Tag: blogging

About Me

Change in routine

Autumn

I had established the routine of replying to a writing prompt on Reddit every Monday morning, but frankly, I’m already feeling burnt out on Reddit.

The reason why it worked was because I had to get up earlier than usual on Monday, and had a decent hour of musing while waking up with coffee. However, that phase is probably over with for good, and I no longer have that space of time.

I’m just not an internet-oriented person. My idea of an afternoon well spent is finding cool mushrooms while out bike riding with the kids. I don’t do social media. I do real life. Call it a weakness.

I don’t actually have the patience to look through endless numbers of writing prompts. Not when I have a bunch of other things to do and an extra hour of sleep to work with.

Maybe some other routine will work itself out, but since being a Reddit celebrity doesn’t appeal to me all that much, I want to devote my free time to finishing my current novel-in-progress. You know, the one that I’ve been working on for over a year. Yeah, that one.

Truth be told, that novel is the reason why I started posting on Reddit in the first place. I WANT people to read it when its done, and I figured that I could use some more visibility to accomplish that goal. However, that just ain’t gonna happen if I never finish!

So, change in routine.

About Writing

Summer update schedule

Autumn

As much fun as it is to blog every single day, I’ve been finding myself with considerably less mental energy for my other hobbies, and they have tapered off until they became no more. The cumulative effect is that I’ve been feeling more unbalanced and less grounded, since I utilize those fiddly hand motions with sewing or crochet to focus my mind and clear my thoughts. It’s meditative, and I need it.

That, in addition with all the summertime activities that I want to indulge in (we need to go to the pool often enough to justify the price of the membership), has led me to decide that I will update on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and continue with my weekend Inspiration posts as already established. While you probably assumed that the Inspiration posts were just filler (ha!), my hope is that they will help with ‘like meeting like’ in a way that blogging itself can’t accomplish — my main goal is to find others who are like me.

Since I’m going to be updating significantly less, I will make more of an effort to write longer posts with plenty of rambling about nothing in particular, to help you feel like I’m not jipping you out of my wonderful presence. I am reminded of that one time, when the weather was noteworthy is some mundane sort of way that I’m truthfully just flat-out making up because heck if I can actually recollect, when I did something that’s vaguely relevant but also mostly made up, to make you think that I live an interesting yet peaceful sort of life full of adventure and zen, magically balanced in a way that no real person could ever manage to pull off. Ah yes, those were the days. Don’t you just love anecdotes?

Okay, okay, reality is that the CRAZY is always thrashing at the bars of its carefully guarded cage, snapping at any fingers that venture too close, and waiting for the chance to escape. Sometimes it’s fun to let the CRAZY loose and run around screaming, but othertimes I need to put away the clean laundry before the cats rub their fur all over it. That’s the real balancing act.

Remember: Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’m off to the pool.

About Me

Literary World

Autumn

Whenever I take a gander at the hottest new releases on Amazon, I can’t help but feel like there really isn’t a place for me in the literary world. It’s not that I don’t believe that I have the skill to write, but rather, I think that society’s tastes have drifted too far for my novels to have much appeal.

I’m old fashioned, and I like sentences that flow well together as an easy thought, that can be read out loud to others. I like to focus more on straightforward storytelling, and I don’t particularly care about impressing anyone with my command of purple prose. I’m nothing like Game of Thrones, and I don’t feel any desire to erase my own voice in order to imitate the bestsellers. I don’t have any points to prove; I’m just make-believing because I like to, and savoring the process of filling up page after page.

I really couldn’t care less about what celebrities or the New York Times say about anything. Their opinions are more of a disincentive, to be truthful, and I will feel like an epic failure as an individualist if I gained their approval.

Sometimes I think that the real world is all about hyper-conformity, and trying as hard as possible to be “3 edgy 5 you” to prove how thoroughly you belong in the 21st century. Me? I’m enamored with the basics of True Love and Motherhood, and it doesn’t bother me that I don’t particularly belong to any century.

Ultimately, it doesn’t much matter. I’ve never been one for approval seeking, and in many ways I’ve lived my life to the opposite. As long as I’m happy and fulfilled, nothing else really matters.

I just kind of wish that I wasn’t so gosh darn weird compared to everyone else. Why can’t there be more weirdos in the world?

About Me

Conformity

Autumn

In the past, I used to try to socialize more. My oldest is very outgoing, and when she was 4-years-old, I felt guilty about being such a retiring introvert. Unfortunately, at that age, her social circle was my social circle, so I decided to put myself out there and see about those mom groups. The neighbor who was heavily involved in them seemed to be an okay person (I found out later that she was duplicitous AF), so I thought it would be a safe bet with at least one other “friend” already there.

At 22, I had danced naked in a forest during a thunderstorm (there was no chance of anyone else being around to see me), and I had felt magnificently connected to all of the elements of the Earth. I can still vividly remember the dark clouds overhead, the pink flash of lightning, the prickle of goosebumps in the cold rain, and the elation of nature and magic. I felt that I could never be struck down.

At 28, I was shrinking into myself, feeling hopelessly like an outsider around my peers, small and insignificant in their eyes. In turn, I found them to be boring, controlling, and generally unpleasant, and I was miserable around them. I hated being there. Hated being the only mom who carried my baby in my arms instead of hauling around a car seat, and the defensive reactions I got when I simply commented that it was because I thought car seats were cumbersome. Seemingly, everything about me was not only wrong, but actively offensive.

As much as I admire the stereotype of the self-sacrificing mother, there’s a huge difference between sharing my last bite of brownie and selling my soul to fit in. I have my limits.

Shortly after I quit, it filtered back to me that they had all been calling me a “doormat” behind my back. Um, what? I’m supposed to prove that I’m not a doormat by . . . abandoning my natural personality to become what someone else thinks I should be instead? No thank you, I’d much rather be a doormat; there’s more dignity in it.

No matter how others try to cajole or criticize me, I stubbornly stick to what I am. Why? Because I remember how it felt to dance with the wind and rain as the thunder kept the beat. Because I actually look at my peers, dressed in unflattering leggings with their hair tied on the very top of their heads like Teletubbies, and I know that I could never in a million years take myself seriously if I looked like that. Because my Jupiter is in Aries, so I need to be an uncompromising individualist in everything I do. Because I know what makes me happy, and what doesn’t.

As for my oldest, I adore the way she naturally is, and I don’t want her to learn to sacrifice her personality to have fake friends. It would break my heart if I lost her like that.

As a writer, experiences like that always get filed away in the back of my mind, along with all of the emotion and aftermath, to reappear as overarching themes in my stories.

About Me

Cellphones

Autumn

My cellphone bit the dust.

I don’t consider myself to be a phone person. More than once, I’ve been the only mom working on crochet while waiting for the kids, while everyone else played on their phones. Mine lived and died in my purse, so if I was ever in the yard, or in my sewing room, I was unreachable — the old fashioned “do not disturb.” I like it that way.

But when the darn thing wouldn’t turn on, my first reaction was anxiety. How am I supposed to know when my appointments are? NOOOO!!

And I kind of hated that I was dependent on my phone.

I don’t think that technology is evil, or anything like that. It’s convenient to enter everything into my phone at the same time I make the appointments, to always have my grocery list handy for impromptu visits to the store, and to text random things to my husband all day long for the reassurance that he didn’t die in an accident while we were apart. I just also believe that I should be functional and not have a meltdown without all of that.

I decided to buy something newer, for the “pedometer” feature that my old phone didn’t have (I’ve had to think a lot more about fitness since baby #4), and ordered something from Ebay. While I wait for it to arrive, I will be 100% unplugged.

I’ve spent most of my life this way, yet now the prospect seems strange and a little unnerving.

More focus for writing, I suppose.

About Me

Solstice

Autumn

Summer is not my best season.

I don’t have much heat tolerance, and the summer months are spent chugging electrolyte mixes while waiting for the hottest part of the day to hurry up and be over with. Popsicle’s are not so much a treat as a necessity around here.

Of course, there’s nothing quite like sitting outside on a warm summer night and listening to the crickets. Sometimes, the best part of life can be found in the quietest of moments.

This year, I’m going to play as hard as I can, heat tolerance be damned. I’ve got a big freezer and Popsicle’s to spare.

Happy Solstice.

About Me

On blogging

Autumn

I actually really like blogging.

As a teenager, I religiously kept a Livejournal for years, posting something every. single. day. In a different life, I would have transferred those skillz over to a less angsty platform, and made a shot toward becoming a professional blogger.

In a different life.

But 2011 found me living out of a car, and once I saw the world from that angle, I never recovered from it.

Just as well, really, because in interim a number of blogger-culture quirks popped up that make my teeth hurt.

I don’t read many blogs now. A few years ago I enjoyed crafting blogs, until I realized that the quality of the actual crafts was dropping precipitously, while those popular bloggers were publishing how-to books that were teaching sloppy techniques. They didn’t care about the crafts; they cared about monetizing.

I’m enough of an arteest to believe that money comes second to artistic integrity. I won’t try to sell something that I was too lazy to put any effort into.

Sometimes I wonder how many other people care. I wonder how many other people are tired of vapid content generators that are concerned more about page views than connecting with readers. I wonder how many people are like me … if anyone.

I like blogging. I’ll probably start putting more energy into it from now on, simply because I’m tired of hiding who I am for fear of being hurt. I just refuse to be anything other than me, especially for a paycheck.