When I first started blogging people weren’t really blogging. There were a few of us (Jennifer was my first virtual friend blogging and she was way before me and Aimee was an early blogroll edition thanks to Becca). But there wasn’t this huge community and there weren’t “blog mavens” or consultants or advertising co-ops. Blogging was something you could do and reasonably expect that most people in the world would have no idea how to find you or your blog.
You need to understand that this was before google was a verb.
So when I started blogging with my full name and my kid’s name (only one kid then), it was a little edgy but it was so far out of the mainstream that it just didn’t matter. Like sometimes people would bring it up at picnics or at parties and people would say, “A blog? What’s a blog? You write a journal online?”
Blogging got me some of my very first writing jobs because I was fortunate enough to be building an online presence when people were building online media outlets. I met other early adopters and some of them had editorial control at these new fangled “Online Magazines” and they read my blog and offered me gigs so there was a clear impetus to keep blogging as me, Dawn Friedman, writer. (I can think of several people who — like myself — owe their editorial careers to the internet because we had some lucky foresight and got there when things were still young and so you could create a site and sell it to AOL who would then sell it to Oprah’s new production company and those of us who rode the wave suddenly had very useful clips whereas before we were just hopeful that an online byline might mean something — anything — to an actual print magazine editor.)
Then the internet grew and became essential for many if not most of us; not just bloggers any longer either but people who appreciated the ease of use of other social media (even my inlaws are on Facebook now, for crying out loud). The publicness of life online became less insulated and more OUT THERE, invading our real world in ways that I did not anticipate when I started my lowly, hand-coded in HTML blog on kjsl.com. (A free website that I got for being on one of the attachment parenting litservs where I first met Jennifer and Katie and several other early adapters who are part of my social media circle although I left that email list probably a decade ago.)
Again, as a writer this worked. In fact, it was absolutely necessary. If you head to any writer’s conference, open any writer’s magazine or show up at any writer’s group people have long been talking about the necessity of being online. My blog still gets me jobs directly (through assignments from editors who read me) and indirectly (through readers who pass my name on to people I know). It is part of the tired buzzword “platform”, which basically is defined as a writer’s ability to alert potential readers to her work.
There is the crux of my dilemma — I don’t want to stop writing because I will always be a writer so I can’t just close up shop and quit having a presence. How then do I shift that presence to allow me the freedom to do other things (namely be a counselor) off-line? How do I prepare to maintain the appropriate boundaries for transference when I have been virtually an open book? And how do I do this while still nurturing my writing career?
I’m headed to a clearer path about this though since I’ve been thinking on it since I sent in my application for my GRE (but didn’t dare think about it for real ’til I got the acceptance to a program).
This is what I know for sure: I liked the challenge of writing that disruption article, (which should be on news stands any minute) and it cemented my yearning to do more nonfiction that isn’t directly related to my life. I have loved writing essays and I will continue writing personal essays but the truth of it is that my focus on that has been due to the reality of my life, which has been very small and inner-focused because I haven’t had the space or time to go out and do any reporting. I mean, there’s a reason why every couple of years you get a slew of new memoirs about new motherhood. When I went to the Nieman Conference (for writers of nonfiction) a few years back, I left feeling both excited and discouraged. Excited because I knew I wanted to stretch myself as a writer and discouraged because I knew it would be a few years before I could do it. But my kids are bigger now and one reason I want to be in school and want to have a career that is not writing-focused is that I want a base that lets me research things that are of interest to me but are not OF me.
When I imagine blogging with these goals I’m still in the process of shaping I think it will be an awful lot like this entry, which is to say it’ll be personal but not the same kind of personal (less vulnerable) and it’ll also (I hope) be more about the things that I’m learning (like Harlow’s Monkey only I can only dream of attaining her awesomeness). And I do want to blog about the reality of grad school when you’re forty-ish and have kids and maybe even are fool enough to keep homeschooling them like we hope to do.
Now the hard part is taking the plunge to start dismantling my archives because dismantling them means making a definitive shift from marketing myself as a writer who will write just about any darn thing and is practically focused on quantity although she yearns to be focused on quality and marketing myself as a more select kind of writer. Which is why I decided to find another way to support myself but which scares me since I’ve been marketing like crazy now for several years and old habits die hard.
See, one reason my blog ends up at the top of searches is that it is HUGE and it is deeply entangled on the world wide web. To dismantle it means to take down these connections, which hurts my “platform.” (And my platform was already hurting because the rise of blogging and then the fall of blogging due to the rise of social networking means my blog has taken a double hit lately.) The reason I’m at the top of this list? Because my archives are large and well indexed (i.e., linked up on search engines).
It is a largely symbolic issue though. I need to get over it and not care if I drop off those lists entirely. Again, old habits die hard, people and my habits are pretty old now.
