Category Archives: What’s the Buzz?

Women and men, boomers beyond and below, married or single, people love TMSW. Check out the buzz!

The Midlife Second Wife Joins “Katie” as a Featured Blogger on Monday, Oct. 22

18 Thursday Oct 2012

Posted by in Love, Relationships and Family Life, Special Events, What's the Buzz?

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The elegant set of ‘Katie.’ The show is taped at ABC Studios in New York and syndicated across the United States.

(MONDAY, OCT. 22, 2012)—UPDATE: I learned late last night that the segment featuring Dr. Terri Orbuch has been postponed and will be rescheduled. When the producers announce a new air date I will let you know. Hope you can tune in to watch Academy Award-winning actress Susan Sarandon speak with Katie Couric and see both women engage in a bit of competitive sport!

The call came on a Monday in August, about a week after I had returned home to Richmond following the BlogHer conference in New York City. On the line was Brittany Jones-Cooper, a producer of Katie, Katie Couric’s new syndicated daytime talk show.

She and Couric had been at the BlogHer conference—Couric was featured in one of several keynote interviews, engaging in a lively discussion with BlogHer cofounder Lisa Stone, and issuing a clarion call for bloggers to participate in her new show. The television legend certainly came to the right place!

And, it would seem, so did I.

Back to that phone call. Couric’s producer had seen my blog, liked what I wrote, and asked if I could be in ABC Studios in New York on Thursday for a taping. Couric has employed several ingenious methods of integrating social media into her program; one way is to have two bloggers in the audience for each show. The theme of this particular program would be divorce.

Now as we all know, I happen to know a little bit about that subject.

And so it was that three days later, my husband John, who grew up about 20 minutes outside of the city, drove me into Manhattan. A bonus of the trip? We’d take some time to explore all of the landmarks of his youth—something I’d wanted to do ever since meeting him.

What a whirlwind! Just arrived backstage at the ABC Studios, still wearing my traveling clothes. TMSW got dressed and made up in record time!

I’m in the cobalt blue jacket, wearing a necklace and an Apple MacBook Pro. At my right is blogger Deesha Philyaw, of ‘Co-Parenting 101.’

You’re reading about all of this now because the program I was invited to attend airs on Monday, Oct. 22, at 3 p.m. on NBC12 in the Richmond market. You’ll want to visit the Katie website to check your local listings; in some markets the program airs at 2 p.m.

Katie Couric chats with the audience before the taping. Check out her gorgeous shoes!

The featured guest? One of my favorite actresses—the smart, sultry, simply ageless Susan Sarandon—as admired for her social activism as she is for her award-winning performances. Single after a long-term partnership with actor Tim Robbins, she turned 66 earlier this month; she shares her thoughts about commitment, relationships, and what it’s like to be an older—albeit steadily working—actress in Hollwood. Also on the show is Dr. Terri Orbuch, aka ‘the love doctor,’ offering useful marital advice—from a surprising source.

After the taping, Sarandon and her two dogs, Rigby and Penny, posed for pictures with Katie. Remind me to tell you a cute story about Rigby!

The colorfully-garbed audience of ‘Katie’

I’ll be tweeting LIVE during the broadcast beginning at 3 p.m. Eastern Time. If you’re not already following me on Twitter, please hop over to the next window and click “follow.”

The producer also asked me to write an essay for the program’s website about finding love after divorce. (I happen to know a little something about that, too.) KatieCouric.com published “Learning to Love Again” on Oct. 22, 2012. The post appears as “The ‘L’ Word” on this blog.

I hope you’ll have a chance to tune in or follow my LIVE tweets during the broadcast. Enjoy! And as always, thanks for reading!

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid

17 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by in Humor Me, What's the Buzz?

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On a night when a new meme was born, one woman discovered the power of a new iPhone app. Would public discourse ever be the same?

And the Winner of ‘The Digest Diet’ Is …

15 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by in What's the Buzz?

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The recipes in this book are delicious and fun to prepare.

Isn’t it nice to start off a Monday with some good news? I’m ducking in very quickly to announce the winner of my giveaway. Congratulations to Mindy Trotta of Cambridge, Massachusetts! Your free copy of The Digest Diet, by Liz Vaccariello, will be departing the post office here in Richmond sometime this week. Watch that mailbox!

My thanks to all those who left comments on my blog post about the diet.

And in case you were wondering….I’ve kept all the weight off, even though I’ve reintroduced things I kind of missed—cream in my coffee, for example. But I’ll tell you something: I simply cannot eat the way I used to—don’t have the taste for it. And as Martha Stewart would say, “That’s a good thing.”

Have a great week, everyone!

Where I Come From

14 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by in Nostalgia, Transitions, What's the Buzz?

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The old Elyria Public Library, Elyria, Ohio

VIOLA:
What country, friends, is this?

CAPTAIN:
This is Illyria, lady.

VIOLA:
And what should I do in Illyria?

What should I do, indeed?

Readers, I come from Elyria, Ohio. When I first ran across this passage from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (Act I, Scene II), as an English literature major at Oberlin College—15 miles (give or take) southwest of Elyria—I smiled to myself. How, I thought, could Shakespeare possibly have known that, in truth, there’s really not that much to do in ‘Illyria.’

Aye, there’s the rub.

Elyria, like so many neighboring towns in Northeast Ohio—including that metropolis to the east, Cleveland—has experienced more than its share of brain drain. Not that I’m such an Einstein, but after my divorce I moved to my alma mater’s eponymous town. I had gone to school at Oberlin and by then had worked at the college for ten years. My diaspora-of-one was not just to save myself a 15-minute commute twice each day; it was to live my life in a community of like-minded people, with steps-away access to internationally renowned concerts and lectures, where I no longer felt as though I were a stranger in a strange land. What a thing to say about one’s hometown! But it was true. I felt I had outgrown Elyria, although in some ways it’s quite possible it was the town that had outgrown me.

I remember when the fine arts were a lively part of life in Elyria. My mother spent—no, volunteered—countless hours selling subscription tickets to the Elyria Community Concert Association. Many backwater towns sponsored similar cultural lifelines, and Elyria was a thriving hub on the circuit. I remember seeing opera legend Leontyne Price, the Vienna Boys’ Choir, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, the piano duo of Ferrante and Teicher, and many others artists perform live in the auditorium of Elyria High School. Imagine that: a town without a performing arts center nevertheless brought internationally respected artists to visit.

And I remember taking the bus downtown with my mother, browsing through any number of sweet little shops that sold fashionable clothes to “the smart set,” eating at any number of mom-and-pop restaurants or soda fountains, buying chocolate cupcakes at Gartman’s Bakery. I saw the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night at the old Capital Theater downtown, and bought my 45-records at Wagner’s Appliance Store. I failed to learn how to swim at the Elyria YMCA across from Ely Square. I’ve already shared with you my childhood memory of the old Elyria Public Library, pictured above. All those places are gone. The library, torn down, opened a modern, one-story facility on Washington Avenue, sometime in the late 1960s, as I recall. It’s still there, although now there’s a newer, larger, main library on the west side.

You know that a city is growing when one library isn’t enough to contain all the dreams of its readers.

Elyria was changing, and I was changing with it. All the shopping was now centered at the Midway Mall. If you didn’t drive you had to take a taxi to get there, because the buses had stopped running. All the downtown movie theaters—and at one time there were four—were shuttered. The Community Concert Association folded; people now drove south to Oberlin to satisfy their longing for culture, or north to Lorain County Community College, at the very edge of the city, where a lecture series and a performing arts series were gaining a foothold. (I actually began my college education there, and received an excellent foundation that prepared me well for Oberlin.) The point, however, is that there really wasn’t much of anything left in Elyria except for government offices, banks, and lawyers.

It made sense that as long as I was starting a new life, I might as well give myself a new city in which to start it. Oberlin was an oasis in the corn belt that rimmed the rust belt of Elyria.

I’m indulging in this reverie because today’s Sunday New York Times features a portrait of my hometown on its front page—the first in a five-part series. Dan Barry, a gifted writer and reporter for the New York Times, spent untold hours in Elyria, interviewing residents, business owners, and government officials—including my oldest and dearest friend, a woman who has remained in Elyria her entire life, never, ever giving up on it. She now serves as the city’s Safety-Service Director. Her passion for helping the city’s current administration turn the city around is inspiring. I hope that she—that they—can do it.

P.S. About the diner that serves as the lens through which Dan Barry views Elyria: After my second husband and I got our marriage licenses, in the fancy new justice center across from the square that also figures prominently in Barry’s article, we walked over to Donna’s Diner for lunch. Several members of the ‘Breakfast Club,’ also referenced in the article, were still there, lingering over their coffee. As is often the case with small towns, I knew several of them. I said hello, and introduced to them the man I was about to marry.

My Mother’s Voice

12 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by in The Healthy Life, The Writing Life, Transitions, What's the Buzz?

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I wrote an essay—the first of many I will write—about my mother’s slide into the quicksand and darkness of dementia. I published it on my blog, and the editors of BlogHer honored it with a Voice of the Year Award for 2012. I’m proud of this, but not solely for the reason you might think. I’m proud of this essay because it exists, because I was able to write it at all. I managed to descend into that frightening pit of despair and start to tell my mother’s story, to return her voice to her, to leave something of her to this world that she left 12 years ago. This was not an easy thing to do, and I will have to do it again and again and again, until her story is fully told, until her voice is finally heard. It will be difficult, and I know there will be times I’ll be afraid to continue.

She was an intensely private person, but in this respect I think she would want me to keep going. She would want people to know, because, sadly, she was one among millions who have disappeared into the maw of Alzheimer’s, and who will continue to disappear until a cure can be found. Maybe if enough stories get told, if enough attention is paid, something that might be enough will be done, and the disease (the irony of my word choice isn’t lost on me) will itself become a memory. It happened with smallpox. It could happen again.

According to Alzheimer’s Disease Research, a program of the American Health Assistance Foundation, more than 5.4 million Americans are believed to have Alzheimer’s disease; by 2050, as the U.S. population ages, this number could increase to 15 million. There are nearly 36 million people living with dementia worldwide, and this number is likely to increase to more than 115 million by 2050.

The essay, “‘Have You Met My Daughter?’ My Mother, Her Alzheimer’s and Me,” is one of 80 essays representing 80 bloggers included in the Voices of the Year anthology, published by BlogHer in conjunction with Open Road Media.

The anthology will be available for download (from Amazon and iTunes) on Oct. 30, but advance orders are available now. Here’s what Amazon says about BlogHer and the book:

BlogHer is a unique media company created by women, for women, and—most importantly—with women, women like those whose voices you’ll read in this collection. Each year, BlogHer—the largest network of women who blog—hosts an initiative to identify the very best work from across the blogosphere. Submitted by the community, selected by a committee, and presented at the world’s largest blogging conference, the pieces presented here have it all because women live it all—online and off. Humor. Inspiration. Food. Family. Style. Sex. Politics. Tech. Career. Dreams. BlogHer’s Voices of the Year reminds us of the transformative power of blogs to connect us all via powerful storytelling.

My thanks to Elisa, Lisa, and Jory—the co-founders of BlogHer—for envisioning this project, and to Donna Schwartz Mills, a member of BlogHer’s conference programming team, for helping to administrate it. I’m humbled by the honor, and honored that my mother’s story will reach a wider audience.

My Gift to You: A Chance to Win ‘The Digest Diet’

08 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by in Special Events, The Healthy Life, Transitions, What's the Buzz?

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The recipes in this book are delicious and fun to prepare.

Thanks to the good offices of Reader’s Digest, I’m happy to announce that I have a beautiful, jacketed copy of The Digest Diet to give away. Here’s how to enter:

Visit the round-up post about my Digest Diet journey and leave a positive comment. That’s your “entry form.” Just a few caveats, however:

  • You have to live within the contiguous United States;
  • There has to be a way for me to get in touch with you to notify you that you’ve won. If you’re not sure that I have your email and postal addresses, please go to the contact page (found above the masthead in the drop-down menu under ‘Who is the Midlife Second Wife?’), and send me an email with that information. (There’s no form to bother with, but that’s where you’ll find my email address.) I do not and will not share your information with any third party;
  • If I am unable to reach you by email to notify you that you’ve won, I will draw another name;
  • And of course, you need to enter by leaving a comment on the round-up Digest Diet post. (“Enter by leaving.” I like that. Think I’ll start a meme to that effect!)

I’ll pick the winner sometime this weekend, and announce it next Monday here on the blog. Good luck, everyone!

Of Change-Agents and Renegades … and a Winner is Announced

01 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by in Special Events, The Writing Life, What's the Buzz?

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Who won this book? Scroll down and watch the video to find out!

This is certainly quite a week for Amy Jo Martin.

The founder of the social media consultancy Digital Royalty has a new book out tomorrow, Oct. 2. On Sunday she was a guest of Melissa Harris-Perry’s on MSNBC, talking with other panelists about the influence of social media on politics, and the change-agent behind the sports and social media phenomenon covered in a Forbes article. And today (winking here) she’s making her second appearance on my blog. What a whirl!

As you know, I met Amy Jo at the BlogHer 12 conference in New York City. And here I must digress to tell you that I felt an immediate bond with her when she shared her experience of finding a lump in her breast the size of a golf ball. As a survivor of thyroid cancer, I’ve become hard-wired to relate on a deeper human level with those who have either had cancer or a cancer scare. As someone I admire once said, we become members of a club no one ever wanted to join. And it’s something of a paradox, because once admitted to the club, you want to remain a member in good standing, if you know what I mean. Amy Jo’s honesty—her fearlessness—in sharing her experience speaks to the very essence of what is so intrinsically valuable about social media: honesty. Being real. Or as Amy says in her book, “showing some skin.”

So I’m sitting in the Pathfinder session, listening to Amy discuss innovation, intention, ideas, influence, and inspiration—and writing as quickly as I can to take down what she is saying: “Coloring outside the lines without crossing the lines.” Sharing the corporate mission statement of Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh: “Be real and use your best judgment.” Explaining the value of “Random Acts of Shaqness.” (You must read this book. And yes, she’s referring to Shaquille O’Neal.)

In the midst of my flurried note-taking I had an epiphany: As a blogger, I’m ipso facto on social media. But I wasn’t really on social media. It was quickly becoming apparent that I had much to learn and I’d better get cracking. And that’s why I’m reading her excellent book, and why I want to tell you about it. I think that it’s a game changer for any public persona, corporation, brand, organization, or entity not yet on board with the new rules of the game. For those already using social media to enhance their relevancy, it will provide an entertaining and enlightening overview of where they have been. I suspect even they will learn things they didn’t already know.

On paper (in pixels?) it doesn’t seem as though I’d be such a social media newbie. I began writing content for Web 1.0 back in 1998 on behalf of Oberlin College. I was wired in for the advent of email, and only just slightly behind the curve on Facebook and LinkedIn, although I caught up fairly quickly. I did a bit of blogging and video interviews, and even composed tweets during our 2.0 phase. And yet I hovered there. It wasn’t until starting my own blog in August 2011 that I truly recognized the importance of communicating regularly and with intention across diverse social media platforms. I’m sure one reason is because I’m now working for myself, and so I feel a sense of urgency. But I am also a writer who blogs. And like every other writer who blogs, I want people to read me. How does a blogger find readers? On social media. Duh.

And so I advanced on the board from Facebook and LinkedIn until I reached Twitter. I opened my own account (kind of feeling the way I did when I first opened a checking account); passed “Go,” and in a year attracted more than 400 followers. (This is more than double what I had before the BlogHer conference, which shows you how much I learned in a very short time). These past weeks I’ve slowly begun to build my presence on Pinterest and Google+. This weekend I wrote my bio for Huffington Post and figured out how to upload a video to YouTube and connect it to what you’re reading now. Just today I sent out my first Instagram. (It’s fitting, on many levels, that it was a photo of Amy Jo’s appearance on the Melissa Harris-Perry show.)

@AmyJoMartin discussing social media & politics on @MSNBC’s @MHPerry #TeamRenegades http://instagr.am/p/QNA_tOSDze/ (Amy Jo is on the left.)

When you start a blog, and hope for it to be meaningful and authentic and actually read by people, it soon becomes apparent that it’s not enough just to hit “publish.” Bloggers control their own distribution. Those who take what they do seriously are not just members of the media, they are also the means of the media—the studios and the control rooms and the printing presses and the distribution houses. It’s exhausting, quite frankly—especially if you’re a team of one. Even a renegade team of one. Even a renegade team of one with an awesome husband to help with things like shooting the video you’re about to see.

This is why Amy Jo’s book is important to me. As a team of one, I have to think about economies of scale. If I spend three hours writing a blog post and only 30 people see it, I’ve just poured four minutes of my life for each of those 30 people. If 300 people see it, I’m starting to get some traction and make some impact for the time I’ve invested. If 3,000 people see it, well, you can do the math. The greatest impression one of my post’s has had was last November, when WordPress featured an essay of mine on ‘Freshly Pressed’ and more than 5,000 people read it over a two-day period. That truly felt relevant. That’s what a writer hopes for.

Please don’t misinterpret what I’m saying here. Every one of my readers is valuable to me. Whether 30 people visit a post or 3,000—each reader means something to me. Each has invested his or her own time in reading what I had to write. Economies of scale work both ways, after all. That’s why I hope I’m providing interesting, informative, and entertaining content for you.

Time is money, as they say. And I’m as busy as the next person—I also run a business and freelance. So these things inevitably begin to matter, especially if your blog is part of the foundation of your livelihood.

Amy Jo learned something early on about the time factor, and she has shared the anecdote widely—in a TEDx talk, at conferences, and in her book. Her former boss, who wasn’t wild about all of this social media business, challenged her by sliding a sheet of paper across her desk. On it were written three words:

Work. Family. Self.

“Choose,” her boss told her. “You can’t have all three.”

Since Amy ultimately left that employer and formed her own business, I naturally wondered if she ever did have to end up choosing. I asked her about it, and she replied via email:

“Since founding Digital Royalty a few years ago, I have been able to design my own day, whether that means working late at night while on the elliptical machine, or taking a conference call from a mountaintop. Through creating Digital Royalty, and especially Digital Royalty University, I have been able to find my Royal Bliss. That’s what balance is to me. It’s not a perfect equilibrium. It’s finding that sweet spot, where your purpose, passion, and skill collide.”
I love that, don’t you? The “sweet spot where purpose, passion, and skill collide.” That’s what balance is. And now, before this post gets too unbalanced by growing too long, I think it’s time to let everyone know who won a signed galley copy of Amy Jo’s book. Watch this video to find out!

Related Article: “Who Wants to be a Renegade? Enter to Win this Free Book!”

A note about the contest: The winner was drawn from the Facebook fans of The Midlife Second Wife. A drawing held Friday evening, Sept. 28, did not yield a winner because I was unable to reach the person whose name was drawn despite two attempts via Facebook. A subsequent drawing, represented in the above video, was held Sunday afternoon, Sept. 30. Out of fairness to my fans, members of my family were excluded from this drawing. I should also note that I received a signed galley copy of Renegades Write the Rules for the giveaway, as well as a free download for my Kindle. Other than that, I received no compensation to write about the book. 

If you would like to like the Midlife Second Wife on Facebook, click the embedded link at the start of this note. You can also follow me on Twitter: @midlife2wife. Thank you for your support!

Want to be a Renegade? Enter to Win this Free Book!

26 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by in Special Events, The Reading Life, What's the Buzz?

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Be the Queen (or King) of all the social media you survey with this handy book. SPOILER ALERT: there are photos of—and tweets from—Shaquille O’Neal inside!

If you use social media to further your business or enhance your brand profile, please keep reading. If your use of social media is purely recreational, but you would like to understand how it affects the ways in which information reaches us, thereby changing our cultural landscape, please keep reading. And if you claim not to use social media at all yet you are reading this blog, well, you just told a teensy little white lie, now didn’t you? Don’t worry. I won’t report you to the FBI-U (Federal Bureau of Internet Users). That agency probably doesn’t exist. And yet, you never know…*

The regular readers among you are aware that I attended the whopping big BlogHer12 conference in New York City last month. I’m still amazed by how many critically essential connections I made there, and by how much useful knowledge I gleaned. I’ll be writing a post soon, for example, about a wonderful new phenomenon known as the midlife blogger (Hey! That’s me!). But today I want to tell you about an energetic, inspiring, and game-changing woman that I met at my very first BlogHer session, on Pathfinder Day. I was trying to find my path in this labyrinth of social media, and Amy Jo Martin is helping me do it.

I had the pleasure of meeting the awesome Amy Jo Martin after her talk.

Amy Jo is the author of Renegades Write the Rules: How the Digital Royalty Use Social Media to Innovate. And with more than 1.2 million followers on Twitter, she knows whereof she writes and tweets. (Forbes Magazine named Amy Jo to its list of “Best-Branded Women on Twitter.) Because I learned so much from that BlogHer session with Amy Jo—and I’m learning so much by reading her book—I’d like to share that knowledge with you.

This Friday, Sept. 28, I will choose, at random, a Facebook fan of the Midlife Second Wife.** The lucky winner will receive an autographed copy of Renegades Write the Rules. If you’ve previously “liked” The Midlife Second Wife on Facebook, you’re already entered. But if you haven’t, and you’d love a chance to win this fascinating book, all you have to do is go to the blog’s page on Facebook and click “like.” I’ll announce the winner here and on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, on Monday, Oct. 1, and I’ll tell you a bit more about the book. Now isn’t that a great way to start a new month?

Really, that’s all it takes. “Like” the Midlife Second Wife on Facebook, and you have a chance to win. Just think, you have a chance to become a renegade and a member of digital royalty. Because even renegades know that it’s good to be the Queen. Or King. (Both are fine. We’re nothing if not inclusive here at TMSW!)

*Guess what I just learned? To be absolutely positively certain that my made-up agency is non-existent, I Googled it and lo and behold! I discovered that the FBI actually has an organization called iC3—the Internet Crime Complaint Center. You’ve now been warned. Remember Google’s original tagline: “Don’t be Evil.” And to paraphrase Amy Jo, perform “random acts of your own Shaqness.” This footnote has been brought to you as a public service of the Midlife Second Wife. You’re welcome.

**Here’s how the drawing will work. I will print out my Facebook list of “likers” and create an entry card by painstakingly cutting each name into a separate bit of paper. I’ll then put all the bits of paper in a beautiful box, and ask the Midlife Second Husband to draw the winner. (I’ll have removed his name and mine from the pool in advance.) Although I can’t afford to have accountants from Price Waterhouse verify the results, I do hope to video the drawing with my iPhone and share it here.

TMSW Partners with Viewpoints to Test Consumer Products

30 Thursday Aug 2012

Posted by in House and Garden, LifeStyles, What's the Buzz?

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Do I have a point of view? Why yes. Yes I do. Thank you for asking. Today, Viewpoints, a consumer-review leader based in Chicago, has issued a press release announcing that they want my opinion. Here are the details: Yours truly, The Midlife Second Wife, is one of seven bloggers in the U.S. and Canada named to a panel that will test consumer products and then share with our respective audiences whether or not the new products are worth the bother and the buy. It’s a unique partnership, and it’s an honor to share the same patch of blogosphere with the other distinguished women on the panel, which, incidentally, is known as “The Viewpoint.” (Gee, maybe Barbara Walters of The View will ask “The Viewpoint” panel to come on her show!)

Know what else I love about this venture? Not only do I get to share with you my experiences in trying these new products, but I also will be donating the product to a charity of my choice once the testing is complete.

Here’s what Denise Chudy, Viewpoints’ general manager, has to say about the program:

“Viewpoints is thrilled to welcome these experienced and witty writers to help us create a more meaningful conversation about new household products. More and more consumers use online reviews to make their purchase decisions. These respected bloggers are perfect for the assignment, and we have ambitious plans.”

You can learn more about the Viewpoints panel below, and if you click on this link you can read the press release.

Let the testing begin!

The Viewpoint Panel

  • Lian Dolan, The Chaos Chronicles by Lian Dolan
    Aside from being a successful blogger, Lian Dolan hosts an iTunes top-rated podcast for moms also called “The Chaos Chronicles.” Based in Pasadena, California, Lian is the parenting expert at oprah.com and author of the novel, Helen of Pasadena, an LA Times bestseller. Her motto is: “Embrace Your Chaos.”
  • Sheila Hill, Pieces of a Mom (because motherhood is a little bit of everything)
    Sheila Hill started her blog in coastal New Jersey to keep faraway friends and family in the loop. She soon realized that she had a lot to say. From daily life to fun activities and day trips for kids to product reviews, “Pieces of a Mom” has evolved into much more than just a daily diary.
  • Sarah Mock, How I Pinch a Penny, Helping you save one penny at a time
    Saving money is important. Sarah Mock’s family in Pennsylvania has cut back on many items, and she blogs about creative ideas for increasing value and reducing cost. She is also is proudly ‘green’ in that she recycles, composts, and buys local when possible.
  • Randi Chapnik Myers and Mara Shapiro, momfaze, the real scoop on raising teens
    From Toronto, Randi Chapnik Myers and Mara Shapiro dish about the joys and challenges of parenting teens and tweens, from stalking kids’ Facebook pages to sharing their clothes to teaching them to stay safe – all while walking the tightrope between Mom and Friend. Frank, funny and honest, these two midlife moms aren’t shy about telling it like it is.
  • Jill Nystul, One Good Thing by Jillee, Sorting through the beautiful clutter of life to find that “One Good Thing” each day and sharing it with you!
    Jill Nystul’s website is based on a simple promise — to deliver ‘one good thing’ to her readers everyday. Her background includes work as a Utah television journalist, and this blog is a return to her roots in that respect. Filled with practical tips and beautiful photos, she calls “One Good Thing by Jillee” her life-saving passion.
  • Marci Rich, The Midlife Second Wife, The Real and True Adventures of Remarriage at Life’s Midpoint
    Marci Rich started her blog after discovering that there really is life after 40, after divorce and after cancer. Readers find inspiration, comfort and humor at “The Midlife Second Wife,” which she defines as “a literary lifestyle/relationship blog with recipes and a medical memoir.” A graduate of Oberlin College, Marci is also a special correspondent for the Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch.
  • Kathy Zucker, METRO MOMS Network, Consulting Network + Biannual Expos + Magazine = Parenting & Career Answers
    The “Metro Moms Network” is more than a blog. Kathy Zucker is founder of this one-stop shop to help families juggle career and parenting. From childcare solutions to expert advice to products that moms can’t live without, the “Metro Moms Network” is a valuable resource for New Jersey parents.

The One-Year Blogiversary of The Midlife Second Wife

24 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Special Events, What's the Buzz?

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Happy anniversary, TMSW! Read through this post for important news about a giveaway to celebrate our first year together!

The month of August is an important one for me as far as anniversaries go. For starters (and most importantly), John and I got married on August 14, 2010. Then, one year and ten days later, I began publishing The Midlife Second Wife. If you’re counting along with me, that means today, August 24, 2012, is the blog’s first anniversary, or “blogiversary,” to employ a technical term. (I’ve learned a lot of blogging jargon since embarking on this social media journey, and yet have miles to go before I sleep.) This past year has been a fascinating time—filled with wonder, exploration, discoveries, and new friends. Please join me as I look back at a year in the life of a blog.

Readership
It’s all well and good to talk about marketing, SEOs, awards, and metrics, but there’s no doubt in my mind what brings the greatest value to the Midlife Second Wife the blog, and holds the most meaning to the Midlife Second Wife the blogger (that would be me). In a word: readers. Or in another word, you. Every time you hit “like” on a post, or comment, or share a blog link on Facebook or Twitter; every time you bring a new reader into the fold; every time you even click open that new post waiting hopefully in your inbox, it’s kind of like the bell ringing in that great Frank Capra film, It’s a Wonderful Life—an angel blogger gets her wings. This blog would have precious little meaning if it weren’t for you, gentle reader. Thank you for your support and continued interest.

MorgueFile image
This angel blogger just earned her wings

You might like to know that as of today, there are 555 of you who subscribe to the blog—either through email or on Twitter. Put another way, that’s as though more than one-and-a-half new readers signed on each day last year. Wow. Just wow. And while we’re on the subject of readers, as of today the blog welcomed a grand total of 24,308 visitors to its portal (An ephemeral number that has changed already because you are reading this now. But at 24,308, that is  1,706 more than the entire population of Avon Lake, Ohio, as of July 2011, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.)

And where have you all been coming from? Well, most of you live in areas throughout the United States and Canada, as you might expect. But you also hail from the United Kingdom, India, Australia, The Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Uruguay, Brazil, France, the Russian Federation, Montenegro, Sudan, Israel, and Denmark.

While we’re on the subject of numbers, I should also add (the pun is intentional) that 66 people “like” TMSW on Facebook. Would you like to help push that number up to 100? Please encourage your friends and family to like the blog on Facebook. I’m giving away a prize to the 100th liker. That’s pronounced LIKE-er, not liquor. And no, the prize isn’t a bottle of vodka. It has more permanence than that!

I should also say a word about The Midlife Second Wives’ Club. As previously announced, the first 110 subscribers to the blog automatically became charter members of this newly-minted association. About half of them have already received something in the mail from me, and I hope to get the rest of the mailings out before the end of the year. Although I don’t have a designated page for the club on the blog just yet, I do hope to get to that in the coming months. In the meantime, I invite you to think of names for other membership levels. There will be more on all of this in a future post.

Writing
I mentioned metrics earlier, and would like to digress a moment to pass along an observation. As many of you know, I began my writing life as a poet. Back in the day, metrics meant the scansion of my poetic line. Now, in the Age of Social Media, it has taken on a whole new flavor. A blogger’s success is measured not by the stressed and unstressed syllables in her sentences, but by the number of unique visitors to her site, whether they click through on ads and what-not, and, well, you get the picture. This is what measures a blogger’s worth, at least in ROI (Return on Investment) terms. But in ROW terms—Return on Writing, I proclaim my metrics stratospheric. Advertisers, do you care? Readers, I think you do and so I will explain.

This blog has allowed me to do something I’ve not really had the chance to do before: set aside time to write. Before, when I worked full-time, I wrote all day long, but for my employer, not for myself. And if any of you write for someone else for a living, you know that you’re often left too drained to create work of your own. But when you blog, you blog for yourself (and your readers). Speaking only for myself as a writer, I find there is nothing richer or more satisfying than knowing I have an opportunity to clarify my own thoughts, using words and tones and rhythms of my choosing. And, of course, there’s the immediacy and intimacy of the inbox—knowing that what I’ve written has resounded with someone else. In fact, the very first daily writing challenge that I did, sponsored by BlogHer, resulted in an essay about writing that the publishing network syndicated. And paid me for. When I checked a moment ago, that one post was read 5,636 times. This is quite astonishing to me, because I’m still adjusting to having so many readers. To quote Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “I am amazed and know not what to say.”

Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing....

Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing. From William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Writing this blog has also resulted in at least one book-length manuscript-in-progress. I attribute this to the BlogHer writing challenge (also known as NaBloPoMo) I just mentioned.

Accolades
The manuscript that is emerging from BlogHer’s daily writing challenge is for a book about my mother, and BlogHer honored the post that started it all earlier this month with a Voice of the Year award at their national convention in New York City. As noted in an earlier post, the essay, “Have You Met My Daughter?,” will appear in an electronic anthology featuring other VOTY winners. BlogHer and Open Road Integrated Media are jointly publishing the e-book.

Last November, WordPress, my blogging platform, featured TMSW on its “Freshly Pressed” site, an event that brought more than 5,000 visitors to the blog in less than two days. Also that month, a funny thing happened that I also attribute to blogging, although indirectly. I submitted a humorous essay to a contest sponsored by Marlo Thomas on her Facebook page, and was one of five winners chosen. The prize? Two tickets to see “That Girl” in the play Relatively Speaking on Broadway. Of course the essay, and the enjoyable experiences that ensued, ended up on the blog.

Photo credit: Marlo Thomas’ Facebook Page

TMSW has also won a few awards from other bloggers: the Liebster, the Versatile Blogger Award, and one I haven’t even had time to properly showcase yet—the Illuminating Blogger Award. To the kind food blogger who bestowed that upon me, I promise to give it its due soon. I’ve just been a little busy.

And I’m pretty proud of this one, especially given my love of coffee. Zabar‘s featured me on their blog. (In the interest of full disclosure, I did not receive either a lifetime supply of coffee or rugelach. Darn it.)

Opportunities
Earlier this month, I attended the aforementioned (and phenomenal) BlogHer Conference in New York, where I learned enough about social media to know that I still have tons to learn. I also met many incredible, bright, talented, and fun women, and joined up with some of them on a Facebook page for Bloggers Over 45. (Hi everyone!)

There’s also something else—something REALLY AWESOME AND AMAZING—that I just can’t tell you about yet. But when I am in a position to do so, you’ll read about it here.

Looking Ahead
I want to continue bringing you the best writing that I can, and the most interesting posts and articles. I hope to beef up the different sections of the blog, and I really long to enhance the look of it. I want to shelve all my books in the “Open Book” library, and experiment with new recipes for you to try. If you have a story idea, please let me know about it. There’s a contact link at the top of the page, or you can leave a comment at the end of this post. Either way, please stay in touch!

Thank you for indulging me in these few moments of revery. It’s a satisfying exercise to look back and take stock. I hope this first year of The Midlife Second Wife has been as enjoyable for you to read as it has been for me to write. Thanks again for being here.

And don’t forget! The 100th person to “like” The Midlife Second Wife on Facebook will receive a prize. If you know someone who should be reading this blog, who will love this blog, or who needs this blog, let them know and encourage them to like it on Facebook. And if you haven’t done so already, please take a moment and do it yourself, right now. It only takes a click, and you might be the 100th clicker. (If bells and whistles begin to blow, please let me know. I’ll try to find out how the Internet does that.)

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

Cheers, dear friends!