Have you ever been freaked out when a casual acquaintance from ‘real life’ found your blog? Or when your Sitemeter showed a steady stream of Google pervs visiting your site? Do you wonder about whether to put up photos of your children or your friends on your blog, for fear of your privacy? Many of us have experienced these unsettling moments, and questioned or even changed our writing styles and our habits as a result.
What strategies do you use to reach the audience you want, while maintaining your own privacy? Most bloggers use some kind of anonymization or privacy strategy, a ‘screen name’ being the most simple and obvious.
Mommy-blogger and researcher Aimée Morrison (Department of English, University of Waterloo, Canada) is conducting a study of writing strategies to protect privacy. She has set up a voluntary, anonymous 15- to 20-minute survey at http://english.uwaterloo.ca/~ahm/ that asks questions about such strategies, for example, if you use password protection to limit your writing’s audience. Follow the link to learn more about the study, or to participate. You can also contact Prof. Morrison directly at ahm [at] uwaterloo [dot] ca for more information.
Aimée is going to BlogHer in San Francisco, and she’d love to interview you in person if you’re going—send her an email at the address above.
Please feel free to repost this message, unchanged, to your blog to encourage others to participate too.
-----
This study has been reviewed by, and received ethics clearance
through, the Office of Research Ethics, University of Waterloo.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Thursday, May 15, 2008
The Moving Finger....
When Hillary Clinton made her gaffe about running the gauntlet of fire in Kosovo, there was a lot of editorial comment in the press about memory and how a person edits it. I got interested in the discussion and went and did some research, culminating in reading a book called White Gloves, How We Create Ourselves Through Memory, by John Kotre. This book turned out to be a bit off the topic I was looking for, but is a marvelous read for anyone who doesn't have basic psychology training but is interested in how memory works to form character in young children.
And so I started thinking about memory forming my character and that of my daughters. And how I edit memory myself. The premise of the book is that we form memory in different ways at different ages, and that memory is stored and accessed in layers. One of the major things we do is to stretch memory to cover more than the original event – leading to, for instance, a clear memory that it was always sunny in the summer at the cottage. Or the conviction that your sister always got the first chance at something and you got second. These convictions shape your perception of reality as an adult – causing extra misery if your week of vacation is rainy or colouring your reaction to your sister's success. It is possible, according to Kotre to deconstruct these memories and influence how you react to things, although he is very sceptical about accessing childhood memories (regressing, I think is the term, but I took the book back to the library).
A lot of our childhood memories are, in fact, not ours but are picked up from the adults around us and incorporated as if they were real. We tell our children stories about themselves and they internalize these stories. Or, at least, my family did it that way. My grandmother and my mother told me stories about myself as a baby or a two year old or whatever. I can identify some of these stories as dramatizations when I think about them. Or at least as edited versions of an event that was probably a lot more shapeless when it took place. As an example, my mother would tell, repeatedly, a story about taking me to the House of Commons public gallery at the age of three and being embarrassed by my saying in clear and ringing tones 'there's the man who wore Daddy's pants' about an MP who was my father's friend, causing all the MP's to look up at the gallery. This story was supposed to illustrate my precocious command of clear speech and, I suppose, that I was an extroverted toddler. The tale has become part of my mental furniture. I have no clue how it really happened, but I think of myself as having been a confident and extroverted child.
I think we all do this to our children to some extent. My grandmother relied on her memory; my mother did much the same. When I do what my daughters call 'telling baby stories' I tend to pull out photograph albums to illustrate things, or I tell stories from the photographs. Because although my grandmother and my mother did have photographs, they were far fewer and mostly static poses. I have maybe half a dozen images of my mother as a little girl. I have more of myself in my first three years because my father was in the navy during WWII and the family sent him photographs; it was much more expensive, relatively, to take and develop photos in the '40's and '50's. Even in the '60's, colour photographs were an item that most people had to budget for. Today's disposable cameras and $.19 prints amaze me; even more astounding is the digital photograph revolution, making still and live photography available in quantity immediately. And so, where my mother relied on her memory, my daughter will have not only still photography but also video to discuss with her daughter.
And there is the mommy blog. Unless your mother kept a diary or a baby book, your stories, like mine, rely on the spoken word backed up with still photographs or even the occasional grainy 'home movie'. Mommy bloggers' children will have the stories preserved, in their original form, backed with copious illustrations in living and sometimes moving colour, put together as the event unfolded. You will probably still retell seminal stories to your children. But your blog will be there to give them a different look, a time frozen reference, to these stories. And to the woman who was telling them.
I wonder a lot about how that will unfold. I picture my granddaughter remembering, say, planting flowers with grama. And there will be the story, with photographs of her in her bug shirt lining up the plant pots. Not raw data, certainly. All of us necessarily edit the stories as we tell them, shaping them to fit the time and space we have to get the story down, emphasizing the point we want to make about what happened. Even bits of dialogue get edited for coherency or chosen to fit into the thought thread as it is spun out onto the page.
I wonder, as I write this, how my mother would have blogged about her day at the House of Commons with her daughter. Or how she felt about raising a child alone when her husband was out sailing around in a corvette in the North Atlantic, in constant danger. I have these stories as she told them recollected in tranquility and, I am sure, smoothed into a pleasing shape by time and repetition. I know that the stories I tell to my daughters are, in fact, partly constructions formed by time and retelling. The stories about my granddaughter, on the other hand, are immediate, although shaped. I almost wish I could live long enough to understand if there will be an appreciable difference.
I won't. When Little Stuff is, say, forty, I would be 101. I'm not hoping to be that old; don't much want to be, tell the truth. And so I write this blog, a message sent forward into the future with hope and love, and try my best to make it a true record, even though I know it can't be perfect, of who I am, what I think, and how we were together.
Crossposted from Them's My Sentiments
And so I started thinking about memory forming my character and that of my daughters. And how I edit memory myself. The premise of the book is that we form memory in different ways at different ages, and that memory is stored and accessed in layers. One of the major things we do is to stretch memory to cover more than the original event – leading to, for instance, a clear memory that it was always sunny in the summer at the cottage. Or the conviction that your sister always got the first chance at something and you got second. These convictions shape your perception of reality as an adult – causing extra misery if your week of vacation is rainy or colouring your reaction to your sister's success. It is possible, according to Kotre to deconstruct these memories and influence how you react to things, although he is very sceptical about accessing childhood memories (regressing, I think is the term, but I took the book back to the library).
A lot of our childhood memories are, in fact, not ours but are picked up from the adults around us and incorporated as if they were real. We tell our children stories about themselves and they internalize these stories. Or, at least, my family did it that way. My grandmother and my mother told me stories about myself as a baby or a two year old or whatever. I can identify some of these stories as dramatizations when I think about them. Or at least as edited versions of an event that was probably a lot more shapeless when it took place. As an example, my mother would tell, repeatedly, a story about taking me to the House of Commons public gallery at the age of three and being embarrassed by my saying in clear and ringing tones 'there's the man who wore Daddy's pants' about an MP who was my father's friend, causing all the MP's to look up at the gallery. This story was supposed to illustrate my precocious command of clear speech and, I suppose, that I was an extroverted toddler. The tale has become part of my mental furniture. I have no clue how it really happened, but I think of myself as having been a confident and extroverted child.
I think we all do this to our children to some extent. My grandmother relied on her memory; my mother did much the same. When I do what my daughters call 'telling baby stories' I tend to pull out photograph albums to illustrate things, or I tell stories from the photographs. Because although my grandmother and my mother did have photographs, they were far fewer and mostly static poses. I have maybe half a dozen images of my mother as a little girl. I have more of myself in my first three years because my father was in the navy during WWII and the family sent him photographs; it was much more expensive, relatively, to take and develop photos in the '40's and '50's. Even in the '60's, colour photographs were an item that most people had to budget for. Today's disposable cameras and $.19 prints amaze me; even more astounding is the digital photograph revolution, making still and live photography available in quantity immediately. And so, where my mother relied on her memory, my daughter will have not only still photography but also video to discuss with her daughter.
And there is the mommy blog. Unless your mother kept a diary or a baby book, your stories, like mine, rely on the spoken word backed up with still photographs or even the occasional grainy 'home movie'. Mommy bloggers' children will have the stories preserved, in their original form, backed with copious illustrations in living and sometimes moving colour, put together as the event unfolded. You will probably still retell seminal stories to your children. But your blog will be there to give them a different look, a time frozen reference, to these stories. And to the woman who was telling them.
I wonder a lot about how that will unfold. I picture my granddaughter remembering, say, planting flowers with grama. And there will be the story, with photographs of her in her bug shirt lining up the plant pots. Not raw data, certainly. All of us necessarily edit the stories as we tell them, shaping them to fit the time and space we have to get the story down, emphasizing the point we want to make about what happened. Even bits of dialogue get edited for coherency or chosen to fit into the thought thread as it is spun out onto the page.
I wonder, as I write this, how my mother would have blogged about her day at the House of Commons with her daughter. Or how she felt about raising a child alone when her husband was out sailing around in a corvette in the North Atlantic, in constant danger. I have these stories as she told them recollected in tranquility and, I am sure, smoothed into a pleasing shape by time and repetition. I know that the stories I tell to my daughters are, in fact, partly constructions formed by time and retelling. The stories about my granddaughter, on the other hand, are immediate, although shaped. I almost wish I could live long enough to understand if there will be an appreciable difference.
I won't. When Little Stuff is, say, forty, I would be 101. I'm not hoping to be that old; don't much want to be, tell the truth. And so I write this blog, a message sent forward into the future with hope and love, and try my best to make it a true record, even though I know it can't be perfect, of who I am, what I think, and how we were together.
Crossposted from Them's My Sentiments
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Help An Academi-Mom
Are you a mom? Do you blog?
I am a mom trying to finish my PhD; and I need YOUR help!
I am conducting academic research FOR you and ABOUT you. I have a particular interest in studying those things that make the transition to motherhood easier, or at the very least, better understood. The growing number of “Mommy Bloggers” has piqued my interest and I am researching the experience of blogging for mothers of young children. Your help would be greatly appreciated and go a long way toward increasing the knowledge of the ways in which blogging can be meaningful for people like mothers.
Please complete my survey and let me know about your blogging experience.
Please click HERE to learn more, or simply click the web button that you see below.
I know your time is valuable, thank you so much for participating.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Are They Reinventing Motherhood (or just giving us a sneak peak into previously private journals)?
Guest Post by Ron of R-World (cross-posted at R-World)
- Kathleen Madigan
Motherhood is a confusing performance, like painting for the legally blind, the preoccupied audience of husband and children caught up in their own drama or anomie and chronically unaware of the great effort expended on their behalf.
While philosophers love the idea of humanity, it is mothers who navigate the real mess of it, the humanity of little people who leave in their wake lost shoes and scuffed walls. A woman whose charm, beauty, and intelligence has given her a variety of romantic options suddenly finds herself confined to home with a big-headed creature who, if he could talk, would go on at length about the flavor of the couch.
And about this game of romance. In what other arena does success require one to immediately retire? Imagine Tiger Woods forced to the side lines after winning his first master’s tournament, victory forcing him into retirement, and you get some sense of how disorienting it is for a woman have finally navigated the mine field of love to learn that this part of life is over; from now on, odd and beguiling children are likely to be the sole beneficiaries of their charms.
But in their blogs, these smart mothers may be creating a new kind of motherhood – at the very least they are finally performing before an appreciative audience of other mothers who “get” what they are doing.
While the act of mothering may be basically the same, its context has been transformed in the last few decades. Mothers no longer sit in a web of extended family that play the role of easily available baby sitters and reference points, people who can sit watch against the attacks of insanity. Mothers are often raising children hundreds or thousands of miles away from their own mothers and sisters. Churches are less likely to provide a default community. University education and an excess of reading has created an ideological divide between them and their own family, even if they did live close by, a divide that makes sharing parenting problems and tips awkward at best. Probably at no time have mothers been more isolated, less able to depend on those around them.
Blogging mothers have done two things: they’ve created a network for themselves and they’ve given the rest of us front row seats into a performance that would have otherwise been completely missed. We get the jokes that would have sailed over the heads of their children, the expressions of serious frustrations that preoccupied husbands dismiss as petty, and the profound insights that would have been forgotten by the time they finally got a coffee break with friends, unable to remember what they were so eager to say now that they are forced to socialize distracted by the peripheral parenting that characterizes almost every activity at a particular stage of life.
It might just be that historians and sociologists will eventually conclude that the blogging mothers have created a new kind of motherhood. Meanwhile, the rest of us are beneficiaries of their willingness – perhaps even their eagerness – to perform, at last, before an audience that can’t help but applaud.
------------
If you are looking for examples of this blog genre, here are four I’ve come to enjoy. (And to be clear, these women are mother bloggers in the same way that Bruce Jenner was a javelin-throwing athlete. It is a big part of who they are, but it is by no means all that they write about or all that they are.) All of these women show a lack of pretense, a sort of unfeigned modesty uncalled for when one can write so smartly and with such humor. Theirs has been a reminder to this idea junkie that behind abstract terms like humanity lie real people with runny noses and definite ideas about appropriate wardrobe and menu selections even at the ripe old age of 7.
Kyran Pittman pushes at the boundary of blogging, waffling between writing about the daily drama and at times actually transcending the genre with postings that seem to fall somewhere between short stories and vignettes. She is probably helping to pioneer a new form of literature.
Slouching Mother peels back the wrapper on motherhood in a way that is strangely honest without insistence on showing the scabs. Her stories are at turns provocative and warming, and she makes motherhood seem as beautiful and at times pathological as it must be, and is one of Kyran's fellow pioneers in the creation of a new literary form that might just get studied alongside the short story and novel in a few years.
Chesca has an unfair advantage over other bloggers because she not only writes with self deprecating humor, but could model – and often does for the benefit of her blog reading audience who get to pretend that they are in her living room as they leaf through the family photo album and listen to her whimsical and witty reports that she closes with unpredictable punch lines just often enough to keep readers off balance.
Cce’s brilliant writing is balanced by her rather quaint reading– she comes here most days. (Hello CCE.) Our exchange of comments has become for me a bit like mid-morning tea in which each of us gets to share what’s animated our thoughts and be heard and acknowledged before moving on with our day. I, for one, take comfort in sharing sensibilities with a woman this smart and talented, even if our lives are playing out in opposite corners of the country, in very different phases. And someday I plan to tell people that I was among the first to realize her potential.
For me, these mother bloggers do so much more than entertain. The rest of us get to be beneficiaries of expressions of charm that might have been muttered into the clothing hamper and lost in an earlier time. And I am at a stage of life when I get a little better sense of my own wife’s incredible performance of transforming sofa chewers into university students (sadly, about a decade or two after such awareness might have been of comfort). [And yes, that's my wife and children from about 14 years ago in the above picture. It would be fascinating to be able to read Sandi's blog from that time.]
Kids? It’s like living with homeless people. They’re cute but they can just chase you around all day long going, “Can I have dollar? I’m missing a shoe! I need a ride!”
- Kathleen Madigan
Motherhood is a confusing performance, like painting for the legally blind, the preoccupied audience of husband and children caught up in their own drama or anomie and chronically unaware of the great effort expended on their behalf.
While philosophers love the idea of humanity, it is mothers who navigate the real mess of it, the humanity of little people who leave in their wake lost shoes and scuffed walls. A woman whose charm, beauty, and intelligence has given her a variety of romantic options suddenly finds herself confined to home with a big-headed creature who, if he could talk, would go on at length about the flavor of the couch.And about this game of romance. In what other arena does success require one to immediately retire? Imagine Tiger Woods forced to the side lines after winning his first master’s tournament, victory forcing him into retirement, and you get some sense of how disorienting it is for a woman have finally navigated the mine field of love to learn that this part of life is over; from now on, odd and beguiling children are likely to be the sole beneficiaries of their charms.
But in their blogs, these smart mothers may be creating a new kind of motherhood – at the very least they are finally performing before an appreciative audience of other mothers who “get” what they are doing.
While the act of mothering may be basically the same, its context has been transformed in the last few decades. Mothers no longer sit in a web of extended family that play the role of easily available baby sitters and reference points, people who can sit watch against the attacks of insanity. Mothers are often raising children hundreds or thousands of miles away from their own mothers and sisters. Churches are less likely to provide a default community. University education and an excess of reading has created an ideological divide between them and their own family, even if they did live close by, a divide that makes sharing parenting problems and tips awkward at best. Probably at no time have mothers been more isolated, less able to depend on those around them.
Blogging mothers have done two things: they’ve created a network for themselves and they’ve given the rest of us front row seats into a performance that would have otherwise been completely missed. We get the jokes that would have sailed over the heads of their children, the expressions of serious frustrations that preoccupied husbands dismiss as petty, and the profound insights that would have been forgotten by the time they finally got a coffee break with friends, unable to remember what they were so eager to say now that they are forced to socialize distracted by the peripheral parenting that characterizes almost every activity at a particular stage of life.
It might just be that historians and sociologists will eventually conclude that the blogging mothers have created a new kind of motherhood. Meanwhile, the rest of us are beneficiaries of their willingness – perhaps even their eagerness – to perform, at last, before an audience that can’t help but applaud.
------------
If you are looking for examples of this blog genre, here are four I’ve come to enjoy. (And to be clear, these women are mother bloggers in the same way that Bruce Jenner was a javelin-throwing athlete. It is a big part of who they are, but it is by no means all that they write about or all that they are.) All of these women show a lack of pretense, a sort of unfeigned modesty uncalled for when one can write so smartly and with such humor. Theirs has been a reminder to this idea junkie that behind abstract terms like humanity lie real people with runny noses and definite ideas about appropriate wardrobe and menu selections even at the ripe old age of 7.
Kyran Pittman pushes at the boundary of blogging, waffling between writing about the daily drama and at times actually transcending the genre with postings that seem to fall somewhere between short stories and vignettes. She is probably helping to pioneer a new form of literature.
Slouching Mother peels back the wrapper on motherhood in a way that is strangely honest without insistence on showing the scabs. Her stories are at turns provocative and warming, and she makes motherhood seem as beautiful and at times pathological as it must be, and is one of Kyran's fellow pioneers in the creation of a new literary form that might just get studied alongside the short story and novel in a few years.
Chesca has an unfair advantage over other bloggers because she not only writes with self deprecating humor, but could model – and often does for the benefit of her blog reading audience who get to pretend that they are in her living room as they leaf through the family photo album and listen to her whimsical and witty reports that she closes with unpredictable punch lines just often enough to keep readers off balance.
Cce’s brilliant writing is balanced by her rather quaint reading– she comes here most days. (Hello CCE.) Our exchange of comments has become for me a bit like mid-morning tea in which each of us gets to share what’s animated our thoughts and be heard and acknowledged before moving on with our day. I, for one, take comfort in sharing sensibilities with a woman this smart and talented, even if our lives are playing out in opposite corners of the country, in very different phases. And someday I plan to tell people that I was among the first to realize her potential.
For me, these mother bloggers do so much more than entertain. The rest of us get to be beneficiaries of expressions of charm that might have been muttered into the clothing hamper and lost in an earlier time. And I am at a stage of life when I get a little better sense of my own wife’s incredible performance of transforming sofa chewers into university students (sadly, about a decade or two after such awareness might have been of comfort). [And yes, that's my wife and children from about 14 years ago in the above picture. It would be fascinating to be able to read Sandi's blog from that time.]
Monday, February 4, 2008
Writing, Blogging and Criticism.
When I was ten, my English teacher told me, “You have a gift. Make sure you use it. I fully expect to walk into a bookstore one day and see your name on a novel.” It’s been many years and the path of my life has taken me many different ways, but I’ve never really forgotten what she said.
Heading into college, I wondered if I could make a decent living as a writer, and decided to pursue my other passion, biology, with the intention of going to vet school. I received my biology degree, changed my mind about vet school and after two and a half years as a biologist at NIH, decided that while science in the classroom is fun, science in the lab is boring. For the past three years, I’ve been a stay-home mom and part-time vet tech, occupations which have given me plenty to write about.
Almost a year ago, a friend urged me to start a blog, which I did mainly to keep out of town relatives up to date on my kids. As it turned out, I love blogging and have yet to run out of things to talk about. It’s awakened that desire to be a professional writer. I think I’ve got the chops for it, and given some help with navigating the industry, I’m confident that I could eventually be successful.
Then someone anonymously left an unkind comment on one of my posts and I learned something about myself. I’m not that concerned about the opinion of someone who doesn’t have the guts to leave their name, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say it stung a little. When you’re good at something, it’s natural to want other people to think you’re good at it too. Reminders that not everyone will agree with you can be hard to swallow. Before I can make my way as a writer, I need to develop a thicker skin, because criticism is as inevitable as the day is long.
Over the summer, a columnist in my hometown wrote a piece about pitbull bans and I strongly disagreed with him. We exchanged a few emails on the subject, but I tried to make it clear that while I thought he was wrong, I respected his perspective. When I looked up the column online, I was shocked to see some of the hateful comments readers had left behind. I wonder if the author reads the comments on the site, and if he does, how he deals with them.
After that, I happened upon the blog of one of my favorite authors, Tess Gerritsen, who has twenty novels to her name. When you read her blog, you can feel her anxiety about book reviews and sales, about success and failure, and it struck me that even a seasoned author like Gerritsen is prone to the same misgivings as the rest of us.
I think the Internet makes it easier to be cruel or hateful because of the impersonal nature of cyberspace. I read things online all the time that I hope people would never say to another person’s face. It’s easier to be mean when you don’t have to look someone in the eye or worry about bumping into them at the grocery store. So I also believe a writer needs to consider the source when taking criticism over the Internet. The author who supported pitbull bans is not a horrible, dog hating person, and the people who left angry comments are probably not violent or antisocial, they’re probably just animal lovers who feel strongly about the subject and who reacted emotionally after reading the column.
In addition, a writer needs to decide how to handle comments that turn ugly. A difference in opinion is one thing; nasty accusations that lend nothing to the conversation are, in my opinion, better off being deleted.
I dismissed the comment on my blog because I’m smart enough to know that not everyone will agree with me, and I’m not egotistical enough to believe that my opinion is the only one out there or that I am always right. For me, my goal is to not take criticism personally, but to use it as a tool to make myself a better writer, to expand my readership, to reach out to a different audience through words.
**Crossposted at The Great Walls Of Baltimore
Heading into college, I wondered if I could make a decent living as a writer, and decided to pursue my other passion, biology, with the intention of going to vet school. I received my biology degree, changed my mind about vet school and after two and a half years as a biologist at NIH, decided that while science in the classroom is fun, science in the lab is boring. For the past three years, I’ve been a stay-home mom and part-time vet tech, occupations which have given me plenty to write about.
Almost a year ago, a friend urged me to start a blog, which I did mainly to keep out of town relatives up to date on my kids. As it turned out, I love blogging and have yet to run out of things to talk about. It’s awakened that desire to be a professional writer. I think I’ve got the chops for it, and given some help with navigating the industry, I’m confident that I could eventually be successful.
Then someone anonymously left an unkind comment on one of my posts and I learned something about myself. I’m not that concerned about the opinion of someone who doesn’t have the guts to leave their name, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say it stung a little. When you’re good at something, it’s natural to want other people to think you’re good at it too. Reminders that not everyone will agree with you can be hard to swallow. Before I can make my way as a writer, I need to develop a thicker skin, because criticism is as inevitable as the day is long.
Over the summer, a columnist in my hometown wrote a piece about pitbull bans and I strongly disagreed with him. We exchanged a few emails on the subject, but I tried to make it clear that while I thought he was wrong, I respected his perspective. When I looked up the column online, I was shocked to see some of the hateful comments readers had left behind. I wonder if the author reads the comments on the site, and if he does, how he deals with them.
After that, I happened upon the blog of one of my favorite authors, Tess Gerritsen, who has twenty novels to her name. When you read her blog, you can feel her anxiety about book reviews and sales, about success and failure, and it struck me that even a seasoned author like Gerritsen is prone to the same misgivings as the rest of us.
I think the Internet makes it easier to be cruel or hateful because of the impersonal nature of cyberspace. I read things online all the time that I hope people would never say to another person’s face. It’s easier to be mean when you don’t have to look someone in the eye or worry about bumping into them at the grocery store. So I also believe a writer needs to consider the source when taking criticism over the Internet. The author who supported pitbull bans is not a horrible, dog hating person, and the people who left angry comments are probably not violent or antisocial, they’re probably just animal lovers who feel strongly about the subject and who reacted emotionally after reading the column.
In addition, a writer needs to decide how to handle comments that turn ugly. A difference in opinion is one thing; nasty accusations that lend nothing to the conversation are, in my opinion, better off being deleted.
I dismissed the comment on my blog because I’m smart enough to know that not everyone will agree with me, and I’m not egotistical enough to believe that my opinion is the only one out there or that I am always right. For me, my goal is to not take criticism personally, but to use it as a tool to make myself a better writer, to expand my readership, to reach out to a different audience through words.
**Crossposted at The Great Walls Of Baltimore
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Seeking out my own corner in the domestic jungle jumble
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf
The above quote has become somewhat of a cliche. In fact, I've seen it trounced about in the papers twice in the past two weeks on various different subjects. Just exchange "fiction" to anything from "scrapbooking" to "studying" to "sewing" to whatever, it's an undeniably contextually mouldable idea. In a perfect world.
Women tend to drag it out at times of flux or transition; as if they need to quantify their changeability, if such excuses were necessary (as they often tend to be). However it is a somewhat tired rubric, I think, now.
Still, I find myself at a loss to come up with an original caption to describe the following:
Yes, this is what counts as my own piece of space in our ever-claustrophobic household. Last week, over a two-day period, I turfed clothing, re-located Christmas ornaments and lonely, unused luggage to the garage; I manoeuvred furniture without causing bodily harm to either myself or my children. I did it all with the prayer in my mind, "Please let the table fit. Please let me have this place where I can shut the door."
As you can see, I've set it up with all my blogging/ writing accoutrements. It's not what I'd call an office; it's not much of what I'd call anything, really.
But it's mine and who knows what may be achieved in here. Oh, the dreams I can dream; magic made tangible from the ether of mothballs and the remnants of boot-polish and dry-cleaning chemicals.
Or I could just get high off them.
That could be good too.
*Please, just on a writerly note, I am fully aware of how many compound adjectives I used in this post. Just so you know, and you know I know.
Cross posted at MiscMum
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Googlereaderphobia
Googlereaderphobia* (from the Greek φόβος "Phobos," meaning fear) is defined as an irrational, persistent, and intense fear of checking Google Reader. This fear motivates the avoidance of Reader. When avoidance is not possible, intense anxiety results. Such anxiety increases as a function of the number of posts labeled "new" or "unread"; if this number equals or exceeds 100, efforts to avoid Reader may become frantic and cause significant impairment in one's social and occupational functioning.
Anxiety may be relieved, albeit temporarily, by marking unread posts as read, although this behavior is recognized by the sufferer as illogical and dysfunctional. A small but substantial group (on the order of 15 percent) of patients reports paranoid ideation to the effect that on the rare occasion that there are no posts remaining to be read, a new post pops up within seconds. This same group tends to view Google Reader as a malevolent entity, with startlingly and recognizably human features.
The only known treatment is the total disabling of one's feed aggregator(s).
*also known as Bloglinesphobia or feedreaderphobia, although these appellations are used less frequently.
Anxiety may be relieved, albeit temporarily, by marking unread posts as read, although this behavior is recognized by the sufferer as illogical and dysfunctional. A small but substantial group (on the order of 15 percent) of patients reports paranoid ideation to the effect that on the rare occasion that there are no posts remaining to be read, a new post pops up within seconds. This same group tends to view Google Reader as a malevolent entity, with startlingly and recognizably human features.
The only known treatment is the total disabling of one's feed aggregator(s).
*also known as Bloglinesphobia or feedreaderphobia, although these appellations are used less frequently.
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