Entries Tagged 'Work' ↓

When I started blogging in the the f-inter of 2004, I was doing it on Myspace and I was losing my mind. Embarassment about myspace membership aside, it started off with simply hearing voices. No, really. I was hearing voices. Also, seeing things.

There was a lot of shit going on in the old noggin’ and some of that shit needed out, fast. Hence blogging.

I think I had, at most, about 10 readers. Those were people who I drank with, or smoked pot with, or fucked. Or would. Or people who wanted to keep tabs on how much I was drinking, what drugs I was doing and who I was fucking. It was it’s own tiny little box, couldn’t have expanded much further than that and it kind of resolved itself when I started getting saner, stopped hovering my nose above white powder on glass and started fucking The Ex again.

Also, I moved to Blogger.

Then, low and behold, I got a job after getting saner and I moved back in with The Ex. Then came the five pregnancy tests. Then came From Manic to Mommy?, which is a blog entirely not worth Googling, since it’s rife with memes and bitching and moanings about the first year and a half of Isobel’s life. I was never intent or content with a mommyblogger title, yet there I was, blogging about mommying.

Something happened and I wanted to hide myself. Reinvent anew. Embrace the momosphere and all of the wonderful people who call themselves momospherians.

I became Zoeyjane and Mommy is Moody was born, originally hosted on Wordpress, then moved to this domain.

From Myspace to Blogger, to Wordpress, to now, the subject matter hasn’t changed much – it’s nearly all still about old wounds, new mistakes, broken synapses, and failures and successes. What has changed, multiple times over, is my attitude toward blogging. My reason for blogging.

Initially, it was a method of recording the aural hallucinations, mood changes, minor psychotic break and laughing it off at the same time. I didn’t expect anyone to read, save for my best friends. I didn’t expect anyone to comment, except for those best friends that I wouldn’t have talked to anyway.

When I moved into Blogger, I still didn’t have that many readers, but the ones I did have, I knew. I read their blogs, I linked them, I blogrolled them. I hoped for, no, expected the same. It took me a while to realize that posting multiple times a day would garner less comments over all and that the 13 regular commenters shouldn’t be expected to leave word on every post I wrote. Especially if it was yet another installment of a 100-things-about-me. But I got hurt, a lot, before I knew that.

When I moved into Mommy is Moody, a few of my FMTM? readers came with me, but for the most part, the people stopping by were newer because I didn’t exactly leave word that I was moving here. I guess the advent of this Zoeyjane popped up on a bit of radar somewhere and people came to visit. Became friends. Left their own words of praise, critique, sadness and hurt. Shared.

Over the past year and a half, since I became Zoeyjane, the writer of Mommy is Moody, a few people who’ve been around for a lo-o-o-o-ng time have said that my writing’s changed. I guess maybe it’s more picturesque. Or tighter? (Which makes me shudder, all over again, when I think of how juvenile I find my commentary now. God, how horrible it must have been for those 13 readers to eek through back in the days.)

But Mommy is Moody isn’t getting to use the … voice that it originally was born to speak.

Now, I find myself with a few side blogs. A few pro blogs. A coupla volunteer blogs. All in all, I contribute to seven or eight urls, I think. It’s hard to keep up with because pretty much each is an extension of myself, yet compartmentalized.

But what remains here isn’t compartmentalized by anything other than the post labels.

What I write (here and at all of the theres) is about the past, the future, parenting, fucking (sometimes over) The Ex, food, eating, sleeping, moodiness, shopping, money, coveting shiny and beautiful things, music, love, loneliness, drugs, drink, smoke, and on and on. I dream of minimalism, yet I’ve deconstructed my writing into specific areas, putting X into a box made for X; Y into a carrier bag wrapped in tissue, meant only for Y.

It’s not me.

It is me, to over organize. It’s not me to have such specifics allocated to one area, when all of the specifics are relating to each other. Keep like with like, you know?

When I did the last redesign, I threw up my side blogs: fiction, reviews and food. Those are all part of daily life, yet for some reason, I thought that giving them their own voice – how could I really do that, if I was still the one speaking it? – would make them better. More successful. Widely read, or something. I’m not sure.

I do know that I intended to regularly publish on each of the side blogs and for some reason, I assumed that they could be just as popular as Mommy is Moody has become. Not that this blog is popular. I just mean, they’d see the same amount of traffic.

I think that somewhere along the line, I read up on some SEO and marketing bullshit that said to stick to a specific niche if you wanted blog superstardom, that having a blog that spanned several topics would be hard to maintain readership for. Fuck that shit.

I was wrong, but this was an exercise I needed to do, on the process of learning who I am. As a person, and as a writer.

I am a blogger who talks about random things, at random times, often within one very-long-winded post.

I cannot maintain the drive to regularly update seven blogs, market them, provide candor and wit and responses to the comments they do get, and keep a nearly immaculate house. Guess which one wins, in my world?

I cannot maintain a charade of neat and orderly posting on the Internet. It’s my one and only place that I’ve, from day one of blogging, allowed myself to be completely off-the-cuff crazy without (much) guilt or concealment.

I am finding the filing system to be too complex, so that I’m spending more time figuring out the colour coding and Dewey Decimal System, when I should be creating the stuff to be filed.

I am saying fuck it.

I’m going back to posting everything in this one tiny spot. Your feed readers are going to groan at you, and I won’t blame you for hitting Mark All As Read. This could mean the usual 3-5 posts a week, or some times a couple in a single day.

I’m just giving you a heads up, because all of this self-created blog bureaucracy is harshing my contact high, yo.

I remember my first set of business cards. I felt like I’d really made it, had graduated into the land of swank and stature. I had the ability to meet anyone, anytime and give them my card with a demure “contact me” thrown their way. Okay, so maybe I wasn’t demure, more like overly-excited and trying-too-hard, but still.

Because I’d very recently prior to that been one to write my name and number in eggplant-coloured eyeliner on someone’s inner wrist, this felt like the big time.

I haven’t had business cards since 2005, since the day that I walked out of a job that was quickly becoming discriminatory due to my problematic pregnancy. I haven’t worked in an environment outside of my apartment since, and so I never bothered ordering cards again.

I mean, what was I going to do? Spend money to print things I’d rarely, if ever, have an excuse to hand out? Who would I give them to – the moms I saw at playgroup? Would I create business cards just for my blog, to get more readers? Prior to the past six months, I really didn’t spend much time speaking about writing, or blogging, and certainly not about this blog, with most of the people I come into contact with. The blank stares and the potential for later embarrassment upon hearing “I was reading your blog, and…” was too great.

My blog was something that existed primarily on the web, to people who lived far-far-away from me. Who I never had to ask to birthday parties and such. I didn’t want to advertise it, and who gets business cards printed for a blog, anyway?

Oh wait.

People do that.

And best of all, because so many people do it, there’s some wicked cute stuff out there, for wicked low prices. Gone is the year 2005, when a hundred plain,white-card-stock two-by-threes cost $85. Enter Moo and $19.95.

I haven’t decided yet if I’ll be printing cards at all, or in time for BlogHer – they seem to be an expense I could do without – but I know I will one day. Because I seem to be getting out and socializing more with bloggers and social media people in Vancouver. Because I meet potential advertisers and retailers (for reviews) all the time. Because I’m in the process of designing a new website for myself…

My very own dot-com that will include everything I do, have done, and can do. A little piece of the web without a blog on it. For my resume, writing portfolio, media and contact information, amongst other secretive things. It will be all encompassing. It’ll tell people who I am and why they should care.

(I’m still working on the ‘why they should care’ part. So far, all I can come up with is prolific. As we all know, prolific without quality just means that you did a lot of shit. And cluttered up the Internetz doing it, therefore lowering the bar for other would-be bloggers. If blogging were marked on a curve, I’d be lowering the grade, eh. {Also, I’m flexible and give good massages. I don’t think I want to list those as skills, though.})

Anyway. The point was, one day, I’ll need business cards. And I plan to get really cute ones. To go with my really cute website that no one will visit.

I have a dream, yo.