Being self-employed and working from home if you have young children is wonderful at all times of year, but especially during the summer. Gone are the worries about 40-hour-a-week summertime childcare that plagued me back when I had a full-time job away from home. Now I’m available to spend my kids’ vacation time alongside them, and even better, they’re old enough to keep themselves busy for a few hours every morning so that I can get some work done before we head to the beach, the pond or the bike path.
In fact, at the ages of 9 and 13, they are even old enough that they generally sleep through some of those morning hours when I’m getting my writing done.
On the other hand, back when I was working in an office throughout the year, I had a couple of weeks every summer when I was officially on vacation. I said goodbye to my co-workers, closed up my laptop, walked away from my desk, and put all work responsibilities aside while I spent a week or two traveling with my family.
Now, there are no weeks throughout the entire year when I put all my work aside. I file stories on family trips and on holidays and every week throughout the summer. Self-employed writers are always on deadline for something, and having given up the paid vacations of my salaried life, I never feel comfortable ignoring all possible sources of income for a week or two.
So it’s a double-edged sword: I feel like I’m always partially on vacation, but I also feel like I’m never fully on vacation.
But this year I told myself that summer would be different. I really wanted to find a way to feel like the ten weeks of the kids’ summer break were a break for me as well. I resolved that this summer I would read more, spend less time on line, and even watch those past seasons of “Mad Men” that my husband has been urging me to catch up on for so long. I was determined that this summer would feel different from the rest of the year.
Yet I couldn’t figure out exactly how to do that. I need to keep up with my regular Globe assignments, which include two weekly deadlines and whatever other opportunities arise to write feature stories. I knew it didn’t make sense to turn down the occasional assignments I receive from other clients. I still need to prepare regular meals for my family, which means regular trips to the supermarket. And I definitely don’t want to slack off on the housekeeping any.
Then, late last week, I read this blog entry from my blogging colleague, Amy Suardi, author of the Frugal Mama blog. It turns out Amy has been thinking along very similar lines. She too wants to take it easier this summer. And she gave me an idea I hadn’t even thought of: stop writing so many blog entries.
Yes, I thought. That’s it. That’s something that would absolutely make it more of a summer break for me. Give up the pressure of writing three blog entries a week? That would be huge! And it would definitely buy me some time for reading. And for watching “Mad Men.”
But I was still a little bit conflicted. I’ve always been so diligent about maintaining my blog. Not because I think there are a lot of readers who really care whether or not I post three times a week without fail, but just because it’s an important writing exercise for me, and blogging generates ideas that I can then use in my newspaper column and other published essays. Moreover, I’ve noticed among other blogging colleagues that those who fade away seldom come back. Bloggers start out with intense enthusiasm….and then gradually drop off. I’ve maintained a regular schedule of posting for nearly three years now; I’m afraid to give myself permission to cut back.
And yet, I don’t want to give up any of my other work, or any household responsibilities. Blogging is the clear choice for how to relieve myself of some of my commitments this summer. And Amy Suardi has empowered me to believe it will be okay. I’ll post once a week for the nine weeks between now and Labor Day. I’ll return to three posts weekly as of Labor Day. Really, I will.
Frankly, I doubt anyone will notice. As long as I can reassure my conscience that this is just for summer, it will be fine. It will make my summer more relaxed, and I’m ready to give it a try. More New Yorker issues, more novels, and yes, more “Mad Men.” Sounds like a decent summer break plan to me.
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Friday, June 29, 2012
Monday, December 26, 2011
Monday, August 29, 2011
What I brought home from my vacation
I did not expect my vacation to be quite so…well, vacation-y.
To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that once you become a parent, “vacation” has a different meaning. Pre-children, “vacation” meant “go away from home and have fun.” Once you have children, in the early years “vacation” comes to mean “go away from home and do all the same things you do at home only with the additional challenge of being in unfamiliar surroundings.” It’s this reality that inspires a friend of my sister to call a vacation with children a “fake-ation.”
And that reality lasts for a while. Traveling with babies, diapers, baby food (whether jarred or homemade), feedings (whether breast or bottle), nap schedules, exposure to all-new germs… I actually have a friend who commented when her children were still under the age of 5, “Vacation? Why would I want to do that?”
But it changes. Vacations become easy again. Kids grow old enough to adjust to new routines and different surroundings. They even appreciate the novelty of seeing and doing new things.
And even though my family reached that point a while ago – as long as Holly remembers her blankie and Tim packs his stuffed elephant and his stuffed frog, it’s all good – I still wasn’t prepared to have quite so much fun on last week’s vacation as I did.
I had sneaky hopes, of course. I hoped I’d get to do more reading than I’ve managed to fit in most of this summer. Take a break from several ongoing work projects. Avoid the three-meals-a-day menu planning that seems to be required of me this summer. Fit in some long walks or maybe even bike rides.
All of those seemed to me like factors of a good vacation. But what ended up defining my vacation surprised me. I woke each morning with a sense that I had nothing immediate to worry about. The day ahead was free.
Sure, we had tentative plans as we traveled through western New York and Pennsylvania: ideas for recreation, sightseeing, time with friends. But still, no worries and no stress. No deadlines, no meetings, no household tasks, no appointments, no errands. I woke each morning feeling as if the whole day was wide-open for pleasure and adventure, and it was the most vacation-y feeling I’ve ever known while on a vacation.
And once I put my finger on that single factor – the lack of anxiety at the beginning of each day – as the defining characteristic of my vacation mood, I started thinking about ways to bring it home.
I can’t get away from all my work or social obligations or household tasks at home, nor would I want to. I like having work assignments to complete and a household to run. I like being part of a community and having friends. I don’t want to get away from all of it.
But I want to learn to prioritize better and not fill up my schedule so cavalierly with so many items I end up regretting having agreed to do.
I don’t have an exact answer to how to sustain the vacation mood while I’m home, but I think it might have to do with being more discerning, even a little more selfish. More discretionary about how I spend my time.
It was a vacation from my blog, as well, and the relief that came from escaping from that five-days-a-week commitment made me rethink that area of my life as well.
My blog is two years old this week: I wrote the first entry on August 28, 2009, and with almost no exceptions, I’ve posted every Monday through Friday ever since, with usually two weeks off each year, one for the Christmas holidays and one for summer travel.
It’s too much. My blog has become yet another onerous commitment, and being away from it made me realize I needed to back off. I put too much pressure on myself to come up with something mildly interesting to say in a public forum every day.
Cutting back to three entries a week (and, if at all possible, shorter ones) is an easy to change to make. Ultimately, no one but me really cares how often I blog (or whether I blog at all).
The other changes the vacation inspired me to contemplate won’t be as easy to make. Less volunteer work? A more relaxed attitude toward housework? A more discriminating approach to accepting writing assignments? Those possibilities all have their downsides. But the change to my blog is a start, and maybe in using this change as a symbolic way to extend the vacation mood, I’ll learn to work some of the others in as well.
To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that once you become a parent, “vacation” has a different meaning. Pre-children, “vacation” meant “go away from home and have fun.” Once you have children, in the early years “vacation” comes to mean “go away from home and do all the same things you do at home only with the additional challenge of being in unfamiliar surroundings.” It’s this reality that inspires a friend of my sister to call a vacation with children a “fake-ation.”
And that reality lasts for a while. Traveling with babies, diapers, baby food (whether jarred or homemade), feedings (whether breast or bottle), nap schedules, exposure to all-new germs… I actually have a friend who commented when her children were still under the age of 5, “Vacation? Why would I want to do that?”
But it changes. Vacations become easy again. Kids grow old enough to adjust to new routines and different surroundings. They even appreciate the novelty of seeing and doing new things.
And even though my family reached that point a while ago – as long as Holly remembers her blankie and Tim packs his stuffed elephant and his stuffed frog, it’s all good – I still wasn’t prepared to have quite so much fun on last week’s vacation as I did.
I had sneaky hopes, of course. I hoped I’d get to do more reading than I’ve managed to fit in most of this summer. Take a break from several ongoing work projects. Avoid the three-meals-a-day menu planning that seems to be required of me this summer. Fit in some long walks or maybe even bike rides.
All of those seemed to me like factors of a good vacation. But what ended up defining my vacation surprised me. I woke each morning with a sense that I had nothing immediate to worry about. The day ahead was free.
Sure, we had tentative plans as we traveled through western New York and Pennsylvania: ideas for recreation, sightseeing, time with friends. But still, no worries and no stress. No deadlines, no meetings, no household tasks, no appointments, no errands. I woke each morning feeling as if the whole day was wide-open for pleasure and adventure, and it was the most vacation-y feeling I’ve ever known while on a vacation.
And once I put my finger on that single factor – the lack of anxiety at the beginning of each day – as the defining characteristic of my vacation mood, I started thinking about ways to bring it home.
I can’t get away from all my work or social obligations or household tasks at home, nor would I want to. I like having work assignments to complete and a household to run. I like being part of a community and having friends. I don’t want to get away from all of it.
But I want to learn to prioritize better and not fill up my schedule so cavalierly with so many items I end up regretting having agreed to do.
I don’t have an exact answer to how to sustain the vacation mood while I’m home, but I think it might have to do with being more discerning, even a little more selfish. More discretionary about how I spend my time.
It was a vacation from my blog, as well, and the relief that came from escaping from that five-days-a-week commitment made me rethink that area of my life as well.
My blog is two years old this week: I wrote the first entry on August 28, 2009, and with almost no exceptions, I’ve posted every Monday through Friday ever since, with usually two weeks off each year, one for the Christmas holidays and one for summer travel.
It’s too much. My blog has become yet another onerous commitment, and being away from it made me realize I needed to back off. I put too much pressure on myself to come up with something mildly interesting to say in a public forum every day.
Cutting back to three entries a week (and, if at all possible, shorter ones) is an easy to change to make. Ultimately, no one but me really cares how often I blog (or whether I blog at all).
The other changes the vacation inspired me to contemplate won’t be as easy to make. Less volunteer work? A more relaxed attitude toward housework? A more discriminating approach to accepting writing assignments? Those possibilities all have their downsides. But the change to my blog is a start, and maybe in using this change as a symbolic way to extend the vacation mood, I’ll learn to work some of the others in as well.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Facing down blog ennui
Kate Hayes coined the term “mid-blog crisis” in a post earlier this week on her blog, Adventures in Parenting, to explore her feelings of ennui, which she likened to a midlife crisis. I know just how she feels.
Like Kate, I’ve been looking at my blog occasionally and thinking “Why do I do this again? Does it matter to anyone? What would be the downside of giving it up?”
I’ve been blogging for 17 months now, ever since I signed with a literary agent who was willing to represent my running/parenting memoir. I was very new to social media at that point; in our first phone conversation, my agent urged me to put together a website, start a Twitter account, and blog regularly. I did all three, and for many reasons I think her advice was excellent. I really like having a website up; I get a lot of enjoyment as well as occasional professional reinforcement from Twitter; and the blog has been a fantastic exercise in regular writing.
But when I say regular writing, I have to take a moment to stop and roll my eyes. For reasons I cannot to this day re-create, I somehow decided when I launched my blog in August of 2009 that I should blog five days a week, every week. Even though I knew of plenty of other bloggers who posted just a couple of times weekly, I had the idea that for me it needed to be like a job: show up at that blog Monday through Friday. And like a job, since that time, I’ve taken only national holidays and two weeks’ vacation per year off from blogging.
Other people who know me will probably roll their eyes at this. I know: Another daily obsession? The mile-or-more-of-running and the 1000-words-of-journaling a day aren’t enough as far as the diurnal rituals? Well, in all fairness, the blogging one isn’t quite as severe: the running and the journaling are seven days a week, and the blogging one is only weekdays.
Still, like Kate Hayes, sometimes I stop and remind myself of just how little it matters. Plenty of friends and acquaintances mention reading my blog in passing, but even more people tell me it’s hard for them to keep up with it. Really, reading my blog is not supposed to feel like a chore; you won’t miss a thing if you take a day or two off now and then. So I have to admit that the majority of my blog readers would probably be happy rather than disappointed if I stopped posting every day.
And yet here’s the advantage of blogging every day: unlike when my essay writing consisted of one or two newspaper pieces a month, I no longer maintain a seemingly endless backlog of story ideas that I’ll probably never get to. Now I get to everything. After all, I need a new idea five days a week. That enables me to burn through a lot of ideas, rather than stockpile them the way I used to. And it also reminds me that you don’t need to sit down with a great idea already formed in order to write a good piece. Many of my favorite blog entries – which went on to become published pieces in commercial publications – unfolded on days that I thought I had nothing to write about. Writers are fond of the phrase “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”, and never is this more clear to me than when I’m fulfilling my daily blogging requirement. Even if I thought I had nothing to say, I often (though not always!) prove myself wrong.
My agent’s reason for urging me to get a blog up and running was that she wanted me to build an audience for the eventual publication of my book. But my book has been out for two months now, and when I run the numbers on who the purchasers are, I don’t necessarily think the blog has had much of an effect. What I do think it has had an effect on is the quality of my writing. Daily practice at anything simply makes us better at it. And while I’ve had a daily journaling habit for nearly two decades and in the past would have said the same thing about the merits of that – it’s a daily practice that improves my abilities every time I do it – blogging pushes me one step farther in terms of quality control. Unlike when I write something for the Boston Globe, I don’t spend a great deal of time judging the literary quality of what I write every day in my blog, but unlike when I write in my journal, I try to ensure that at the very least it’s coherent and not too lengthy for even my most committed fans (Hi, Mom!) to be willing to read.
So despite my incipient blogging crisis, I’ll persist, and I hope Kate Hayes will as well. As I always say about daily running, the single best reason to blog every day is so that you never have to take time to decide whether or not it’s a good day for blogging. Good entries, bad entries, and all that fall between: I’m not ready to give up yet.
Like Kate, I’ve been looking at my blog occasionally and thinking “Why do I do this again? Does it matter to anyone? What would be the downside of giving it up?”
I’ve been blogging for 17 months now, ever since I signed with a literary agent who was willing to represent my running/parenting memoir. I was very new to social media at that point; in our first phone conversation, my agent urged me to put together a website, start a Twitter account, and blog regularly. I did all three, and for many reasons I think her advice was excellent. I really like having a website up; I get a lot of enjoyment as well as occasional professional reinforcement from Twitter; and the blog has been a fantastic exercise in regular writing.
But when I say regular writing, I have to take a moment to stop and roll my eyes. For reasons I cannot to this day re-create, I somehow decided when I launched my blog in August of 2009 that I should blog five days a week, every week. Even though I knew of plenty of other bloggers who posted just a couple of times weekly, I had the idea that for me it needed to be like a job: show up at that blog Monday through Friday. And like a job, since that time, I’ve taken only national holidays and two weeks’ vacation per year off from blogging.
Other people who know me will probably roll their eyes at this. I know: Another daily obsession? The mile-or-more-of-running and the 1000-words-of-journaling a day aren’t enough as far as the diurnal rituals? Well, in all fairness, the blogging one isn’t quite as severe: the running and the journaling are seven days a week, and the blogging one is only weekdays.
Still, like Kate Hayes, sometimes I stop and remind myself of just how little it matters. Plenty of friends and acquaintances mention reading my blog in passing, but even more people tell me it’s hard for them to keep up with it. Really, reading my blog is not supposed to feel like a chore; you won’t miss a thing if you take a day or two off now and then. So I have to admit that the majority of my blog readers would probably be happy rather than disappointed if I stopped posting every day.
And yet here’s the advantage of blogging every day: unlike when my essay writing consisted of one or two newspaper pieces a month, I no longer maintain a seemingly endless backlog of story ideas that I’ll probably never get to. Now I get to everything. After all, I need a new idea five days a week. That enables me to burn through a lot of ideas, rather than stockpile them the way I used to. And it also reminds me that you don’t need to sit down with a great idea already formed in order to write a good piece. Many of my favorite blog entries – which went on to become published pieces in commercial publications – unfolded on days that I thought I had nothing to write about. Writers are fond of the phrase “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”, and never is this more clear to me than when I’m fulfilling my daily blogging requirement. Even if I thought I had nothing to say, I often (though not always!) prove myself wrong.
My agent’s reason for urging me to get a blog up and running was that she wanted me to build an audience for the eventual publication of my book. But my book has been out for two months now, and when I run the numbers on who the purchasers are, I don’t necessarily think the blog has had much of an effect. What I do think it has had an effect on is the quality of my writing. Daily practice at anything simply makes us better at it. And while I’ve had a daily journaling habit for nearly two decades and in the past would have said the same thing about the merits of that – it’s a daily practice that improves my abilities every time I do it – blogging pushes me one step farther in terms of quality control. Unlike when I write something for the Boston Globe, I don’t spend a great deal of time judging the literary quality of what I write every day in my blog, but unlike when I write in my journal, I try to ensure that at the very least it’s coherent and not too lengthy for even my most committed fans (Hi, Mom!) to be willing to read.
So despite my incipient blogging crisis, I’ll persist, and I hope Kate Hayes will as well. As I always say about daily running, the single best reason to blog every day is so that you never have to take time to decide whether or not it’s a good day for blogging. Good entries, bad entries, and all that fall between: I’m not ready to give up yet.
Monday, January 3, 2011
Sunlight and mist
Somewhat unexpectedly, I’m starting the year with some breathing room.
Usually, the kids’ return to school after a vacation – be it Christmas vacation, summer vacation, either of the two that fall in between, or even a long holiday weekend – finds me almost frantic to get back to work, with a pileup of deadlines to meet, stories to pitch, facts to check, and corrections to submit: a range of work-related items I simply couldn’t find the mental focus to take care of while they were home.
But last week wasn’t like that. It’s not really that my client list or writing load has diminished any – which is a good thing – but just that a lot of work was due just before Christmas, leaving almost none due after. It’s time to replenish the pipeline as the new work week begins.
But in the meantime, as I wait for responses on pitches I’ve just sent off and edits on work I submitted before Christmas, I’m in a little bit of a lull, which is a rare situation for me. So I’m thinking about ways I can improve my writing, and particularly my blog, in 2011.
For one thing, I’m hoping to learn more about nature writing, particularly by becoming better acquainted with the work of Henry David Thoreau. I’ve already collected several books toward this goal; the trick now is to read them, in hopes that they will educate me about how to describe the scenery around me, which of course is nearly identical in topography to – and just six miles away from – the Walden Pond landscapes about which Thoreau often wrote.
“A man's interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town,” he said, and I need to keep this in mind: the goal is not simply to have the natural world be more often the focus of my writing, but to make my observations worthwhile and meaningful.
Late yesterday afternoon, just before sunset, I looked south over the pasture where the cows graze when it is not covered with snow, as it is now. A very foggy day was ending; the air was so whitened with misty vapor as to look almost as if snow were falling, but the air was warm, nearly fifty degrees. Most of the day – including the 7:30 a.m. hour when I went for a three-mile run – had featured heavily overcast skies, but the clouds were parting as dusk drew near. Although the air was still suffused with mist, a thin yellow film of sunlight beamed down from the sky, so that if you looked straight ahead over the pasture you saw the thick white mist but if you looked upward you saw the parted clouds with sun shining through.
What a perfect metaphor for the New Year, I thought to myself. A thick haze if you look straight into it, but a beam of sunlight and clearing skies if you look just a little bit higher. I resolved to keep that image in mind as I took my first steps into 2011. A lot is hazy about what lies ahead right now, including but also beyond my near-term workload. Above it, though, is light shining through, just as light always eventually does. I’ll remember as this new year begins to try to look beyond the thick haze, remembering that illumination is within sight if you just remember in which direction to cast your gaze.
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