writer’s block
goodcopy.ink is a copywriting collective. We don’t exactly play quatre mains at the keyboard, but we’re a bunch of people who are good at different things. On the other end of your hotline are Jill and Annelies, who will match you with the writer you’ve been pining for. Sort of like Tinder, but with better opening lines and less hassle.
Ilona
Lodewijckx
by Nicolas Marichal
Away with word processors! If it were up to Ilona, she would compose all her words on paper, handwritten with her black Kaweco Skyline fountain pen. She draws the crossbars of her t’s hard and wide, like steel beams that buttress the lines. The offshoots of her r’s first rise proudly and then, in the downward curve, seek intimacy with the next character. Her Q cuts like a scimitar and her capital J is poetry.
If only all our customers were generous souls, who could muster the patience to transcribe this delivered beauty onto their various digital carriers themselves. Alas... They want to copy-paste, with a simple ctrl-c and ctrl-v. Victims of our times. Ilona Lodewijckx would have it otherwise. In her world, copy-paste would only be done with scissors, a tube of glue and a stack of magazines from the olden days.
Annelies
Desmet
by Jill Mathieu
Annelies Marie Paulien Desmet is known by many names and titles. She is a part-time philosopher, academic, writer, artist. We think. What we do know for sure is that she can stuff birds, that she writes essays exhorting technology to reason and that she drives a lawnmower-like Lada Niva. She definitely elevated rubber boots to urban garb. And above all, she preaches Amor Mundi, the love of the world. Annelies seeks a more tender way to relate to our planet. For herself, but also for you. She elegantly and eruditely records this quest in magazines, books, her podcast and mails riddled with postscripts—enough to feed our Amor Anneliesi.
Marine
Coutereel
by Nicolas Marichal
Three times a week, Marine sets her alarm at 05:30 to be at the Watermael-Boitsfort swimming pool by 06:58, queueing up with the old people, just before the pool opens. Because she can undress faster than the pensioners, she is the first to dive in, with French rapper PNL rapping into her waterproof earbuds. She always swims 60 laps of 33 metres, thereby not quite making it to 2,000 metres. Staying short by 20 metres… No problem.
No, no problem at all! Because contrary to what the locals say about Marine la machine, she is super chill. So chill that, on weekends, she sleeps in until 07:00 and doesn't even go swimming. Marine writes for VICE, translates for ink., smokes L&M (although her mother smokes Marlboro and her grandmother Philipp Morris), sticks plastic diamonds on her phone case and once bought Raf Simons trainers that she doesn’t wear because they’re not pretty. She knows the first names of two different Murakamis and her first book will be about herself.
Filip
Vandewiele
by Ines Van Impe
Filip likes to keep things short, powerful and resounding. He is a man of baselines, slogans and few words—just the right ones.
A gentleman who draws up advertising scripts and campaigns.
Sentences that stay afloat alone, like rafts.
Words with meaning.
And humour.
That's Filip.
Or FLP.
Jill
Mathieu
by Nicolas Marichal
The Huns had Attila, the A-team had Hannibal, the Ninja Turtles had Splinter, and goodcopy.ink has Jill. Of course it’s teamwork and of course we’re all friends and we can all write some, but Jill is Jill. She also has to write the invoices and charm new customers. As soon as she has caught one, she plays Tinder between the client and the copywriters on duty. She then soars over the team like a bald eagle, balancing on air currents, only to dive down when someone ventures into forbidden phrases like ‘something for everyone’, ‘out of the box’ or comparisons with a bald eagle on air currents.
Jill does not lend out books, not even to her best friends. She’s going to be pretty in tiger prints until she‘s 90. No one is more distressed by a reverse ’ than Jill Mathieu. When she takes photos, hardly anyone is ever in them. That is why she sometimes travels alone, to avoid all risks. She can forge a knife, exterminate mice, make pottery (including the weird Japanese thing with the glued cracks), build her own house on wheels, cook with wine, write with a pen on paper, dance while DJ’ing and sew on a button in a car, but she cannot bowl. She cannot bowl—at all! One day, we went bowling with some friends and she only scored around 60 points. That was the least anyone scored in the whole group and it was really embarrassing.
Nicolas
Marichal
by Marine Coutereel
Nicolas looks like Jesus but he will not turn water into wine. Nicolas prefers beer. He will not walk in the desert for 40 days either. Instead, he will go for a 27-kilometre birthday walk in the Meerdaal forest, every 18th of October. And it is no coincidence that his lucky number in the casino is 18. Look no further.
If you want to find him, prayers will not help. Just drop by the Ghent Festivities, where he preaches his perverted gospel. From ten in the evening to eight in the morning, Nicolas and his round-breasted apostles break bread with the drunk at a caravan of love.
Combining his writing and illustrating skills, he loves to create alternative city maps while observing people in old neighbourhood bars. That is why he loved working on a map of all 400 bars in Ghent. All this with Bach in his ears, to wash away nocturnal sin.
Hélène
De Bruyne
by Jill Mathieu
Hélène De Bruyne taught me how to write. Not in a mentor-like way (I have Nicolas to thank for that), I mean she taught me to draw a’s with a full belly and capital L’s that curled with a calligraphic swoosh. Hélène is my mother.
She does not know that I put her on the website, but I had to, because my mother is the kind of Xena The Warrior Princess who has been a vet all her life and then just decided to become a translator. She is as good at translating from and into French as she is at cutting off dogs’ testicles. And she also does a very good osso bucco. Anyway. (My mother would prefer to translate with pen and paper, but the problem is her illegible doctor’s hand. It would just look like Foux du FaFa French.)
Ines
Van Impe
by Filip Vandewiele
[KEY PHRASE]
The winged writer blogs in blasts.
She stews a story that forever lasts.
[BASELINE]
Makes a long story brief and deep.