Two little gifts arrived from the Cosmos today. Twice.
I am blessed.
I began thinking about BlogHer’s 10th Anniversary while waiting for my twin grand babies who are now very grownup three year old girls. From this juxtaposition I made wonderful discoveries.
One of the wonderful things about being a prolific blogger who has started dozens of blogs and scores of forgotten accounts is that I can rediscover myself through found writings from forgotten moments. This is what happened when I was reading about 10 x 10 and this coming year’s BlogHer Conference. I haven’t gotten that figured out as yet, but I started thinking about BlogHer’s influence on my life and writing this past decade and I started to wonder when it was exactly that I connected with BlogHer.
Way back then I was using pseudonyms and not caring particularly much about what the long-term implications of having multiple “identities” would mean over time. I had been The Word Wench on Brazen Hussies, Cuppakona on Yahoo, and Artemesia Pax aka ArtPax on a variety of peace and justice sites. Thinking back, I remembered that I first had joined BlogHer as ArtPax. So I searched BlogHer.com for posts under this name. I found them. Boy, I was stupid back then. I missed out on connecting with some wonderful bloggers early on.
I am soon (soon is a relative word) going to do some serious reminiscence about my last 10 years of blogging through the parallel history of my interaction with BlogHer. When I do I will post a link here.
I was a peace and justice blogger, a CODEPINK blogger, back then. Comments were mainly from trolls. I was not trying to build community, I was just trying to provide information and chronicle attempts to push societal consciousness back toward rational thought during the dark years of of Bush/Cheney. I did not follow the mommy blogging formula nor the blog-for-success formula that was developing way back then. I followed my own beliefs about what online writing should be back then. To find out more you will just have to follow along over the next month or so as writing a retrospective post that covers decade-plus-long blog development will take a bit of data gathering.
Good Enough vs Top of the Line Writing Tech
I love technology. There is some sort of undeveloped engineer somewhere inside of me.
In yesterday’s post I wrote about my recent experience with process of computer repair and replacement, the importance of protecting the technology that supports my business from pets, and the need for having a service and equipment providers you trust.
There are a few more aspects of the process that I would like to highlight as potentially informative and instructional to other small or micro business owners who are struggling as a start up or just dealing with the less than optimal economic environment for small business.
Photo credit: imelenchon from morguefile.com
What I Learned
- Zero interest consumer accounts can help a gal out when she starts a business on a shoe-string .
- A generous return policy allows for assessment of products and the likelihood that an unacceptable product will be replaced by a different, often more expensive product that meets the needs of the consumer.
- Tech reviews can emerge from trials and tribulations. I have experience with Windows 8 and with the Chromebook because of I tried them and found them to not meet my needs.
- Open Box, or returned, items rock.
The Chromebook
Many people, including sales reps in computer stores do not care for the Chromebook because it is not really a computer. The Chromebook functions as a vehicle to connect to the internet. It may work very well for writers who are looking for a portable tech product for working on cloud-based apps, Google docs, and websites. I found that I was pleasantly surprised by the number of things that I could work on and with while using the Chromebook.
For the record I was using a Samsung Chromebook. It had a good battery life, could connect with my WordPress sites with no problem, was just fine for accessing and altering my Google docs. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of applications within Google Play, the equivalent of an app store, that allowed me to do many things I did not anticipate that I would be able to do.
I happen to think, overall, that the Chromebook, at $250 or less, is a great option for bloggers who are working with very limited funds.
The two major things I did not like about the Chromebook were:
- the less than accurate cursor tracking that made graphic manipulation and game play (even simple Facebook or Zynga games) exercises in frustration.
- the low quality resolution of the screen that left my astigmatic and presbyotic eyes tired unless I was very disciplined about taking a break from the screen every half hour or so.
The Chromebook is good enough for my basic needs.
Upgrading to a MacBook Pro
When my MacBook Air was deemed irreparable I had to determine whether I would just work from the Chromebook which I had purchased while the MacBook Air was in the shop, or whether I would replace the Mac with another Mac. My reasons for choosing Best Buy have been stated before in yesterday’s post and above in today’s post. The specific equipment decision rests elsewhere beyond store or brand loyalty.
The first question I asked after being told by MacBook Air was junked was, “What open box Macs are available.” I had not anticipated going top of the line, especially since having my iPad stolen via a pickpocket this summer and realizing that I could not always afford to replace stolen equipment. I had the funds from the MacBook Air return, the clerk let me know I could also return the Chromebook with no problem, The Chromebook protection plan would also be refunded to my account. The only open box item available then and there was a retina display equipped MacBook Pro. I looked at the new MacBook Air models in stock, but they were close to $350 more than what I had paid for the open box one. I wasn’t sure it was really worth the price.
I think the retina screen is what won me over in the end. The resolution is so crisp, even for document editing that I can not wear my progressive lenses and work on the laptop. My eyes become strained when I wear progressives and the change in focus from keyboard, to bottom screen to top screen stresses my eyes with the constant shifting and refocusing. The Mac retina display is so much better than most screens that I can work without glasses and read everything n the screen. This is a personal constraint, but less eye-strain is a good thing, even if you still keep your glasses on. The resolution also allows me to work with detailed graphics and there is no tracking problem I have ever encountered on a Mac. The increased storage and the ability to play games are nice features but not deal makers or breakers. The lesser price of the open box item made the Pro fall within a price range I could afford. A new one fell outside of the range I could justify.
I am still perturbed that my cat started this whole saga with her fur-brained actions, but it turned out well. And it turned out in a way that allows me to have a great amount of confidence that I made a good choice among the options open to me.
Reflections, Reality, Reorganizing: a post in which I assess my writing business and ask for your help
Ok, this one is a real request for your opinions. I’m trying to figure out what to do next with sites, blogs, writing, and generally my career for the next however many years. Some of you know me in real life, some of you know me as a sassy and occasionally savvy writer. I will never stop writing. I will not stop being me. The two have been intertwined for at least 45 years. I love concepts transforming to fixed ideas as words appear on a page. It is a process that gives me reason to live. Really. It isn’t the only reason, but it is one of the reasons I love life.
Photo credit: mconnors from morguefile.com
The Challenge
I have to make some serious adjustments to my “projects” over the next year so that I can become successful or maintain success as a writer, businesswoman, citizen, and family member. This is a juggling act with which every woman writer I know struggles from time to time, with the time being a few moments every-once-in-a-while to constantly.
I used to think I juggled balls, now I know that I was juggling flaming chainsaws for lots of my life. I decided that sticking with bowling pins, preferably the kind not soaked in gasoline, will be my modus operandi for the next couple of years.
The Situation
I raised my daughter. I practiced vibrant, noisy, and somewhat effective, peace-making for many years when leaders of my country were apparently hell bent on bankrupting us in wars that benefitted no one but corporations who had interests in the natural resources of the places we fought. I muddled through a decade of debilitating depression with little help from anyone but therapists who I could sometimes afford to consult.
I rebuilt myself. I built poetry, websites, named cohorts, and created a sense of self that is strong though scarred. I have healed. And I have started many creative projects as I healed. I will market some of them.
The Products
I have all these things I could finish, package and market:
- This site: Reasoncreek.com
- Another site: BoomHer.com
- Several years of posts from BuildPeace.blogspot.com about being a peace activist could be turned into an ebook.
- Stacks of research, notes, and writings about Gene Stratton-Porter, a multiple top ten best selling author and seminal amateur ethologist and photographer, who influenced a generation of early leaders in 20th Century environmental thought such as Rachel Carson.
- Stacks of research, notes, and writings about The Later Born Baby Boomers, the original Gen-X, who were completely different from the elder brothers and sisters with whom they were lumped as “Boomers” when, in truth, they were too young for Woodstock, too young to experience the draft or fighting in Vietnam, or too young to experience a youth in which psychotropic substances were not readily available.
- Stacks of research, writing, and outlines, tables of contents, and chapters of a memoir about being a somewhat in tact adult survivor of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy medical child abuse.
- Really nifty organizational products for writers that I could market as e-publications.
- Two half-written e-books on terribly timely topic which I cannot divulge so no one else will beat me to them.
- All the trappings for fashioning amazing steampunk jewelry and art.
- At least five speculative fiction stories I need to write.
Prioritizing
I’m leaning toward reorganizing everything from all my sites with a few prime categories or sub-domains on one domain. But I’m not sure how to best manage these. More research is needed. I just don’t feel that I can do justice to more than one online venue and continue my BIG writing. What do you think?
Sunday is a Day Off or a Day for Free Writing
Since I am writing, it definitely is not a day off, so this must be free writing. The A to Z Blogging Challenge that is taking place this month gives participants a day off each week. I really, really like this whole thing of having a day off each week; it is civilized. But this month I am participating in BlogHer’s daily writing challenge, as well as the A to Z challenge, and it is an every single day challenge, although prompts, which are only suggested not required, are provided only for Monday through Friday with weekend days being topically free days when participants can write about anything.
For a day of rest, I had a very busy day.
The Meet Up group I coordinate, Tucson Women Bloggers, met this morning. It was a great experience, once again. Women of varying perspectives, experience levels, political persuasions, blogging types and needs all gathered together to exchange information, encourage and learn from each other, and strategize for how to build the best infrastructure we can for those will build upon the interconnected women’s history we create as we blog. Great new people, great returning members, and all of us together working toward the goal of getting the valuable information we all have as women out there to create change. Information is power.
Checked in on the home front and found all to be ok, so I went to pick up my new hybrid touchscreen laptop. I have only had my tablet and my desktop for almost two years. I have been wanting to try working on a PC so I will better understand what clients who are not Mac-o-philes have as context when they create their blogs, so I decided after an unfortunate iPad drop on the floor which left me with no sound on it, that this was the right time to return to using a laptop. I’d been checking out specs for a while and decided to look at ASUS because of price and good reviews. When I realized the inexpensive machine was light and smaller than most laptops, but bigger than a tablet and had a touch screen too. I decided to give it a go. So I picked up my new laptop today and I am now becoming reacquainted with Windows (though this is version 8), Microsoft Office and for the moment, Internet Explorer.
It has been an eventful day.
Cool Collaborators: Generation Fabulous
Women, as Apple used to say, “Think Different.” Thank heavens for that difference. I think it might save the world.
As I say in an article which I am honored to say was selected to be live during the inaugural launch of the Generation Fabulous site,
Women’s culture, which had been desperately filling every small crevice not already claimed by male culture, was bursting at the seams – and when the electronic niche of a globally interconnected world wide web opened, we flooded in with blogs and e-books, and all the knowledge, skills and strategies that we as women have been trying to keep alive in a world where ubiquitous limiting constraints worked against us.
This quote is wordy, and a bit intellectual, but what do you expect when we are describing one of the most significant spin-offs of the early electronic age?
Women’s empowerment and equalization of women in history were not among the intentions voiced in the planning of ARPAnet, Mosaic, and other defense and education communication technologies that led to what we now know as the internet, inter-webs, web, net, cloud and/or information highway. Cultural evolution is tricky that way. If you try to constrain, control, channel or “pipe” it, it will spring a leak, wriggle away, or morph into something completely different. Go with the flow.
Women flow, women think different, women persist. There is a flow or an energy among women of a certain age. I’ve written about it before.
No matter how troubled, unappreciated, stressed, overworked, or underpaid we women writers of a certain age may be, we are creating the structure of future with the paths we walk, the words we write, and the myths we disintegrate with our raging ray-guns powered by the energy released during hormonal fluctuations.
Zeitgeist is the word that comes to mind. The “spirit of the times” is real and perceptible to people who are aware of trajectories and trends as they emerge. I became aware of a group of women acting on Zeitgeist at the BlogHer conference last year who formed a critical mass. I was planning to launch a site, Done Nesting at that time, and found a group of women of a similar age to me, women who are of a certain age, and who were all, each and every one of them, ready to act or acting on the need for a non-Mommy-Blogger community, alliance, group, recognition… I spoke to many folks about how we, women of a certain age, felt about the how some of feeling that the unofficial but widely known target audience of BlogHer being Mommy Bloggers. I talked to Lesbian Dad, aka Polly, who is of a certain age, about this; but she is a mommy blogger even though she calls herself a dad. Even though Polly understood what I was talking about, and she was the only one besides Denise who understood what I, and other women who do not have children living in their household at the moment, were talking about when we said we felt excluded and ignored.
I do have to say as a disclaimer that there was one session at this conference last year, that addressed an older mommy blogging constituency, “Blogging into Midlife.” I missed it. Duh. I thought it was for 30 or 40-somethings. Yes, I am 50 something. I am still 24 in my head but time passes. So, I attended “Strength in Numbers” because of my interest in online organizing.
I met several other women, of a certain age, I had followed, read, admired, or just discovered at the conference at the Birds of a Feather Breakfast, and at another event that had nothing to do with BlogHer that was in NYC at the same time: a “Bloomer” gathering put on by the Boom Box Network.
There was change in the wind. Soon after the conference a group, GenFab, popped up on Facebook and I had found my Homies/Tribe/Peer Group.
I ruthlessly read and share with this group. Competition be damned! We are all Fabulous women writers who are for the most part of a certain age. Knowing what other women who were similarly motivated were doing helped me hone my ideas for a site. Done Nesting is on hold and I am moving forward with BoomHer.net. No writer creates for exactly the same audience, we all fill different niches. Few people, or marketing agencies, are skilled enough to even know how to determine real market share or audience and then create something that would target exactly the same group. If you know of anyone who can do this, please let me know! I want to work with them.
I choose to move forward together, create synergy, and increase the momentum of the trajectory of women creating their own legacy, in searchable form, on the internet. I am absolutely pleased as punch that Generation Fabulous, the site, (apart from the Facebook group) launched today. Women know how to coöperate, if we didn’t the species would have died out ages ago. So when asked about how I feel about great sites that might be viewed as competitors, I respond that we are not competitors, but rather, are smooth operators and cool collaborators . (Cue Sade here.)
Thirty Days Hath September
[one_half]September In Review
I don’t know where this month went. I’ve blogged every day in September as a part of a NaBloPoMo challenge. I have posted, essentially cross-posted, links to my daily posts whenever I can find a few additional minutes in the day to catch up with four Facebook blogging groups, as well as leaving a link on BlogHer’s Nablopomo September Posts page. Pinterest and Stumble Upon updates have been made less successfully than other updates. Google+ was utilized least well of the standard social media platforms this past month. Auto-generated and posted Twitter and Facebook posted links were the most regular. Facebook sends lots of folks to my site, but autoposts on Twitter rarely does. I have not really even dipped my toe into Instagram.
I’m going to have to rethink the entire update/marketing procedure to make it more streamlined targeted, effective, personal, and worthwhile. I’m not sure all that is possible at the same time though. Some changes do need to be made.
The most important writing and marketing lessons of September for me were the ones related to pipelines and previously mapped out, written, and scheduled posts. The stress goes away and the act of seeing words come together in a meaningful way on the page is fun when the immediate, “gotta get it out today” pressure is removed. I start posts now even though I know I won’t finish them the same day, or perhaps ever, but if the same thoughts or topic crop up as something I want to write about again, I have something from which to add to, or subtract so the blank page is not a problem for me to face.
The Wednesday Weekly App post, even though has ‘t been every week, is a definite keeper. I will probably include something like a Mastiff Monday, too, to include my undoubtedly in the offing puppy posts. The addition of another puppy into my life gives me another topic about which to have recurrent posts. Like I need another topic!
I still think that writing every single day may be a bit much for me. I might give myself weekends off, if I don’t feel like writing on a Saturday or Sunday. And if I do feel like writing, I can polish, edit or get a few days ahead with posts or work solely on the structure and back end of my sites.
I like idea of a retrospective look at my writing for the month that is ending. Briefly examining what I want to keep and what I want to change for the upcoming month sounds like a reasonable tool for me and a topic that might inform others who are interested in blogging and writing in the 21st Century.
Next month a summary will be tough to do because the end of the month is not just Halloween, but also preparation time for Dia de los Muertos which in Tucson is a very important time for historic and evolving cultural traditions. MORE on that throughout the month! There are also some birthdays and anniversaries in this coming month of people I have loved and lost. I want to write about them. I will also be prepping for a long weekend at a resort in Mexico in November, something that is way off my usual radar as “resorts” especially ones with “native villages” within the resort “experience,” are a bit too colonial and “noble savage” for me. October will provide opportunity for lots of fun and thoughtful writing. And of course the holidays are approaching with visits from the offspring and their progeny. And Done Nesting will go live, though be in Beta. I’m looking at an After the Apocalypse launch (tongue in cheek naming here!) October is gonna be GOOD.