Tag Archives: NaBloPoMo

TMSW is Five-Months Old Today!

24 Tuesday Jan 2012

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(Want to help me celebrate? Read through to the end of this post to find out how!)

Five months ago today, I hit “publish” on the very first post for The Midlife Second Wife. What a long way we’ve come in such a short time! I thought you might like to hear about some of these developments, and a few new offerings planned for the coming months.

Last night, the blog welcomed its 12,001st visitor to the site. I have to say that this number has me a bit flabbergasted—I had hoped to reach 10,000 visitors after my first year of blogging. If the trend continues, 20,000 readers will have passed through these pages by our one-year anniversary.

Your fellow subscribers now number 273: 133 are following by email or readers, 25 are following the comments, and 115 join us by way of Twitter.

I’m going to add another opportunity today for readers to climb aboard: a site based in Sweden, Bloglovin.com, acts as a sort of storage locker for people who follow a lot of different blogs, organizing them all in one place. I’ll be adding a widget to my site so that Bloglovin’ lovers can share the TMSW love.

TMSW has won two awards from bloggers: the Liebster and the Versatile Blogger Award. In November, TMSW was featured on WordPress’ “Freshly Pressed,” an event that brought more than 5,000 visitors to the site in less than two days. Also in November, the highly respected publishing network BlogHer syndicated one of my posts. Fifty-five of you like me, you really like me, on Facebook, too.

So what’s next? Well, I’ll continue posting two to three times each week. (I also hope to pick a quiet month when my freelance work subsides and do another NaBloPoMo with BlogHer). You’ll see the recipe files getting thicker, and you’ll have more interviews with experts to enjoy. I’ll even begin sprucing the place up a bit. I’ll be asking for your opinion in a few readers’ polls, too.

We now have our 110 charter members of the Midlife Second Wives’ club, and they can expect to hear from me in the weeks ahead. I need to think of an idea for the second-tier membership group, too; if you have any ideas for that, please let me know! I’ll also get to work on our Midlife Second Wives’ Hall of Fame.

And by all means, please send me your ideas for articles, post your comments, and share the articles you like on Facebook.

While we’re on the subject….I have a favor to ask you. It’ll help us all celebrate this five-month milestone!

Close your eyes, think back, and pick out your favorite post from the last five months. Got one? Good. Now, email a link to that post to three of your friends, letting them know about the blog, and invite them to sign up. (This is important: send me a blind copy of your email so that I’ll know where the new subscribers are coming from.) I’ll enter your email in a drawing for a special prize for each new subscriber that comes my way through your efforts.

(I promise it will be useful and tasteful, not like the Leg Lamp “Major Award” that the Old Man received in A Christmas Story.)

Thanks for reading, and thanks for sharing!

—XOXOTMSW

The Writer’s Prayer

19 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by in The Writing Life

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The Writer’s Prayer
With apologies to St. Luke and St. Matthew

Our muse, who art within us,
Hallowed be thy flame.
Thy freedom come,
Thy quill be done—
No dearth like the other night at seven.
Give us this day our daily “said,”
And forgive us our frets,
As we forgive those fretters within us.
Lead us not into frustration,
But deliver us from drivel
Now, and at each hour and breath,
Amen.

—Marci Rich

Today is the 19th day in a row that I’ve written and posted to my blog and cross-posted on BlogHer, part of the commitment I made to the glorious madness known as National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo. The other day, while speeding through the BlogHer site to post my essay, I spotted a photograph on a syndicated NaBloPoMo post that pretty much sums up what it’s like to write in such a frenzied blur. The writer illustrated her essay with a photo of her laptop.

Big deal, you say? It was perched on the toilet.

For obsessives—and writers are nothing if not obsessive—this image is gold.

Dawn’s post inspired me to write about NaBloPoMo again. The challenge served as my subject twice: when I wrote and posted my very first NaBloPoMo submission, way back in the dark ages of November 1, and the day after, when I learned that the editors at BlogHer had syndicated it, thus giving me a huge boost of energy from which to tap. Now, 19 days later, we’re all more than halfway home and more than a little exhausted.

One of the added values of NaBloPoMo is the demand that it makes on one’s discipline as a writer. Posting an essay every day for 30 days straight yields such a prolific output as to turn everyone participating into the Joyce Carol Oates of blogging. I’ve never written so much of my own work at such a consistent pace in my life. And I’m 55. That’s a long time. (I really don’t count my professional output from years spent writing for other people and organizations.)

A word about that. Years ago, when I first began life as a salaried writer, a lovely author named Diane Vreuls said to me, “Be careful. Pay the bills, but try to avoid jobs that have you write. It can get in the way.”

It did. I churned out press releases, faculty bios, tip-sheets, magazine articles, and—with the advent of the Internet, web stories. But I did little to no writing of my own. The exhaustion that sets in from being creative for hire while balancing home and family left me dry. And I missed the poet I used to be.

Majoring in English with a creative writing emphasis as a non-traditional student at Oberlin College, I had studied with Diane’s husband, the poet, translator, and literary editor Stuart Friebert. My particular focus was poetry, and I was required to present a poem for critique in Stuart’s poetry workshop every week. He used to quote Grace Paley to us: “A poem a day keeps the prose doctor away.”

Those days of “a poem a day”—from around 1987 to 1991—represent the last time I experienced such prolonged outbursts of creativity. Until, that is, this month. So thank you, NaBloPoMo, for reminding me (and I do need reminding, for life gets in the way) that there’s a reason for writing every day. It’s no longer because I “have to” in the assignment-sense; it’s because I have to, as in “I need to.” As in the survival sense.

Note: In a metanarrative kinda way, if you link to Diane’s name in this post, you’ll be taken to an article I wrote about her on the occasion of her retirement from the faculty at Oberlin College.

You Have to Write to Win

03 Thursday Nov 2011

Posted by in The Writing Life

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Ummmm….do you remember the other day, when I posted a blog about posting? You know, the one about the National Blog Posting Month [NaBloPoMo] challenge to write and post a blog each day this month? I said something along these lines:

What motivates a person to write? More specifically, what motivates a pressed-for-time blogger to take on such a commitment during the portal month to the holiday season? I’m rather embarrassed to admit it, but in this case there are prizes involved. Now I’m not saying that I can be had for the price of a free book, but there exists a part of me that thrills to the idea of someone calling my name and handing me something. Lottery winnings, for example. And since we all know that’s never going to happen (well … maybe if I started buying them …), this is as close as I’m likely to get to that rush of adrenalin.

Now, I’m not altogether comfortable quoting myself, but in this case there’s no easy way around it. It’s not that I’ve had to eat my words, exactly. No, it seems that the fine folks at BlogHer liked what they read, because they’ve decided to syndicate the post on their site.

Here’s how it was explained to me in an e-mail yesterday:

It means we want to feature it, moving it from the general well of NaBloPoMo posts onto the front page of NaBloPoMo and give it a little extra social media love.

“Extra social media love?” Yes, please! And thank you!

What, exactly, is BlogHer? It’s a community. It’s also a media company. BlogHer was created in 2005 in partnership with women in social media, and, according to the BlogHer website, it is also the largest community of women who blog, with 27 million unique visitors per month. BlogHer hosts conferences—including the world’s largest conference for women in social media—and the BlogHer Publishing Network.

The icon beneath my headline will direct you to the post as it appears on the BlogHer site, under the title “Why We Write Even When We Have No Time.” BlogHer has featured the essay on its home page as well as the site page for NaBloPoMo. The encomium will be followed by a modest check, presented in the spirit that writers should be paid for their work.

Although I’ve been writing for nearly 30 years (51 if you count the time I learned how to write my name), I’ve only been blogging for less than three months. For that reason, being chosen for syndication by BlogHer comes as a surprise, albeit a wonderful one, and I am deeply and truly honored by their validation of my work.

Now you’ll have to excuse me. I’m going out to buy a lottery ticket, because, as I’ve learned, you can’t win if you don’t play. And especially if you don’t write. Although, as Shakespeare reminds us, “the play’s the thing.”

And, I might add, so is the writing.

To the editors at BlogHer, my sincere and joyous thanks!

For more information about BlogHer, please click here.

Why We Write Even When We Have No Time

01 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by in The Writing Life

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NaBloPoMo 2011

I’ll tell you. The things you learn when you begin blogging.

November, it appears, is National Blog Posting Month, or, in blogging lingo, NaBloPoMo. Well, at least it is on a site known as BlogHer. For those like me who are new to this wondrous phenomenon, BlogHer is a rich and robust destination on the Web where women who blog (and the men who love them?) can find inspiration, community, and, it appears, nifty badges like the one shown above.

About this badge. I’m going to try and earn its keep on my own blog this month by making an effort to post something every day. Yes, you heard me. Every. Day. This. Month. This is an ambitious undertaking because, as we all know, November in America features that delectable holiday of food and gratitude, Thanksgiving. This is immediately followed by the chaos known to American retail commerce as Black Friday. Oh, and I’m starting two fairly substantial freelance projects in November.

Madness, indeed. Believe it or not, I had planned on writing this week to tell you that I would be curtailing my postings, reducing my output from three to two missives weekly while I turn my attention to my freelance work. Hah!

Did you hear that? We make plans, and God laughs.

What motivates a person to write? More specifically, what motivates a pressed-for-time blogger to take on such a commitment during the portal month to the holiday season? I’m rather embarrassed to admit it, but in this case there are prizes involved. Now I’m not saying that I can be had for the price of a free book, but there exists a part of me that thrills to the idea of someone calling my name and handing me something. Lottery winnings, for example. And since we all know that’s never going to happen (well … maybe if I started buying them …), this is as close as I’m likely to get to that rush of adrenalin.

Oh yes. And there is the matter of the creative process. Each day BlogHer will post a  NaBloPoMo “writing prompt,” a question designed to stoke the imaginative engine. Today the question is:

What is your favourite part about writing?

(Apparently the person who drafted this question is Canadian. Can I hear a huzzah from my readers up in Canada?)

My favorite part about writing, aside from affixing the final period to an essay or article, is the roll-up-your-sleeves hard work of it all. Paradoxically, that’s the part I also love the least. And yet … I love the way that I manage to disappear into the world of whatever it is I’m writing, whether it’s a poem or prose. It’s a world that I am creating and one that I alone am responsible for ordering, so I consider it a grave assignment, even when I’m writing something that I hope will elicit a laugh or a smile.

It is also a world of play. I love to play with language, with words and their sounds, which is probably why I began my writing life as a poet. One of the first college textbooks I ever bought was called Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry. I loved it then, and I love it still. It’s actually to the right of me now, on my bookshelf. I love the fact that editor Laurence Perrine chose to give primacy to the word sound. Sense will come, but later. For me, sound has always been the lure that will bring me ’round to my senses.

I’ve always thought of writing as thinking on paper. To this day, if I want to learn something, I write about it. It used to be that I wrote poems to understand philosophy or history. Or other poems. It’s no surprise, then, that this method would evolve to the point where I am writing a blog to further my education—an education about a life. Mine. And every bit as important as exercising the life of the mind.

Joan Didion, in her 1976 New York Times Magazine essay, “Why I Write,” explains why she stole George Orwell’s title:

Of course I stole the title … from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:

I

I

I

Far be it from me to compare myself to the glorious Joan Didion, but I understand her meaning here. One of the ways in which we differ, though, is the fact that while she views writing as an act of imposing oneself upon other people by the act of saying “I,” I tend to see the act of writing as an imposition of one’s “eye.” I have an eye on the world. (For this reason I have always loved the title of the Christopher Isherwood play, I Am a Camera.)

It makes me happy to observe and explore my subject from various angles—lit by language—and present it to you, my reader. I’m far more comfortable with the “eye” of writing than I am with the “I.” Perhaps this is one reason why it’s taken me until now to make this very real commitment to a writing life.

Writing one post a day might strengthen that commitment. Who knows? We can hope …