Writing | this woman's work

15 years ago and iPad for school

Aug 112010

Way back when I graduated college no one had laptops, none of the coffee shops had wifi, it wasn’t possible to mail PDFs and only graduate students (and peer mentors — I was one) were given university email addresses. (Mine was psu00019@odin.pdx.edu — so I was the 19th student to get one.)

I imagine thing have changed some.

Thanks to Julia, I have an iPad. She surprised me with one last month to get me ready for school and to thank me for working my hiney off for Support for Special Needs. (She gave me an iPad and had nothing to give her so I installed a bunch of plugins as a gesture of my love and respect.) Here’s what I have installed on my iPad in the hopes that it might save me from lugging around my dang laptop, which is heavier than it looks:

Evernote — This lets me grab web pages and things from my desktop and have it sitting and waiting on my iPad, which I am thinking will be useful for research. I’ll add here, too, that I’m basing some of my app grabs on what would be useful to me as a regular old writer and assuming that it’ll work for school, too.
Simplenote — An Evernote alternative — I’m not sure which I’ll like better yet.
Dropbox — HUGELY useful. You can use this across computers, too. Anything you put in your desktop Dropbox then becomes available to you on other computers. You can also make things public to make a large file for someone. I used to use it at work a lot and also with our printer since sometimes I had trouble getting large files to upload in their system. Now you can also access your files on the iPad.
iStudiezPro — Let’s you track your schedule and assignments for school along with your professor’s contact information. A tidy way to keep track of all my school demands without cluttering up my regular calendar.
Penultimate — I bought this thinking that with a stylus, I could get away with taking notes by hand at school but I don’t think that’s going to work. I got a Pogo stylus and it’s just too clunky. I still might use it for drawing charts though. I think visually and sometimes I chart out a writing project when I’m first pulling together my notes.
Note Taker HD — This looked like maybe it would work better than Penultimate and you know, it might. I haven’t totally given up by somehow making the iPad work as a traditional notebook.
iAnnotate PDF — This is amazing and is so going to save on printer costs!!! You can take notes on a PDF — highlight, tag, etc. — and then email it to yourself or others or read it from the iPad. I use Dropbox to get notes from my desktop to my iPad and then work on them there. I love research and when I’m working on something, I tend to do more than I need. This will help me keep track of the scads of documents I usually print out and scrawl all over since you can also file them easily and then do a search to find the ones you want. I LOVE THIS APP!!
Corkulous — Again, I am a visual thinker. You have to watch a video to get this but it’s a way to brainstorm and then organize it. I use in real life corkboards a lot but now that I moved my computer upstairs, there’s no place to put them. This solves that problem.
ToDo — This goes with Corkulous. It exports the to-do lists you add into your brainstorming apps at Corkulous. So basically if you’re, say, planning a paper you can use Corkulous to keep track of all of your ideas and then add the to-dos, which will show up in your daily planner. You can use tags and folders to track your to-dos. I like things to be compartmentalized so this will help me. It also imports to-dos from my iCal (Apple’s native calendar application) on my desktop and the to-dos in my Mac Mail. I use Mac Mail strictly for Support for Special Needs. Like I said, I like things compartmentalized.
Voice Memos — Simply a voice recorder so I can theoretically record lectures. (I’m unlikely to do this so really it’s just for Madison to record herself singing on it.)

I also bought a foldable bluetooth keyboard. It was originally designed for the Palm Pre so the keys are kinda funny but it’s smaller than a novel and I can tuck it into my bag and this way I can take notes on the computer without my computer.

I know what this means

The Story of My Life, Writing 5 Responses »

Jul 302010

There are these two ex-boyfriends I sometimes dream about and the symbolism for both of them is absolutely clear to me. The first boyfriend appears when I am thinking about my most creative self. He represents my urge to chuck it all and go tearing selfishly around the world living only for my want to write. The second one shows up whenever I’m struggling with my creative career. He represents my need for professional accomplishment as a writer. Back in my youth, I thought that when I was dreaming about them that I was dreaming about THEM but then in my thirties (I think?) I realized I was really dreaming about myself and since I’ve figured that out, it’s made those dreams much more useful to me.

Last night I had a dream about the second one and it was so transparent.

The first part of my dream, I was in his apartment with another writer friend of mine who is at home with small children (younger than mine) and we were discussing her resume and how to work it to help her go back to this career that has nothing to do with writing (and which she’s never had in real life). We were talking about how to structure her resume so that she could get a job that would meet her practical needs (financial, parental and personal) but still give her time to write. You know, like what I’m hoping school will be for me. The ex-boyfriend was sitting at a table away from us scribbling away on notepaper and I leaned in and and said to her, rolling my eyes, “It’s easier for him. He doesn’t have to compartmentalize everything like we do.”

Then in the second part of my dream, I came back through his apartment like the way you might walk through a bus station. This time I was holding Madison’s hand and she was a very little girl. I was holding her hand tightly because I was afraid that she might get into trouble or get hurt in the apartment but at the same time, I wanted her to see the apartment and I wanted the ex-boyfriend to see her. Then I cut through the front door and was relieved that she was still with me.

I mean, really. So transparent.

So the ex-boyfriend is my professional writing career and the conversation in the first part is about feeling resentful that I can’t give the time to my writing career that I’d like to (but also feeling hopeful) and the second part is worrying — as I always worry — that my kids will not get what they need or that I will not get what I need.

I have dreams that are about these things ALL THE TIME. It’s the story of my life. It’s the story of lots of lives (maybe yours).

I find these dreams very comforting even though nothing gets resolved. I find them comforting because they are an acknowledgment of my struggle. Sometimes when I’m feeling excessively grouchy I’ll have a dream and understand that my grouch has to do a bigger frustration than having to wash the towels twice because I left them too long in the washer and they got mildewed. Those dreams are a reminder of my SELF and that I need to keep an eye on that part of me and pay attention to it and remember to nurture it.

The fact that these are ex-boyfriends getting all symbolic up in my dreams also made me think about how pre-Brett I dated boys who had something I wanted. I dated boys who I wanted to be like and then I decided that maybe I would quit looking for these qualities in a partner and instead start looking for these qualities in myself. And then when I started doing that I met Brett. Or more like my heart was open for meeting Brett who is his own self and not an imaginary who-I-want-to-be. Brett enhances my life and enhances me while before those relationships — through no fault of the guys who were in them with me — left me feeling frustrated and insecure and unhappy. It makes sense though because you can’t marry someone to fill up your empty spaces; you have to find someone who gives you the strength and ability and encouragement to fill those spaces up yourself.

Look at that. I started writing about dreams and I ended up writing about marriage. Such is the wandering mind unleashed on a journal, eh?

Anatomy of an article

Adoption, Writing 17 Responses »

Jul 022010

I wanted to write a little bit about the process of writing that Brain Child disruption article. It’s the first time in a long while that I’ve written something this reported that wasn’t straight service and I loved writing it even though it was hard and I had a lot of adoption-related nightmares while I was writing it. This is very long so I’m putting it all below the cut (I also don’t have time to edit so forgive any stupidity on my part) but I thought other writers might be interested in this. This was my query letter, which I pitched in December:

Continue reading »

Blog beginnings and more

Grad School, Writing 8 Responses »

Jun 142010

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.

Writing as therapy

Blogging 12 Responses »

Jun 032010

Do you ever read someone’s blog and think, no! Stop! You’re too vulnerable! Don’t hang this out there! We talk a lot about how much we should share about our kids but there’s the sharing of ourselves, too. For the past month, I often cringed when I was reading Katie’s blog but I’ve cringed reading her blog before, too. She’s very widely read and she blogs about EVERYTHING. She blogged her divorce, she blogged her pregnancy losses. She blogs at her site and on Babble and she gets terrible, awful, mean comments but she keeps blogging.

Most of us writers already knew what many bloggers discover, which is that writing is one of the best ways to figure out what in the heck is going on with our lives. You can write your way out of a problem and into a new attitude. You can start writing in one place and put your pen down with a sigh (or lean back away from your keyboard) and realize that you have written yourself into a whole better place.

Katie is also a huge blogging as activism person. She has always been a strong advocate for breastfeeding and she has always blogged the hell out of it even when working full-time meant she had to partially wean her youngest. She blogs from a feminist, pro-woman, pro-motherhood perspective and some of her best work has been around the topic. I have no doubt that she will take her passion and her skill and create more wonderful writing out of her personal tragedy because she is driven not just to write her way through her struggles but also to use her work as a means to help other people through their struggles.

Blogging is powerful.

It’s powerful because it’s public but because it’s public and because blogging is rarely a carefully planned event for most of us (most of us kinda just wing it, right? I know I do) it means that people get snapshots of us as works in progress. To me, that’s what’s so wonderful about a blog and what makes it a piece of performance art (as long as it isn’t taken over by product reviews and memes — a little bit of that goes a long way, eh?). It’s a virtual permanent record of our impermanency, a record of our growth and change and the patterns of who we are and who we are becoming.

When I teach blogging classes, I always give examples of blogs that are pretty rigid in their scope because I think for a new, nervous blogger having a focus can make it easier to get started. I also think that the irony of giving yourself strict limits it that it can force you to be more creative. If you are blogging, say, only about bikes you have owned, you will have to dig in deep to make that interesting. You may start by just writing about finding your first trike under your Christmas tree and then find yourself another time writing about the specific sound of the bell on the handlebars and the fantasy you had of yourself in other people’s eyes, powerful and fast on your first two-wheeler, ringing the bell so people would stop and stare in astonishment to see you fly by so fast.

At the same time, I think for those of us who stick ourselves or who are stuck by others in genres need to remember that blogs are not like books. A book may need to be easily categorized but a blog is a living thing. It is growing and maturing and while the readers help build the blog and help guide the blogger through their visits and comments (a popular topic may inspire us to write more on that topic), we are the authors and we get to define what we are. It’s why I’m grateful now that I gave my blog such a broad title way back when. If I’d defined my blog more narrowly — as “just” an adoption blog or “just” a writer’s blog — I’d have a hard time justifying my need to write other things; I’d be worried about disappointing my audience. But I’ve found that some of you like the posts on writing and some like the posts on adoption and some of you never ever comment unless I write something about, say, freelancing. It’s all good. And for me, it’s all been good therapy, too.

In other words, you can write more about bikes if you want to. You’re the boss of your blog.

So when I think about giving up my blog in January, I lean more toward remembering that I get to decide what it is and how to work it. I can change my scope. I can also take down archives. (I know they live on in internet cache but only a really dedicated spirit could find them and then god love her, let her read ‘em!) I think maybe I will give myself useful rules like that I will only write on Wednesdays perhaps or that I will only write on X or something like. I won’t be sure until I get there, I guess. But I do look forward to a time when I can afford to take down the ads because I’ve never much liked having those.