wonder of wonders, a novel. I had certainly caught the writing bug. But, as many know, one cannot make a living as a writer, so I did the next best thing.

In my twenties, I went to work for a typesetting company.

This led to a long love affair with words. I spent 20 years in the publishing industry, proofing pages for design errors before graduating to proofing others’ words for errors and editing copy for precision and succinctness.

And then in 2017 I was introduced to the travel industry, working with large groups of people, taking them on journeys to amazing places. In effect, being guide and caretaker. From this I learned I am social, and I’m a people-pleaser.

I have also learned that life can be frustrating, which brings me around to my business name: Fifty and Frustrated. Fifty is physical (I’m 50), while Frustrated is more a state of being (I’m frustrated about certain aspects of life and the world at large). For me, frustration is the emotional (mental) response to opposition of progress—be it in my career, my life and my lifestyle, as well as the outside world that surrounds me (and sometimes presses back against me).

But this blog is more about how I turn these frustrations into achievable goals. It’s finding solutions to the things that trouble me, and then offering these solutions to you.

We all, in some way, are unfulfilled. I just happen to be doing something about it at age 50. Perhaps you can do it younger? Or older? You just need to make the commitment, no matter your age, to do it now.

So, I invite you to come along with me on my adventures as I navigate this world one day at a time. I promise a humorously fulfilling journey.