I used to write here quite a bit about the value of attending conferences—I traveled regularly and spoke at conference events a few times a year, and I think it can be an invaluable way to sort of improve your freelancing career on all fronts. Just by attending an event where you’re likely to meet potential clients and/or have time to brainstorm with colleagues, you’re increasing your own knowledge base and network of potential jobs. And if you speak at one of these events, you’re honing your presentation skills, adding to your resume, and hopefully becoming more comfortable as a leader in your field. And all of this is aside from the fact that a lot of us freelancers lead fairly solitary work existences, and it’s just a good idea to get out and spend some time with other people in a work environment now and then.

In short, there’s tons of good reasons to go to conferences, present at conferences, and just generally place value on getting dressed up every so often to face the world.

I had a good rhythm going there, for a while, and then I had to take some time away from work and tend to other things, and somehow it’s now been years since I went to a conference. It wasn’t entirely intentional. I just got away from it and then it felt hard to get back to planning for and carrying out the travel and such. But I’m finally getting back on that particular horse, next month.
Read the rest of this entry

When my kids were little—when they truly needed near-constant supervision—the only summer option that allowed me to continue working was some sort of care arrangement that covered school hours. They could go to camp, or I could hire a sitter, but there had to be something. As they’ve grown, summer has changed; we’ve gone from constant, full-day care to fewer scheduled activities, and now that they’re both teens, I don’t have to schedule them for anything at all. Let’s face it, they can feed themselves and keep themselves alive without much help. They’ve even reached that magical age where I never hear “I’m booooooooored!”

So the good news is that I can work as much as I need to and I don’t have to worry that my children are going to wander off or set the house on fire or anything. We sat down as a family and discussed the summer, a few months back, and this was the first year where I was really able to say to both kids, “Tell me what you think will work best for you.” My son was really looking forward to doing a whole lot of not much, and maybe spending more time with friends than we generally manage during the school year. My daughter, on the other hand, wanted to take a class and some lessons. They had different desires but we wanted to make it work, and so far it seems like it is.

The interesting thing, for me, is how keeping the kids on a workable schedule is actually helping me make my summer schedule more productive.
Read the rest of this entry

I’ve now been freelancing for so long, for the most part, I don’t even have to produce a resume when applying for a new gig—I can direct potential clients to my LinkedIn account and/or my website to check out my credentials. But it didn’t start that way, of course.

A decade ago, I started looking for work again when I’d been home with my kids for years. To make matters worse, I was looking for writing work when I had an employment history as an engineer. This was before LinkedIn, before I’d started blogging, before Facebook and Twitter and all the ways we make networking connections as a matter of course nowadays.

Every time I had to submit a resume I agonized over how to best “beef up” my actual qualifications, while somehow minimizing the gap in my work experience. Usually I would give up on the resume and try my best to write a cover letter that charmed potential employers into overlooking the fact that I’d spent the last three years at home, changing diapers. And I hadn’t thought about this for years until a friend of mine—a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom—asked me for help in writing a resume. “I don’t have any qualifications,” she fretted. But that’s not true; resumes are one part truth and one part flair, and that’s particularly true for folks in creative fields like writing.
Read the rest of this entry

I’ve seen a lot of discussion online lately about professionalism in blogging—all of the expected stuff about conducting yourself appropriately both in the office and out in public. All of that is important and worth discussing, of course, but today I got to thinking about something a little less straightforward.

My Facebook feed filled up today with folks remarking on the Boy Scouts’ decision to allow gay youth. Many of my friends had a lot to say about it, and I have my own opinions as well, of course, but I found myself fascinated by what was being said by whom. Many personal bloggers are used to being very vocal in their beliefs about many or even all sorts of current events. Lots of bloggers have certain rules about what they will and will not discuss, but it’s the rare personal blogger whose religious and political leanings aren’t evident, if not the centerpiece of their writing.

I doubt that anyone who reads my blog, for example, has any question about which way I lean. But it’s not something I talk about all that often. I never made a conscious decision about it, I just don’t. And it wasn’t until today that I started thinking about why that is.
Read the rest of this entry

Every year it happens, and every year I feel a combination of relieved and panicked.

School’s out. My homeschool kid took his last final, and my public school kid has her last one in the morning, which is a half day. By lunchtime tomorrow, it’s officially summer in our house.

Having grown up in the northeast—where school started the Tuesday after Labor Day, and due to excessive snow days usually ended the third week in June—I am still, after all these years, always vaguely surprised to realize that it’s only mid-May and the kids are done. I like it, though. My husband is on the university’s schedule, and even though I know there will be days when I’m shouting, “Everyone out of my office! Scoot!!”, it’s nice having him home more and the kids off at the same time. I like that we can usually get in a camping trip or two before the rest of the world is on summer vacation and/or the southern temps here soar to 100+.

When my kids were little, summer meant figuring out camp and other scheduling issues so that I could continue to work. Now that they’re both teens, I can simply tell them to go away, I guess. Ha! But I find myself wanting to work less, and trying to figure out how to best balance everything this season.
Read the rest of this entry

(Pictured here: Not me. You can tell it’s not me because she’s actually asleep.)

For all of my big talk about staying organized and learning to adapt to the ebb and flow of a flexible schedule, reality remains… messy. Sometimes I feel organized and capable and on top of things. Sometimes I feel like I am holding on by my teeth. And this week, I feel like one of those “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie” books.

I’m a day late writing this post, even. Because this week somehow started off okay but quickly went off the rails, and I don’t even know how it happened. On Monday, things were under control. I was getting stuff done. Today—Friday—I foolishly tried to take a nap to maybe catch up and it didn’t go well. I would like to blame this on the school year ending, but it seems to me that a week like this one happens every so often no matter what I do. You’d think I could figure it out, by now. You would be wrong, though.
Read the rest of this entry

I love to tell people that we homeschool my son. Love it. Even with homeschooling becoming more commonplace, it always causes folks to do a double-take. I don’t look like a homeschooler. I am neither a religious fundamentalist nor an overly-crunchy earth-mama hippie type. (Neither are a lot of other homeschoolers. But you know, stereotypes abound.) My daughter attends public school. And so folks always seem surprised.

The best part, of course, is that people who would never dream of homeschooling (spoiler: I used to be one of those people who would never in a million years dream of homeschooling) have a lot of questions. And mostly those questions pertain to my son—is he keeping up? Does he ever see other kids? Doesn’t he miss regular school? The answers are yes, yes, and not really. (When someone outright asks me if my kid is socialized—like maybe I keep him in a box under my desk—I cannot be held responsible for any snarky response I might blurt out, though.)

We’ve eased into it; our first year, he went to a homeschooling collab nearly full-time. This year, he’s gone half-time. And the coming year? I think we’re going to do a full curriculum at home, finally. We’ve found our groove. But even when people know I work full-time from my home office, it’s rare that they’ll ask how I manage it.
Read the rest of this entry

I feel like I should preface this by admitting that back in 2006, I was part of a BlogHer panel called “Mommyblogging is a Radical Act.” As much as I’ve never been a fan of this particular term, way back then—seven years ago, which is like, what, maybe 49 years ago in Blogging Years, right?—I thought it was important that the blogging community have an honest discussion about what it means to share about our experiences as parents. I have no regrets about being part of that. At the time, that sort of blogging was still sort of new and different and we were all figuring out what it meant.

But that was seven years ago, and a lot of things have changed since then… including that many of us who were simply sharing our day-to-day for the sake of finding an outlet and community are now paid to write. Many of us are freelance writers running our own small businesses, working full-time (or more), and the fact that we write about our children from time to time is either incidental or just a fraction of the work we get paid to do.

And yet, good lord, the world is just so reluctant to let go of that term “mommyblogger.” Most of the time I don’t care; what’s in a name? I’m just doing my thing, getting my work done, living my life, whatever. But then there always comes someone wanting to take that dismissive term and use it as the cornerstone of painting every woman with a blog as a silly little moron.
Read the rest of this entry

I have this coffee mug that says “I’m famous on the Internet.” My daughter gave it to me for Christmas, as a joke. I love it because it’s really big (all the better to hold lots of coffee…) and also because I think it’s hilarious.

Because I am not famous, on the Internet or otherwise. I have no desire to be famous.

A lot of people look at personal blogging as a way to “build a brand” and “become a celebrity” and I think those people are delusional. First of all, the number of people who are successful at becoming some sort of celeb through blogging compared to the number of people who wish they were is… not encouraging. And second of all, I cannot imagine wanting to be scrutinized the way so-called famous people are.

The joke in blogging is that you know you’ve arrived once you get a hateful, trollish comment on a post. Once someone cares enough to tell you how very wrong you are, that’s it! You’ve made it. Can you imagine the amount of vitriol famous bloggers are subjected to on a regular basis? No thanks. But more importantly, I think once a writer attains some level of attention for their personality, it becomes hard to avoid becoming a caricature of oneself.
Read the rest of this entry

So this week has been interesting for me, to say the least. I started a new gig, and I wrote my first post, hoping that things would go well. You never really know, when you start at a new venue. But I was (am) excited about it. I shared it with my readers on my personal blog and hoped I’d get at least a few comments.

The post in question is here, and at the time of this writing, it has over 20,000 Facebook likes, about a hundred “shares” (which I’m able to see; who knows how many I can’t), 80 comments, a whole mess of tweets, etc., etc., yeeha, woohoo, and all of that. I even had a local friend call me this morning to say that she’d seen my piece “all over” her Facebook feed this morning and was delighted to be able to say, “Hey! I know her!”

I don’t know; maybe this sounds like a regular day, to you. But to me, even as someone who’s been writing online for nine years—making a living for most of that time, mind you—this is more attention than any single piece of my writing has ever gotten before.

It’s completely wild. And weird.
Read the rest of this entry