As a self-employed woman, one of the things I have to do is prioritize and also find balance. I have been feeling decidedly off-balance lately, so I have decided to re-focus my energies. And one of the ways in which I am going to do this is by moving even more behind-the-scenes here at Work It, Mom! Therefore, I am letting go of this poor, neglected blog. By doing so, I will be able to concentrate my energies on other activities for WIM, and also create some blogging space (hopefully) for others.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you behind the scenes!

Jen

The email goes like this:

Dear Jen,

After four months of waiting for you to return my manuscript to me, I can only conclude that you are not planning to get back to me on this. Before I contacted you, my colleagues assured me that you were wonderful to work with. They told me about the wonderful rapport you establish with your clients, and I found that to be true. However, I have come to learn that you are good only at establishing the initial rapport to rope your clients in. After that, you are all talk and no action. I am retracting my project from you. Not only that, but my two colleagues who recommended you are also withdrawing their business from you.

Sincerely,

Pissed off client

Hours after I woke up, I could still see that email in my mind’s eye. It preyed on all of my own insecurities, which is unsurprising because my mind drafted it. I think it was also unbelievably cruel of my own mind to do that to me. I lay in bed wracking my mind for who that email could have been from. It was both a relief and a slap to find out that it was from me.

The night before that, I dreamt that I was responsible for disposing of these dead mice that were the size of cats because they had swallowed other mice whole. I can’t remember who told me to dispose of them, but I know that I didn’t think much of that person, because my solution was to put the mice down the garbage disposal and turn it on. The disposal hurled mouse blood at me, and it hit me in the face and got on my teeth. I turned off the disposal and left the mice half in and half out of the drain, and ran to look in the bathroom mirror, frantic about having mouse blood on my teeth, but unable to stop my tongue from running over it and tasting it.

When I woke up, I was half tempted to go look in the sink and see if the mice were still there.

The grant I am working on is due on Saturday at 5 p.m. They need ten hard copies of the grant, so I would like to have it done by Thursday night, so Friday the client can print it, copy it, and bind it nicely. Yesterday, after school, I had to buy shoes for two kids, jeans for two other kids, groceries, we had dinner with friends, homework, bed time, and 37 urgent emails, all of which cut into the grant-writing time.

Today, my husband called me because he left a book at home, so I walked it over to the college classroom where he was teaching. I was on my way home with two hours left before time to pick up the kids, when I ran into my neighbor. “I am on my way home,” he told me, “because the kids have an early out today.”

Perfect.

This post is indicative of that fact that a) everything is conspiring against my finishing my grant deadline this week and b) apparently, I will do anything to avoid working on it.

Do you ever have anxiety dreams like these? I think I liked mine better when they involved forgetting my chemistry class for an entire semester…

I have been in the university library for half the day, and I have gotten some significant work done on a grant proposal. I had sent it off Thursday night and got very immediate and good feedback on it Friday. There was work to do, but fortunately, it is only a ten-page proposal, so you have to temper the concept by remembering that you are talking about paragraphs, not pages. I need to go over it again and make sure the phrasing is what I want, but for today, I am content to let it rest a bit. Then, I went over a manuscript I have had on my to-do list for about ten days.

I have discovered that the library is a good place to work: because I am neither student nor faculty at the university, I can’t access the internet there, except by my wee blackberry. Thus, I remain pretty non-distracted by the Work It, Mom! flickr pool, instant message, email and blogs. However, in the midst of all of this wonderful productivity, I have been taking short breaks to sneak peeks at my email on my blackberry. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.

Yesterday, I was working at the coffeeshop, when I got a very unexpected email. One of my other gigs is as a blogger at Weblog Inc.’s blog TV Squad. I have blogged there for over a year. One of the constants in my life is about 30 team emails a day. Some of them are tips, some of them are team members sharing comments, some of it is administrative. But they are almost all entertaining and so even when I am taking a break from reviewing shows, I still read nearly all of the emails. I have never met any of my TV Squad colleagues, but one of the things I have learned since I first met and fell in love with the Internet, 10 years ago, is that you don’t need to meet people in person to forge relationships with them. These email buddies, these co-workers, these colleagues become your friends who live inside your computer, and it’s amazing how much you think of them. You don’t even realize how much until you get emails like the one that stopped me cold yesterday afternoon.

The subject line was simply “Adam.” I almost didn’t read it. I almost didn’t read it closely. It was from one of our other writers, and I figured that it was something about Adam’s schedule that had come up, but since these emails tend to be funny and there were already a few responses, I read it.

Adam Finley was killed Thursday morning. He was hit by a school bus while riding his bike. He was only 30 years old.
I started gasping as I read the email, and clasped my hand over my mouth. I read it again about five times. I couldn’t believe it. I still cannot believe it.

The entire team is in shock. And for the past two days, we have been planning, via team email, how to commemorate Adam, how to remember him on TV Squad. Seventy-nine emails and counting. What strikes me the most about this situation is that when tragedies strike, we so often feel paralyzed. We feel the need to DO something, and there are few worse feelings than that there is nothing to be done. The team became immediately mobilized by the plan: We are devoting Monday on TV Squad to Adam Finley. He had blogged there from its inception, and had probably the largest number of posts. He was truly synonymous with the site, in ways that I am not. So, his longest-term friend there, Bob Sassone, will write a post about Adam, and then all of us are going through the archives and selecting our favorites, so we can post them and our memories of him. There will be no other posts on the site tomorrow. We are making changes to the header, discussing images to use in the posts, and we are also discussing his family, how to make the posts into a tribute to Adam for them.

The strangest thing about all of this is that I feel the need to grieve with someone, to talk about this with someone. Adam was wickedly funny, and he never missed a trick on TV Squad. He was always picking up on the fact that someone was duplicating a post, or that a post needed to be done. He was a constant presence– sometimes team emails can continue ad nauseum, and he would always be there chiming in. He was also very opinionated, and sometimes attacked by commenters, which I can relate to. But he was always supportive of everyone else on the team. You could count on him. He was a stand up guy. And did I mention wickedly funny? And the only other people I know who feel this grief are like me: We knew him from our email inboxes. We knew him through is posts. We knew him from his words. And we are using words to remember him and to comfort one another, to express our individual shocks and grief collectively. It feels so weird to be reading all of these emails in one specific way: I keep waiting for Adam to chime in about all of this. And he hasn’t yet. His voice is conspicuously absent. I still haven’t really figured out that he is not going to. I was actually stunned be the level of grief I feel about this. Can you mourn someone if you only knew them by their words? Yes. Yes, you can. And we are.

I can’t stop thinking about his mother. I cannot stop thinking about his mother.

We have heard that one of his parents’ fears is that Adam won’t be remembered. I was surprised by this, but then it occurred to me that maybe their fears stem from the fact that he didn’t have children, wasn’t married. He has made his mark in other ways. Last night, I bought a sympathy card to send to his family. I didn’t know your son– but I did. I sat in a crowded coffeeshop yesterday and wept when I learned of his death. His life meant something to me. I will miss him. I am so very sorry for your loss. I will remember him.

Ed. note: You know how that road to hell is paved with good intentions? I had intended to post this last week. I had intended to compile an email list with everyone who volunteered to do book reviews, contact you, and set up a schedule. And then my son got a human (versus a computer) virus, and so did I. So, I didn’t get anything done. So, here is our first book review, done by Kathy Howe, mostly because she volunteered early and got it done first. And also because she is fabulous.
For all of the rest of you wonderful women who have volunteered to do book reviews, I have this to say: YES! And I am going to ask you to do me a favor: Write your review and send it to me at jcreer at gmail dot com. Please put in the subject line, Work It Mom! Book Review. Then, I will email you back and let you know when it’s going to go live. Please include a brief bio and a link to your blog and/or whatever other website (your business!) you want me to promote. I am going to post book reviews on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, because there was such a terrific response to this (and because otherwise, some of you won’t get reviews up til January!).

Here are some guidelines:

1. You may post more than book review, but I am going to ask that you not submit more than one per month.
   
2. Your book review is your book review. I am an editor by nature and by trade, so I will edit for clarity and for grammar and punctuation. If I see anything significant, I will email you about it before I edit it, but for small edits, I’ll just go ahead, and you will trust me, yes?
   
3. Please make your book reviews about 500 words– not a lot longer than that.
   
4. You can write about a favorite author, magazines, an article you have read, a book, something you love, something you hate, etc. It’s up to you!
5. I will send you a button that says, “I blogged at Work It, Mom!” for your blog, and we ask that you wait for a week before cross-posting your review on your own blog.

I have to tell you, also, that one of our readers is going to be going to a reading/signing by Diana Gabaldon of Outlander fame on September 17th. She is going to try to do a mini-interview, too, so if you have any questions you’d like her to ask, leave them in the comments!

Also, if you have a book you are trying to promote, please feel free to send me a review of your own book (sure, you can write it!) and some more information! Thank you, and without further ado, Miz Kathy Howe.

Every so often I am asked to review books here on Kazoofus. Despite the fact that I love to write, I do not love to read. So I usually tell people that I’d rather not receive their book for review.

Recently I received an email from a publisher that was a wee tiny bit eye catching though.

The publicity department had sent me an email asking me to read:

Put Your Big Girl Panties On and Deal With It…
(the no-nonsense guide to getting what you want)
by Roz Van Meter

How exactly am I supposed to say NO to a book with a title like that!?!?!?!

I received the book in the mail and the first thing I did was read the back page about the author. I think I rolled my eyes when I read marriage counselor and yawned when I read “Life Coach” in her biography because everybody thinks they are a life coach. I decided to cut to the chase and started reading the book.

I regret to inform you that my yawn and eye roll were totally premature.

Roz Van Meter is DAMN COOL PEOPLE.

From Chapter One: Women Rule!

“I love women.

Oh, I’m crazy about men too, but there is nothing like a woman who has stormed through her own personal deliverance with guts and gusto and lived to tell the tale to others.

As I think back to some of the women I’ve counseled through the years and have come to know deeply, I’m still amazed at their courage and creativity.

Some of them are now in their seventies. Others are just starting out. We all have one thing in common: we became fiercely determined to get custody of ourselves.”

Do you SEE why I loved her so quickly!?!?

What woman on this planet hasn’t at one point or another had to reclaim custody of herself? Be it a bad job situation that needed to be straightened out or a terrible relationship we needed to either salvage or leave behind. It could have been something major or something minor, the size of the event doesn’t matter. What matters is women…ALL WOMEN…need to get custody of themselves at least once in their lives.

And to do it, we must be fierce and determined and unrelenting about our mission.

Roz Van Meter GETS that.

To say that I love this book is an understatement. I want to take this book on a vacation with me, myself and I and I want to study it and actually act on all of the ideas that it presented to me or that I came up with from reading the book.

The book is inspiring which is a subject that I always tend to enjoy. But unlike most inspirational books that solely focus’ on getting you to where you need to be, Roz also points out that where you are at this exact moment in time, isn’t total rubbish either.

Even the finest silver needs to be polished now and again.

I could seriously go on and on about this book but I want you to read it and love it for yourself. I don’t want to tell you everything but I will tell you one of my favorite things in the book is Chapter Two: A Loving Letter.

The chapter is wonderful but the key part of the chapter is that at one point, when she was torn between needing to wear her big girl panties and wanting to play around in her little girl britches, she wrote herself a letter that was only to be opened and read on a very bad day.

“In case of depression, break seal.”

She wrote herself a loving letter to remind herself that she can get through anything. She will always support herself and so will those around her that care about her.

Her letter was short but powerful and best of all - her letter worked. She broke that seal when depression set in and was reminded that she had been through tough times before. She could get through this too.

I’ll close this review with an assignment for myself that I hope you will assign to yourself.

I’m going to write myself a loving letter. One that reminds me of my good traits, happy times, and how I triumphed over challenges in the past. I’m also going to include in my letter to myself tips for getting through those dumpy, slumpy times. What have I done before that worked to cure those moody blues?

If you want to read a book from a woman that GETS it you really need to read this book. She is sharp and witty and she doesn’t offer up an ounce of fluffy bullshit anywhere in the book. She is real, she is honest and she is an author I will seek out again and again when I am looking for books.

After I set up the Most Excellent Work It, Mom! book club, the discussion took off so much that it felt… superfluous to start a weekly post here called What Are You Reading? What do you think? Not only did the post I had planned seem superfluous, but I have also been working on things behind the scenes here at Work It, Mom!, and in my other working life (I have two, don’t you?), I have two grant applications due at the end of this week. And today is my son Christian’s eleventh birthday. So, I have been flying around trying to configure budgets, do research for background sections, write measurable goals, buy birthday presents and cupcakes, cut up fruit for fruit salad, vacuum, get the kids to make their beds, coordinate writers for WIM articles, and keep up with the forums.

You know, my arms are tired. So, I don’t feel like I am doing a great job of juggling everything right now. But tomorrow is another day.
So, here is what I was thinking about instead. I would really love to keep the discussion about books alive, but it’s sort of boring just to have one hand clapping, don’t you think? So, I thought of this: Having one of YOU do a guest post each week (I am so totally not stealing that idea from Nataly– I gave it to her) about what you are reading, and showcase your thoughts a little more than we can with the forums. You can do a book review, talk about a favorite author, a genre, a magazine, etc. Whatever you want. And you can link to your blog, and you can point your readers to your post here. I’ll even give you a button to put on your blog that says, “I blogged at Work It, Mom!” or something more exciting that reflects the topic. What do you think? Would you be interested in doing that?

If you are interested, please leave a comment here and then I will coordinate with you about how to do this!

We are adding new ways for you to participate here at Work It, Mom! all the time!

Tomorrow, I am starting a weekly feature here called What Are You Reading? And I am going to talk about what I read (um, mostly schlock), and see if I can get recommendations from all of you. Then we can compile a list of great books here that we can all share!

Are any of you interested in joining a book club? I am going to start a group that is a very general book club Most Excellent Work It, Mom! book club, and hopefully, with enough interest and participation, we can break this down along genres: fiction, non-fiction, mystery, romance, sci-fi/fantasy.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

On another note (but it relates in that it has to do with us, as working moms, taking care of ourselves), I am also starting an exercise/diet group called I Can Be Fitter, Dammit! (Oh, who am I kidding– I want to be thinner!) I think of it as a potential support group for me, LOL. I can’t be the only one who is finding losing weight to be a serious challenge, and who can’t work in exercise every day! But I have started making small changes, and I am starting to see results. I think we can help each other by sharing what works, what doesn’t, and by confessing when we mess up (oops, did I really go to Taco Bell at 1:00 a.m. the other day with my husband after karaoke? Um, yes, yes, I did), and getting back in the saddle.

So, I hope you’ll come and check out (and join!) these groups and take a little “you” time in the bargain!

I am not going to work tonight. Right after I finish this post. But wait– I just had an idea today for how I can incorporate a blog onto my corporate site! I should really jot down a few ideas. And then? I am going to stop working. But if I just spent one hour tonight on reading these articles sitting on my desk? I wouldn’t have to do it tomorrow morning. And that would leave me more time tomorrow morning to read Carol’s chapter as a favor to her, before I start working on editing those two sections I have to turn around by the end of the business day.

And then I will really stop working tonight. It’s only 10:00 p.m. now– if I stop in an hour, that will give me some me time, right? Before I collapse on my bed?

Does this sound familiar? I am terrible about setting up boundaries for work. But I am working to get better. I now have a task list set up for Work It, Mom! responsibilities, so when I sit down every day to do my work here, I know exactly what I will do and in what order. I also have a timeline for a grant project I am working on for my editing company, with specific dates about when things should be done.

My problems are usually that there are all kinds of little projects that seem to have no end. (I wonder if anybody has submitted a new article to Work It, Mom! that I should edit and set live? I noticed a typo in an article earlier when I was reading and went in and fixed it. Maybe there are other typos in other articles?)

But if I [continue to] work tonight, chances are that instead of being more productive tomorrow, I will be less. I may, in fact, be a greasy spot on the rug. The third book by Stephenie Meyer came out yesterday.
It has been sitting and staring at me all day. I am going to go read it. Right now.

What are YOU going to do instead of work tonight?

What do you do when your own resume reveals something about you that could make a potential client not want to work with you?

When I began my medical editing business, I had on my resume, against my husband’s advice, an article I had published in Salon several years ago. He advised me to take it off because the article was about the fact that I smoked, and I was trying to get clients who were physicians, and who were most decidedly anti-smoking. I scoffed: “I’ll be sure to tell them I put the cigarette down long enough to make their edits.” I didn’t even smoke very much, and that is part of what my article was about. But still.

I was in conversations with a client who headed up a tobacco prevention program, though I did not fully understand this at the time he requested my resume. He looked at it and then emailed me back asking me whether I still smoked, because he had never hired someone who smoked before. I sat before the computer in shock. I was stunned. I could not believe my own hubris, my own stupidity. I thought the publication in Salon would outweigh the content. And here I was, about to lose a gig because of it. What to do? I suppose I could have written back that I didn’t smoke anymore. How would he have known? But deep inside, I knew that he would know. It was bad enough to have the habit. I wasn’t going to lie on top of it. At heart, I am a geeky, honest person.

I wrote back briefly that I did still smoke, still in the same small quantities as I had written about in the article, and that I hoped this wouldn’t be a barrier to our working together. As I hit send, my heart sank because I really wanted the chance to work with this client, and I was quite sure that I had blown it before I began. He wrote back that he suspected my attachment to smoking was more emotional than physical, and thanked me for my honesty. I got the gig. What was most important to him was that I respected him enough to tell him the truth. And that day I learned that a lot of people can edit, and there are probably many people who can do my job. But perhaps my ability to do my work had a bit more to do with who I actually was in addition to my abilities than I had previously ever suspected.

But lots of other women did! Including our own CEO Nataly and The Working Closet’s Susan Wagner (and I can’t wait to hear about their trips!) If you felt like you missed out by not being there, here are some terrific places to read about other women’s experiences there, so you can peek in the window with me, face pressed against the glass.

First, Susan Mernit has several posts– so many that I just decided to link generally to her blog, and you can start reading down. Fortunately, her posts are also short and well-linked, and have pictures! Great stuff and loads of information here in brilliant, colorful bursts!

Mom 2 Amara went and discusses here why television journalists don’t blog and other topics raised at BlogHer this year.
Women in Media and News were there and asked Elizabeth Edwards about media policy reform. Click on the link to find out what Ms. Edwards said.

Cynthia DamourTru notes that there were 800 attendees this year, and recounts the two year history of BlogHer. Two years, people. Wow.

True Confessions answers the question from the Book Session of whether or not you need an agent, and so much more about getting a book deal from your blog.

And finally, my favorite: Plain Jane Mom used twitter to cover the conference sessions she attended live. It was much more immediate than live blogging. I loved it. I felt like I was there. Thank you again, Erika. Her blog coverage of the event is here.

Did you go to BlogHer? Did you work it? Don’t forget to enter our contest! (We already have an entry about an interesting autograph request asked of Amy Sedaris…) If you didn’t go to BlogHer, how did you keep up with it from where you were?

The title of this post is from a great book by Richard Russo, called Straight Man. The lead character thinks the line to himself right before he rises from a sticky, beer-covered table in a bar, and, despite being a well-respected professor in his community, despite knowing that this cannot possibly be in his best interest, hurls himself into a bar fight.

I cannot be the only one who does things that are not good for me. I just read over at LifeHacker that I could lose $1 million over the course of my lifetime by watching television instead of using that time starting my own small business from home. So, does that mean that in my case, I should start another small business from home?

What happens when, in my case, I could actually lose money week by NOT watching television? I currently write three TV show reviews per week, and get paid to do it, for a blog. And I have started to wonder whether this falls under the category of “Not good for me.” I spend an hour watching each show, so that’s three hours total, and then nearly another hour per show writing my reviews, finding images I am allowed to use in my posts, resizing the images, figuring out which number the episode is and what season in the show it is, and then creating a poll for the end of my post. So, that is about six hours a week for about less than minimum wage per hour.

And then the commenters are often nasty.

Why do I keep doing this? So I can justify having HBO for the summer? Because it’s something that I hope I can use as a portfolio sometime later? Because I like getting advance screenings of shows in the mail? Because I want the free T-shirt for the site? Does this make me feel cool? I suppose it is a combination of all of the above. It certainly isn’t because of the money. And there is usually nothing wrong with that.

But I can’t help wondering whether I would be a) making more money by working on my medical editing projects when those shows are on instead of watching them; b) making more money by working on tasks that I can do while watching TV, instead of having to watch the shows carefully for reviewing purposes; or c) more relaxed if I could just watch the shows– or just Tivo them and not have to watch them when they air and then write reviews right after. This is starting to feel like a whole lot of effort for not much gain.

What are YOU doing that isn’t good for YOU?