Writing

This post has been over a week in the making. It was originally supposed to be the final post of a week-long series I was going to do on the whys and wherefores of creating a blog you can be proud of, but I believe that topic is already covered ad nauseam all over the internet. I don’t think I really need to add my two cents, but I do plan on posting a page that lists some of the tools I use for this blog. You know, geek stuff like plugins and feed readers and whatnot.

Since I pretty much have this post written, I’m going to pop it out today and hopefully build on a discussion that started at BlogHer. Each break-out session at the conference was live-blogged by several volunteer posters, but the one that caught my attention was Public Parenting and Privacy and was aimed at mommy bloggers who document their children’s lives on the internet. Shannon of Rocks In My Dryer was one of the panelists in this session and brought the discussion of blogging and privacy to the BlogHer website where several more voices chimed in (mine included).

Every blogger out there is concerned about privacy. How much of yourself do you put out there? Do you give your real name? Your last name? How about the names of your children and do you post pictures of them? It would seem everyone has a list of things they will not put out on the internet. They draw a line and form clear boundaries that designate what goes through when they hit “publish.”

Boundaries are not always constant. If you’re an experienced blogger, your boundaries have probably shifted over the years. Or maybe not. My friend Meg has been blogging for nearly as long as I have and continues to refer to her husband and daughter by nicknames on the blog. She has never revealed her last name whereas I have. I also post many more pictures of my daughter than she does of hers, but that’s something I’ve been trying to limit as Autumn gets older.

I may be a little more liberal in what I choose to reveal here, but that’s not to say I don’t have some very clear boundaries of my own. Some go way back to my very first post on Blogger while others are boundaries I’ve established fairly recently in light of wanting to increase my readership. Some boundaries have even been established after making mistakes I don’t wish to repeat.

I thought it might be worthwhile to discuss a few of my boundaries and why they are important to me because having an actual written code of conduct just might prevent me from making an ass of myself in the future. Maybe.

Do not use the blog to publicly address an issue that should be handled in private.

In other words, don’t use the blog to be a jerk to your friends and family, even if you think they deserve it. I’ve heard so many bloggers say they refuse to put anything on their blog they wouldn’t feel comfortable saying to a person’s face. That’s a pretty darn good rule.

Last year was a very bad year. Job issues were making me miserable, Nathan’s mom died, I was sick almost constantly from October through February and then there was my accident in December. At the height of my misery, I felt very alone because no one called or e-mailed to check in with me. It pissed me off because I suspected the folks who weren’t calling were still reading my blog. So I wrote a post about how I felt about them. I wrote about feeling abandoned to see if I would get a response from the very people I felt had abandoned me. The thing is, when I did receive a comment on the blog from one of them, I didn’t know how to respond and just deleted it. So really, what was the point of that post if I was going to go all chicken shit and not acknowledge the response?

The truth was I was being an asshat. I was using the blog to showcase my asshatedness in all its glory. But I was also hurting and did not know how to communicate that hurt to those around me. A blog can be a wonderful tool to communicate with others, but it can also be used as a weapon and that’s not cool. I know that’s not cool because I’ve been on the other side when someone has had some less than flattering things to say about me.

It’s so easy to sit in this chair and think I’m all alone out here because I really can only put faces to a few of the people who read this blog. I’m not alone, though, and need to realize whatever I write might have a negative effect on my relationship with others.

Don’t blog about work. Just don’t do it.

I never used to write much about my job. While cleaning out my archives recently, I noticed there were only 17 posts categorized as “work” out of the 470-plus posts I have written so far. That’s a small percentage, but that’s a percentage that could very well have gotten me into trouble at some point. Losing one’s job for blogging about work may have worked out for Heather Armstrong, but her story is the happily-ever-after version of what can go wrong when you write about your co-workers.

If your professional life is so miserable that you feel you must share your misery with the online community, be safe and do it anonymously. There are all sort of ways you might be able to do this. Just be smart and don’t identify yourself, your co-workers or your employer.

I recently pulled most of my posts labeled “work.” I re-categorized some of the more benign posts I thought I could keep and deleted the “work” category altogether. Better to be safe than sorry.

Be mindful of what you post about your children

A few months ago I snapped some pictures of Autumn after a bath and uploaded the best shot to Flickr. It was relatively harmless in its content, but because my description below the photo included the word “child” and “bath” in it, the picture received 11 hits from other Flickr users. Getting more than a few views of any one photo in my stream is unusual, so the only explanation I could think of for the hits is that some folks out there were looking for very specific content. Needless to say, that photo is now marked private.

The same goes for a short snippet of video I took of Autumn in the bathtub and uploaded to YouTube. Out of all my videos there, that one had the most hits and the most referrer links. It freaked me out and I took it down along with the birthday photo montages I had created that included her full name.

From the comments I read on the live-blog recap and on the BlogHer website, it would seem parents are all over the map when it comes to what they will and won’t reveal of their kids. When Autumn was an infant, I had no problem posting pictures of her in just a diaper. Now that she’s nearly three, I make it a point now to only share pictures of her where she’s clothed or, in the case of this picture, a shot that reveals nothing below the shoulders. The child absolutely loves to run around in her skivvies so there’s rarely an opportunity for me to catch her looking respectable, you know?

If I could start over, I would probably think twice about using my child’s real name. I suppose I could go back and replace every instance of her name with a pseudonym, but that would not change that the blog itself is named after her. The next obvious answer would be to change the name of the blog, but at this point that would be a logistical nightmare. I’m just going to have to be very careful.

Just because it was funny, that doesn’t mean it should be blogged

We have a term we use at The Hollow when something absolutely has to be documented; “blog worthy”. Nathan has come to terms with being married to a woman who likes to write about their lives and has actually submitted a few suggestions to be added here. Even so, there have been times when something truly blog worthy has happened and I’ve passed on writing about it because it might cause extreme embarrassment for the parties involved.

Just this past weekend I found myself in the middle of a completely ridiculous situation involving my family. I recognized the ridiculousness right away, as did Nathan, and actually started composing the post in my head as the situation was unfolding. I even went so far as starting the post in Wordpress but had to stop myself. Publishing this moment would have meant sharing a potentially mortifying piece of information about another family member. After conferring with Nathan, we both decided this was one story that should not be shared with the entire internet.

Respect the boundaries of others

Just because you like to blab about your life, that doesn’t mean your friends and family want you to blab about theirs. I’m lucky to be married to a man who doesn’t mind being ridiculed. I actually think he likes the attention, but there are some spouses/partners/children/friends who don’t want to be included in your daily drama. Those who live their lives publicly need to respect the privacy of those who don’t.

The same thing goes for other people’s children. It’s one thing to post pictures and names of your own kids and other thing entirely to post pictures and names of someone else’s. If you do, make sure you have permission from the parents. That’s a no-brainer.

Speaking of kids, there might come a time when Autumn asks me to stop writing about her. There might come a time when what I’ve already written about her could cause her some embarrassment. This was another thing touched on during the discussion at BlogHer, and it seems to be a topic that’s on a lot of parents’ minds.

I know of some bloggers who purge their archives and delete any potentially incriminating posts that could embarrass their kids down the line. While I’m all for trimming some of the fat, I will never purposely delete months or years of what I’ve written. This blog is an extension of my love for my family and I only wish my parents had documented the first years of my life the way I have with Autumn. It would have been nice to have read their impressions as young parents working through it all for the first time.

There are possibly a couple more rules I’m missing here, but I think the ones I’ve listed form a solid foundation for Staying Out Of Trouble On The Internet. Granted, they are my rules and I hardly expect them to apply to everyone.

Also, if anyone out there has something to add, perhaps something you learned through experience or horrible mistake, I’d love for you to drop it in a comment.

For the past few weeks I’ve been contemplating what to do about the blog. What to do in regards to how far I want to go with this. Sometimes I get into such a funk that I don’t feel like writing at all. Sometimes I get so busy that I feel guilty for taking the time to write. Though he would never say it, I’m sure Nathan is getting tired of hearing “blog this” and “blog that.” Blog blog blog blog blog.

Nathan recently told me, “You’d go crazy if you didn’t have your blog.” He’s right. This blog helps keep me sane. Those few long-time readers I have may recall several posts in which I grumbled about work. Those posts have since been deleted, but my feelings about the job remain. I am not fulfilling my life’s dream. I do what I do because I have to do it. I have to put food on the table. What I’d rather be doing is what I do here. I want to write. More importantly, I want to get paid to write.

Unfortunately I can’t quit my job and blog full time. At least not right now. I think that’s a possibility in the future, but we’re talking a few years down the road. That being said, I’m going to be trying out some new things here in the next few weeks, most of them having to do with monetization.

Monetizing a blog is a tricky thing. You don’t want to alienate your current readers, but you also don’t want to limit your potential out of fear people won’t like it. I talked to Nathan about this very issue last night and came to the conclusion that this is a fairly risk-free venture for me since my readership is so low as it is. I don’t want to lose any of you, but I’d also like to be able to spend some time with my kid before she graduates high school.

There are several possibilities I’m considering right now, from doing product reviews to adding more affiliate links, but one thing I know for certain is I will not stop writing about my life and my family. I’ll continue to be my dorky and candid self and write embarrassing posts about my social handicaps. The well will never run dry there. Trust me.

Anyway, I wanted to put this out there because you few, you happy few, you band of readers totally rock. You’re the reason I’ve kept it going for this long.

Thanks.

-H

Internet, I am tired. Very tired. I’m to the point where sleep deprivation is affecting my home life and my job so I really must find it in me to get to bed early and not stay up until midnight writing today’s blog post. Instead, I’m going to cheat a little and insert a bit of something that has already been written.

A few weeks ago I published a journal entry I wrote the summer before I started my sophomore year of high school. I thought I’d post another one because it was fun, albeit frightening, becoming reacquainted with my teenage self. This time, however, I wanted to post something a little more recognizable. The fifteen year-old who wrote about listening to George Michael and needing a boyfriend to feel validated is someone I probably wouldn’t know today if I passed her on the street.

As I was skimming through the 161 page Word document that is my current journal, I realized how much my writing has changed over the years. Most of my entries are unreadable by anyone’s standards. At least 75 percent of what I wrote was about my weight; losing it, gaining it and hating it. What I wanted was to find something that sounded closer to the voice that winds up on this blog. You know, the one that’s all Sloth and Gluttony and isn’t afraid to admit she weighs more than a Giant Panda.

Interestingly enough, that voice did not emerge until I became pregnant. My personal journal entries were pretty sparse during my pregnancy and I didn’t actually start journaling about the pregnancy until I was half way through it. Sometime in July I decided to open up the Word document and start writing again. It would seem my girl had already become the muse who inspires me to this day, because when I found the following entry I thought, “Oh yeah, I know this woman very well.” She’s the one who started this blog less than a month later.

August 30, 2005

I had quite a few strange dreams last night. In one, I lost the diamond out of my wedding ring. I found it in my bed, but it wasn’t the bed I sleep in now. It was the bed I slept in growing up in my parents’ house. I thought it would be lost forever because my mother lost the stone out of her engagement ring many years ago at the grocery store. In another dream, Nathan and I were helping my uncle sort recycling. For some reason we were at my parents’ again. We were just sorting his trash and wondered why mom and dad couldn’t sort theirs, too. And finally, I dreamed that I was breastfeeding my baby. That was nice. Christopher Plummer was also in one of these dreams as Captain von Trapp, but I have no idea how he fit in or in which dream he had his cameo. All I know is that he was an ominous figure and appeared in the same dream in which I stepped on a scale and had no idea how to make sense of all the spinning dials.

As of today, I have 68 days left until my due date. Less than 10 weeks. I’ve been having trouble with my back since this weekend, the cause of which I think was lugging the vacuum cleaner upstairs. Nathan chastised me for doing that, but if I had to wait for him to do something that I asked, I’d never get anything done. He exists in his own time continuum.

Take the laundry for example. I’ve been toting full baskets up and down the stairs all throughout my pregnancy but was having a problem this weekend because of my back. Nathan asked my why I have to do everything so I told him I don’t like it when he does the laundry because all he does is wash the clothes, dry the clothes and leave the clothes in baskets to wrinkle. He never hangs them up. So he said rather adamantly, “I can hang up clothes!” I said, “Fine, take this basket upstairs.” I started another load and walked upstairs to find him sitting in front of the TV playing his X-Box with the basket of laundry sitting on the couch. “Oh, sure you can hang up clothes,” said I. “You want me to hang these up?” asked he. “I thought you just wanted me to bring the baskets upstairs.” Arrgh! I just wanted to strangle him. Why is it that men lose brain cells once they get married? It’s as though the wedding band has some kind of kinetic power that instantly zaps the man once the ring is placed on his finger. Bye-bye brain. So long independent thoughts.

(2008 Heather has to interject here and vindicate her husband because he is totally not the lazy pile of flesh depicted here. Internet, my husband is a house-cleaning GOD. Let’s just blame pregnancy hormones for these libelous accusations and move on)

We attended a child birth class this weekend. If I thought I had everything regarding the delivery figured out, this class made me realize I knew nothing. I felt as though I was sitting through 9^th grade sex ed again while all my beliefs were shattered one by one. For example, I thought the epidural was good. The epidural is something I want, no question. During the class, however, I found out that the epidural actually slows down labor, and once it’s administered you are stuck in bed until that baby is born. Now I am an impatient person and really don’t like the thought of things taking longer than they should, not to mention having a catheter inserted to relieve my bladder because I can’t get up to pee.

I was able to visit one of the labor rooms. It was nice and roomy, but still not some place I want to spend the majority of my day. My only concern now is that I don’t know if I’m physically able to handle hard labor. I haven’t exercised much since I found out I was pregnant. I certainly could not spend 45 minutes on the elliptical like I could before. I guess the best way to handle it is to keep my options open. For all the planning I can do, I’m sure nothing will turn out the way it’s supposed to.