When social media stops being fun
Categories: Head hitting brick wall, Like talking but with more typing
There are many perks to the various jobs I do, including (but not limited to): Getting to work from home, getting to work in my pajamas, sometimes getting to do great things for charity as part of my job, having a fair amount of creative freedom, and sometimes getting free stuff.
Yeah, I said it. Sometimes I get free stuff. And that’s definitely a perk, I’m not going to lie.
Free stuff is tricky, of course, if you have concerns about maintaining integrity, which I do. There are bloggers who make poor decisions in the face of free stuff, and I never want to be among them. (Side note: Go read Susan Getgood’s excellent recap of the recent FTC guideline changes for bloggers, if you haven’t. Go. Now. I’ll wait.)
I’ve had a lot of fun with the various free things I’ve been lucky enough to receive, right up until I was selected to be a Frigidaire Super Influencer.
Read the rest of this entry



When I was a little girl, I wanted to grow up and be an actress. There was nothing I loved better than being on stage, no feeling headier than transforming into someone else and performing.
The wonderful thing about the Internet and all of the so-called “new media” we’re enjoying as a result of it is that it’s easier than ever to make your living as a writer—there’s plenty of places willing to pay for quality work, and if you’re ambitious and savvy enough, you can even create your own site(s) to generate revenue.
To further confuse this metaphor, I’ve included a handy photo of a pothole, even though I really did mean a slothole. Which is, of course, an imaginary thing.
I spend an inordinate part of my day reading and answering emails. On that rare occasion (oh, modern connectivity, what a blessing and a curse you are) when I’m away from email for a good-ish chunk of time—say, 12 or even 24 hours—I return to a deluge of messages. Like, several hundred.
I don’t know about you, but my patience for this recession is really starting to wane.
Every now and then I’m asked to come give a little guest lecture at my local university, and I enjoy doing this because it tickles me to no end that anyone would find me an expert on anything. Also, many college students seem to regard professional bloggers as something roughly on par with unicorns—everyone’s heard of them, but they are regarded as mythical, for the most part.
My children are pretty well past the Dr. Seuss stage, but we all still find it endlessly amusing to frame discussions involving choices in the manner of Green Eggs and Ham. Could you, would you, in a boat? Could you, would you, with a goat?
This is a topic I keep coming back to because I see it coming up again and again, in various forums, and it’s something about which I feel very passionate. I talked about steps to
My office is located at the side entrance to our house, which means that anyone familiar (read: everyone except people who want to stop by and sell us some Jesus) comes in through the door, here. This is to say that my office tends to be a main thoroughfare, in addition to being a fairly sunny space (which I enjoy). Nevertheless, I often refer to the office as My Cave. As in, “I just need to get back to hiding in my cave so that I can get some work done.”