So I received a personal email from a faithful reader letting me know she misses Good News Sunday. Truthfully, I was thinking just the other day how long it’s been since I’ve written a Good News post. For those who don’t know, I used to post nothing but a bulleted list of good news each Sunday because, frankly, there’s enough bad stuff to feed our brains and still have enough for leftovers.
The Good News Sunday posts ceased to exist when I had my mini-breakdown related to the pressure I was feeling to blog on a schedule. As much as I’d like to be, I’m no Scribbit. Perhaps if I received 50,000 page views each month, I might be tempted to roll out the red carpet as far as both reliability and quality are concerned. Then again, Michelle didn’t get where she is today without a lot of hard work on her part, and she is one fantastic blogger.
Anyway, I’ve been giving blogging a lot of thought lately. In fact, my internal bloggy reflections just about caused me to run through a stop sign the other day on my way home from the grocery store. Eeks! I know the quality of my content has been suffering, and frankly, I feel just about ”blogged out.”
I cannot see myself blogging beyond 2008; I’m running out of things to say that I think really matter or that have the ability to provoke lurkers from delurking. My most successful post, to date, has been about how to make a pirate hat. Go figure. If how to make a pirate hat is my post popular post, everything else I write must be horribly sub-standard. It wasn’t even a nicely written post, and the accompanying picture was just awful, but without that post, I would lose a quarter of my 200 daily page views. *Acutally 200 page views is on a really good day. Realistically, I receive between 150-175 page views each day.* There’s just not many of you who read my blog on a consistent basis. I’m basically sticking around at this point to garner more interest in Root & Sprout. As soon as I feel confident that Root & Sprout can reel readers in on it’s own, I’ll probably be done with blogging.
The thing is, I don’t want to invest the amount of time in this blog to make it into one of the Top 10 Mommy Blogs. Really, I don’t think I’m Top 10 material anyway. I feel a lot like I did when I was in high school, like I’m living in the shadow of some really great people. Blogging is not my genre, so to speak, and I can’t pretend to be even good at it.
I stated before that I don’t want to be popular, but I’d like to retract that statement now. I don’t want to be popular for sharing my personal life on my blog, but I do want to be popular for creating what I hope to be a wonderful parenting site in Root & Sprout. The second edition is coming along nicely and looking really good, and it’s my goal to make each edition better than the last.
With that said, Root & Sprout consumes a lot of my time. Not only do I write many articles for the site, I comb through every submission I receive until I have read each one several times and edited them to “fit” the site. Each one of you has a very different style of writing (which is nice for variety in blogging), but pick up any magazine and you will see that there is a cohesive flow to how it reads as a whole. Editing just one article takes me anywhere from 30-60 minutes, because I want to be careful to “correct” for grammar and mechanics while preserving the integrity of your content. Perhaps I’m just slow. Or maybe I’m just anal. Or it could be that I can’t do anything without one of my three kids interrupting my work every five minutes.
Here’s a look at the other responsibilites associated with Root & Sprout, besides writing and editing:
- moving articles and pictures to the archives
- posting new articles and pictures to the site
- formatting the pages
- formatting SEO keywords
- Root & Sprout newsletter
- Root & Sprout marketing
- Root & Sprout legal
- Root & Sprout business
There is plenty of behind-the-scenes stuff associated with establishing an online magazine, and I’m often up until my eyes are red and grainy (my cat is walking around with my fabric tape measure in its mouth so that it’s trailing about 10 ft behind him - funny!) and I can no longer see straight.
Besides my largely unpaid work (at this time) for Root & Sprout, there are other writing and non-writing related projects on which I am working:
- a collaborative preschool-aged story with my oldest daughter
- print work for consumer magazines
- year-end school “stuff” at both the preschool and elementary school
- vacation plans
- vegetable garden
- keeping house
- making sure my family is fed
- being a wife
- being a mother
Lately, blogging has taken the backseat to everything else (read, my life). I actually woke up the other night in a cold sweat questioning my claim to be a “writer.” I often feel that I am just “playing” at being a writer. Yes, I’ve been published both online and in print. Yes, I am developing an online “magazine.” Yes, I am currently working on projects that have the potential to pay in the longrun. However, I am not working on any lucrative projects at this point, and, as strange as it may sound to you, I feel like not earning a paycheck makes me not really a writer. You know how scary not earning a $ and harboring feelings of doubt is for me?
For one thing, you all know how I feel about gas and food prices. Gas here is $3.96, or at least it was two days ago. I am insanely worried we’ll be paying $5.00 a gallon when we go on vacation (2400 miles roundtrip, not to mention excess driving). Our stimulus check from the IRS is tucked away in savings, and that’s how we’ll be able to take our first real family vacation in nearly 10 years.
Also, I quit my contract job believing that I was about to fall into another contract job. I was just about to sign the contract that promised to pay nearly the same amount of money for fewer hours worked. Plus, I was looking forward to the new job because the content sounded engaging and real. To make a long story short, I was dumped. It conjured up a few familiar feelings of being dumped by the only serious boyfriend I had before meeting my husband, the one whom, after he had given me a “promise ring” (cheesy, I know) decided just never to call or write or offer an explanation as to why I was no longer important in his life (he was in the Marines at the time and stationed in Egypt). Yeah, you could say I never completely recovered from that blow to my self-esteem. Yeah, you could say I am still really bitter about it, as much as I love my husband and would never change the events that led us to meet.
Losing a contract job is like a blow to your self-esteem, too. There was no call or explanation, simply a cease in communication. And in my opinion, it is not my responsibility to go chasing down every potential contract job or to take the lead in determining their intentions. They are the ones hiring me for a service, not for consultation as to how to run a website. But I digress. I offered my rates; I even offered to write at a discounted rate (and certainly below what other freelancers charge). And while I know that the reason this job didn’t materialize is because the timing probably wasn’t right for them afterall, I still feel disappointed. I’m sure it had nothing to do with me. I can tell myself that until I am blue-in-the-face, but the lack of a steady paycheck won’t pay to rent Hannah’s violin through the summer and next school year. It won’t pay to send Bridget and Jacob to the preschool summer day camp. It won’t pay to purchase a membership to the community public pool for the summer. It won’t pay for Hannah to go on the Girl Scout camping trip. It could have, but it won’t now.
I hate to admit that I am one of those people who measures self-worth by how much she contributes financially. Not your self-worth. My self-worth. I want to have my proverbial cake and eat it too. There is this competitive drive in me that I have squelched far too long because I felt, on some level, I shouldn’t be competitive. I have believed for close to a decade that I should want nothing more than to be a mother, but a mother is not all I want to be. I am sure that statement came out wrong and/or will be misconstrued by some, and I apologize. What I am trying to say, however, is there is a part of me that needs to feel successful at something other than being a mother, and I believe Root & Sprout can do this for me.
What does any of this have to do with Good News Sunday? Nothing, really. It’s not that I haven’t any good news to share. It’s just that my life is shooting off in so many directions right now that, like a handful of sand, it’s impossible to contain it all. Some of it, like blogging, will inevitably slip through the cracks between my fingers.
15 comments
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May 19, 2008 at 11:14 am
tracey
Remember that a lot of people, myself included, don’t comment all the time. I rarely click through after reading on Bloglines, as I just don’t have a fast enough computer or enough time to do so.
Take a break, hon. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. If you don’t enjoy blogging, don’t do it for a while. If you miss it, come right back.
As long as I still get to talk to you!
May 19, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Michelle at Scribbit
I don’t think people often realize how time consuming it is to publish your own magazine–and blogging professionally is really the equivalent of a magazine. I could use a staff of people. Actually, I’ve thought that that would be a great thing to consider–branching out and getting a group together like Goodyblog or others do. Heh, put it on the list of things to do right?
May 19, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Gnorb
Loaded post, my friend. I’ll respond as best I can.
That matter to you or to anyone else? I suppose this statement sort of begs the question, “Why are you blogging?” Often times what we find really matters is decided not by us nor our perceptions of what should be, but by people and what affects them. Frankly, I read your blog because I like seeing how a friend’s doing. I suppose one way of looking at it is that it all matters. Another, that none of it does.
Correlation and causation are two different things. You correlate the Pirate post and the replies therein to your popularity, and determine the cause to be your substandard writing in others. Not so! The pirate hat post gets a lot of comments because it likely draws a lot of Google traffic, where it ranks #4/#5 (depending on the server) when searching for “How to make a pirate hat”.
Thing is, your posts are usually so verbose, so packed full of info, and often so varied that they may bring themselves down in search engine placement. Ironic, I know, but part of the quirky world of Internet search engines. You don’t get as many hits there because not as many people show up. (I don’t know what your marketing is like, by the way, so I can only comment on that which I see through organic search engine rankings.) Less hots = less commenting.
Funny. I think back to the most commented/viewed posts on my blog. Most of them I did almost zero actual writing work in. My most popular? Pictures of “Elita Loresca”. After that, two online games. The most commented? An online game about helicopters. Only one post, something I wrote up about online scams, gets a fair amount of comments outside those three. Note that all three have been around since… 2006-ish? Anyway, the lesson here is that you shouldn’t necessarily count on the masses to determine value UNLESS masses are he answer to “why are you blogging?” in which case you have to ask whether you’ve been blogging for yourself or for others. (It’s a question I ask myself every so often when I wonder whether I should finally hang up the blogging hat.)
Just wondering, how many people do you have on RSS? How many people made the transition from Blogger to WordPress? How many are repeat viewers? How many are new? How long do each stay? How much traffic is direct, linked, or directed from search engines? All of these will give you a better picture of where you’re at.
(FYI: I don’t often visit your site, but I read it via RSS daily.)
I don’t think content is your problem, I really, really don’t. I wonder, however, whether marketing might be. I also wonder about the writing style, and how your propensity to be “so verbose, so packed full of info, and often so varied” correlates to your readership, short and long term. (By the way, I don’t know if you use tools like this, but have you thought about submitting your stories via “StumbleUpon” and “Thoof”? What about using Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, etc. You probably have, and I’m sorry if it seems like a dumb question, but this is the kind of stuff that will also very likely help you with Root & Sprout.
On the other hand, congratulations at finding such a passion with Root & Sprout. Maybe your blogging was merely the road you needed to get you to this eventual destination.
As for editing, you’re not slow. You’re thorough. There’s a lot to be said for that. Frankly, that’s one think you and my wife have in common. She’s thorough. VERY thorough. Me? I’ve done editing before, but I’m more of a writer than I am an editor, hands down. And as both a writer and and editor, professionally speaking, I think you give yourself WAY too little credit. Take that for what it’s worth. Also, give it time: you’ll become faster.
Here’s my very personal, requited only by the existence of this post: you shouldn’t quit blogging. That’s not to say that your blog shouldn’t switch formats. Eventually it’ll have to. But blogging is a PHENOMENAL tool, and YOU are as good as you’re afraid to admit to yourself that you are. (It’s not hubris when it’s true.) Are you going through a low spot? Absolutely. We all do. And my recommendation (plea, actually) is not to insinuate you haven’t thought about this thoroughly. I’m simply saying…
… well, what am I saying? I guess I’m asking you not to quit. And I’m telling you that you’re better than you’re willing to admit to yourself. And I’m wondering about your purpose for blogging. On the other hand, I’m very happy you feel so gung ho about Root & Sprout and wish you all the best. When my wife and I have kids, we’ll be checking your magazine regularly.
So I’m done. Hopefully I haven’t offended you. If I have, I’m sorry: it’s not my intent. If I made you think… well, then, that’s sort of my self-imposed life’s purpose. To make people think. I’ve done my job.
(Wow… This was a really long reply.)
May 19, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Gnorb
See now, reading that reply I really wish for an “edit” button. Let’s see,
“You don’t get as many
hitspageviews there because not as many people show up. ”Less
hotshits = less commenting.“Here’s my very personal opinion, requited only by the existence of this post:”
I’ll stop there because in this reply, as in all my writing, “typos will lurk and creep and scuttle on the edges of the text and, despite my best efforts, jump out and wave furiously at everyone as soon as I’m done…” (I love that quote)
May 19, 2008 at 4:48 pm
PreSchool Mama
Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re just beginning to feel the pressure of the magazine and all that that comes with.
As for the contract, when Roots and Sprouts takes off, you won’t have time for any of that stuff, anyway.
May 19, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Robin
Hang in there Melissa. It will all come together. I believe in you.
May 19, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Debbie Yost
I know exactly what you are saying. I am struggling with many of the same issues myself. On June 4 I officially close my daycare. I get the summer off and then I need to make some PT money to supplement the family income. I don’t know what that will be, but I had hoped freelance writing might be the answer. I’ll see what the summer holds. I sometimes wonder if I should even keep blogging. But, then, someone says something that gives me encouragement and I plug on. Again, we’ll see what the summer brings. I’ve got many ideas for Root and Sprout but then I wonder, what about my blog. I sometimes struggle with the direction of my blog. I’m sure that is a huge problem for you. You can only spread yourself so thin. I think it’s a good game plan. I really hope Root and Sprout succeeds. It’s a great idea. I know you’re not overly religious, but I hope you don’t mind if I keep you in my prayers anyway.
Oh, and if it helps, gas is only 3.69 here in Kansas. At least for now.
May 19, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Debi
I guess I kind of don’t know what to say. I’m just sorry you’re feeling spread so thin, and are somehow in some ways doubting your self worth. That makes me so very sad! Give up blogging if that will help. Or just take a break from it and see how that goes. I’m sure Root and Sprout is a full-time job…and in some ways it will probably get easier as it grows, and yet it will probably become even more time consuming.
If you do quit blogging, I will miss you catching up with you every day! Miss it more than I can say! But I won’t let a friend as sweet as you slip through my fingers…and I do have your e-mail address
Whatever decisions you make, I’m sure they’ll be the right ones. Know that you’re one incredible lady…lots of us out here sure do know that! None of us can predict the future, but I’ve got a feeling yours is bright!
(And by the way, I hate to say it, but I think your gas price is probably higher by now…it was $4.03 here yesterday.)
May 19, 2008 at 8:36 pm
ramblingsbyreba
Huggies…
I love reading what you have to say.
And I wish I could contribute to Root & Sprout, because I LOVE what it’s about.
Need a non-Mom-type person to write? Need someone to edit on occasion? I’m your girl.
Huggies again…
May 20, 2008 at 6:56 am
James
Great post!! No really, I mean it. I view and use my blog as a conversation with the world. Only it takes place over days and weeks not minutes. I also gives me a chance to express topics and feelings that I think about at work or while driving where I’m alone and can’t talk. this format also works good for my irregular posting schedule. Of course the other end of it is the few readers I have (about 1-3 a day). but it works for me.
I can relate quite a bit to how you feel about being a financial success (but in the exact opposite way). Often I’ll feel successful careerwise & financially but less successful in the rest of my life with family and friends; that there should be more outside Monday-Friday, 7am-4pm.
Anyway, great post and keep up the good work. A good friend once told me the sometimes life gets in the way of life! Think about it!
May 20, 2008 at 8:57 am
gary
wow, long and interesting post, and a million comments too!
I um, like pirate hats, butI see what you’re talking about. I see a lot of bloggers burn out. My blog is a creative project and adjunct to my business, so it is all pretty seamless: work,blog,life all together. But you are obviously pulled in quite a few directions, and I will be interested to see where it takes you.
Speaking of $$$, how’s Louie?
May 20, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Sandy
Good for you, Melissa! I hope your new magazine takes off. You are the perfect person to do it. I just read through - sorry I’m a little late - to see what’s going on w/you.
Hang in there - it’s happening! xo
May 20, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Stephanie
Best wishes with your decision! Speaking of Scribbit, did you read her article about blogging speed bumps on 5 Minutes for Mom? Here’s the link: http://www.5minutesformom.com/3493/scribbit-guest-post/.
May 21, 2008 at 12:50 pm
erica
Do what makes you happy. At the same time, remember that you are your worst critic and are harder on yourself than we, your readers, are. It seems that we like you better than you do, and that makes me sad for you because you’re great. So find what makes you proud of yourself, happy with your accomplishments, and do it.
May 23, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Quality: When Enough Is Enough - Gnorb.NET - Online Home of Norbert Cartagena
[...] there was a post by my favorite mommy blogger, Melissa, who questioned whether she should keep blogging past this year (and the ensuing followup). There she said something most of us don’t really have the guts to [...]