Blogging 101: Session IV

Yours, Mine, Ours: Blogging Kids

Things evolve so quickly in new media. Hearkening back to the "early" days of blogging (about five years ago) makes me feel like adding "consarnit," and "whippersnapper" to the end of every sentence. Back in the dawn of time, young whippersnappers, there was a lot of controversy over the safety of publishing stories and photographs of kids on the internet. Some believed that predators would flip through blogs like the Sears Roebuck catalog of victims and simply pick out the ones they wanted.

There are still those who think social media was sent by the devil to destroy newspapers, spread aids, and eat children, but prevailing wisdom has come to conclude that children are no more vulnerable being seen online than in any other public place: the mall, the playground, the baseball park, their school newsletter, or the city paper's coverage of the spelling bee (when kids are actively engaged in online activities, that's another issue).

Which is to say, children are vulnerable. Anywhere. If you have some, you need to watch them.

Go check on them now. I'll wait.

It might surprise you to know that I am actually a lunatic when it comes to protecting my kids' privacy (ask our PTA or their babysitter). But security concerns are a very small part of it. It has more to do with trying to balance the public aspect of our family's life. It's important to me, as a writer, to tell the stories of this big, little life I love. It's important to me, as a mother, to preserve private space for my children to grow. Reconciling those two interests is a continuous improvisation, not a uniform policy. The borders around the territory where mine and their stories intersect is a shifting one as they, and I, grow.

To date, I've kept the boys' names out of the blog. Not so much because I worry someone could use that information for nefarious purposes--anyone on the playground can hear me bellowing first, middle and last names, loud and clear. And follow us up to our front door, for that matter (where our rottschund will eat them). I've written around the boys names' as a signal to me and my readers that the central focus here isn't my children, though they run through it, tracking mud and sweetness, leaving the front door open and slamming the back.

Notes to Self isn't a title I put a whole lot of thought into. But it's been a good one. This a journal of my experience, my identity. The context right now happens to be family life. But I don't have to worry about "rebranding" myself when my children are grown. My writing includes them, but it's not about them.

That's where I am with it today, anyway. Other blogging parents have arrived at different decisions. Know what? They probably have different bedtimes for their kids, too. Like every other judgement call you make as a parent, do whatever works for you and yours, within the bounds of safety, love and respect.

Note I said you and yours. Nothing will get you in hot water faster than blogging about other people's kids, a common newbie mistake. My recommendation is not to post any identifiable content about a child online, anywhere, without checking with the parents first. By identifiable content, I mean photos and names. If someone else's child has a supporting role in a blog post, read Blogging 101: Session II and proceed with caution.

I'm going to talk a little more about photos and and copyright trespass in the final session of this series. What have I left out that you'd like to discuss? Include a question in the comments section below, and we'll tack a little Q&A on the end of the next installment.

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Blogging 101: Session III

My House, My Rules

This is not my favorite topic, and I think we should spent as little time with it as possible. But trolls do exist, and newbie bloggers need the heads up. A friend of mine started a blog a few years ago, and was attacked by a very nasty troll in her first month. His/her vicious comments shook her up badly, and she locked the blog down.

In her case, it was a drive-by troll, the kind of belligerence that Kate of Sweet Salty once perfectly characterized as a dog barking out the open window of a speeding car. It's just random meanness—the online equivalent of vandals tipping over flower pots. I hope it never happens to you, but if it does, I hope you won't stop planting flowers.

A troll is someone who is unhappy, bored, unhinged, or just plain mean enough to want to take it out on someone else. Trolls are looking for a diversion from their own misery. The general consensus among bloggers has been not to give them one. If you encounter a troll, treat it as if you would a wild dog. Cross the street. Don't make eye contact. Wait for them to move on. Most trolls are just really lonely people. They'll take negative attention if it's the only attention they can get.

Sometimes, trollish or threatening behavior needs to be called out. But proceed with caution. We bloggers can be a little defensive sometimes, and not every critical or clumsy comment is truly hostile. From time to time, solidarity goes overboard, and the torches and pitchforks come out. There have been comment wars that made the blogger and her supporters look worse than the offender. It hurts people who aren't really trolls. And it rewards those who are, because feeling victimized is many a troll's preferred drug.

In my experience, registered comments will filter out most trolls. Yes, I know I lose a few commenters who are shy, or have trouble with the verification codes. They can always email me. I put my name on my opinions. I require that others do so with theirs. There are old-school bloggers who are very rigid about letting every comment stand, no matter what. I think that's nonsense. The paper doesn't publish every letter to the editor verbatim, and neither do I.

I've deleted comments where offline friends and family have shared personal information (like the kids names) that I choose to keep private (sorry, mom). I delete spam comments. I've deleted religious prostyletizing that I felt bordered on hate propoganda. Not in my house, not on my blog.

And that's the acid test for me, really, in deciding how to handle hostility, the rare time it occurs. How would I handle this offline? Would I permit it in my living room? Would I dignify it with a response if it was shouted by a crazy person on the sidewalk? Would I round up all my friends and neighbors to shout back at them? If someone kicks over my flower pot, and tells me I had it coming for putting my flower pot out there on my front porch, do I accept that?

Of course not. Those people can keep moving. The rest of you, come in! Let's put some coffee on. I'm so happy you're here.

Up next week: Blogging kids.

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Blogging 101: Session II

I really loved all the intelligent and varied perspectives that were offered in the comments section of Part I of this series. Keep it coming—we're all of us making this thing up as we go along.

Today, let's talk about the place where our blog and offline life intersect.

Who's Life Is it Anyway?

No one who's ever written anything worth reading in any genre has done so without drawing on real-life experiences, relationships and observations. To never employ third person pronouns is to write from a very sterile, ego-centric space, and it will collapse on itself in a hurry.

You have an offline life (I hope). You have conversations, encounters, and conflicts that involve other people; interactions that are the grist for reflection, storytelling and opinion. Can you blog about them? Yes, with some caveats (these apply to adults; I'll address child-related issues in it's own session).

Back when I pretty much knew all five people who read my blog, I was less circumspect about bringing offline friends into it. I didn't give much more thought to mentioning a relevant offline anecdote in a blog post than I would dropping it into a conversation at the park. Nothing slanderous or gossipy, just segues like, "That reminds me of something funny my friend so-and-so always says..." or "When this happened to my friend so-and-so, it made me think about the time I..."

Show me a columnist or memoirist who doesn't use that device, and I'll show you someone who ran out of material a long time ago. But not all my so-and-so's were comfortable turning up in my blog. Some were and are perfectly cool with it. Some, I eventually learned, weren't. I was naive, but I also never dreamed the things I wrote here would travel as far as they have. (See "worst-case-scenario test, " Session I.)

I probably err too much on the side of caution these days. I used to love taking photographs of celebrations with friends, and now I leave my camera home, because I'm tired of giving the verbal disclaimer that the pictures are not for my blog. I need a hat that can display OFF DUTY, like a taxi sign. Beyond my immediate family members, I don't post photographs of people on my blog without permission. When my daily traffic grew beyond a few dozen people, I stopped posting them to my public flickr set. Even for a closed network like Facebook, I only post pictures of friends that are a) flattering, and b) portray only subjects I know are okay with being seen on Facebook.

I'm actually kind of a nerd about the picture thing. Your mileage may vary.

When it comes to referencing offline conversations and anecdotes, I try to make sure my motives are pure and the focus is not on the other person, but on what it brings up for me. Sometimes I miss. Sometimes my words are not, as I would like them to be, impeccable. Sometimes I disguise a person's identity in every possible way, changing the details, throwing out decoys, and still, someone whom it's not about, thinks it's about them. Unfortunately, this has happened more than once. Sometimes, more than one person thinks it's about them at the same time. At which point, I just throw up my hands. Someday I'm going to put all the people who think my writing is all about them in a room and make them fight it out. The victor can just have this blog.

I guess what I'm saying is that you can only be so careful. For all the hundreds of people who feel my writing speaks to them positively, there's always a few who are convinced it's speaking to them negatively. I can't do much about that. For some people, there's a pay-off in taking offense.

Which brings us to the wonderful world of trolls.

Up next: My House, My rules.

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Blogging 101: Session I

Two friends asked me within a few weeks of each other if I had any pointers for new bloggers, and I think I looked up from my work long enough to send them each a very helpful link to google. Over the weekend, it occurred to me I can do better. I started this blog a little over three years ago, anonymously posting as "K.," never dreaming it would lead where it has. I've learned a few things along the way. It's only fair to pass them on.

From the beginning, I made it a rule to not have rules for my blog. The beauty of a blog is that it's a continual work in progress. The context evolves with you. So these aren't rules, as much as marks scratched in tree bark: "I came this way." I'll keep moving beyond them. So should you.

Author! Author!

I used anonymity as a safety harness while I figured out what a blog was, and what I wanted to do with it. A redundant move, since hardly anyone was reading anyway in the beginning. But I felt more secure knowing that a google search of my name wouldn't bring anyone to my blog before I was ready. After a while, it became clear to me that what I was writing here was as much my "real writing" as anything I'd written offline, and it only made sense to claim it. I think long-term anonymity is a tough row to hoe, from what I've seen. The internet is an increasingly small world, and your chances of being outed become greater with time. I think it should be regarded as an eventuality. Can you withstand a worst-case scenario? If not, should you blog about it?

There's a middle path, and that's to adopt a persona. People see that word, and think it means "fake," but persona is simply a protective layer, like an outfit you put on to go in public. There's nothing phony about it, unless it becomes your whole identity (if you sleep in your work clothes they WILL get smelly). Many bloggers have developed personas (usually a nickname, or actually using the name of their site as their online identity). They don't hide their real names, but using a nickname signals that the person behind the blog is more than the sum of her posts. You'd think that would be obvious, but the immediacy of the medium heightens the illusion of a 360 degree view.

A reader once confessed that she couldn't shake the feeling that she was snooping through my underwear drawer, because my blog seemed so personal.

"Oh honey," I laughed. "My underwear drawer is way more interesting than my blog."

Maybe it's a pocket of Canadian reserve, or the fussing mother hen in me, but I worry about bloggers who over-share, though they would probably reassure me, as I did the reader above, that it's a controlled transparency. To each her own. But I think it's healthy for your soul, if not your site traffic, to reserve some mystery. It's the new radical act.*

Can't please some of the people any of the damn time.

Let's get back to the worst-case scenario test, because if there is a rule to follow in blogging, I think this is it.

Picture someone in your world with whom you share nothing in common. In a million years, you will never be friends. You presume they don't care for your kind, and you preemptively don't care for them back. Now picture this same person becoming an ardent fan of your blog in a few years. Hey, aren't you glad you didn't post that snarky thing about them that one time? Whoops, you did post it? I guess you feel like a dumbass. I know I have.

Take it from me, it is an iron-clad law of the blogosphere that the person you least want or expect to find your blog will find it and read it. Everything you post needs to be considered with that in mind. Everything. Note I said "considered" not "censored." Writing is risky. If you are putting out anything at all meaningful or interesting, in any medium, you will lose a few friends and alienate some people. It's Dale Carnegie in reverse. There's no avoiding it. Someone, somewhere, is going to hate something you've posted. Someone, somewhere is going to hate the fact you blog at all. Not everybody is excited about the way social media is transforming and levelizing communication. It's getting better, but there are still people who recoil as if I cleared something nasty from my throat when I say "my blog."

Learning to be okay with not being okay with everyone is a necessary (and sometimes really painful) part of maturation, both as a writer and as a person, but that doesn't mean you should be reckless with your words. Don't post anything you're not prepared to take responsibility for. Be mindful, but not timid. No matter what, if you do this long enough, you will stumble across an old post from time to time and cringe. And that's a good thing. It means you've changed and grown.

Coming up: Rules of Engagement (blogging kids, friends, enemies and innocent bystanders) and Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Trolls.

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*"mommy-blogging" was famously declared a radical act at the 2006 Blogher Conference in San Jose.

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Guilty of Indulgence

As Kristen pointed out the other day, the latest Facebook craze, "25 Random Things," is already 400 years old in blog years. But somehow it seems more compelling in this incarnation. Maybe the context makes it more meaningful. My non-bloggy family and friends are in on the game. Or maybe it's because declaring myself in lockdown from 9-12 everyday while writing a book was a triple dog dare to the universe to tempt me.

I hope my editor is okay with me turning in 300 pages of Facebook memes in the fall.

The truth is, I have to cut way, way back on Facebook, Twitter and other guilty pleasures. It's hard to say how my new writing commitment will impact Notes. I need the blog to keep me loose and limber, so I suspect not much. But it does give me an excuse to repurpose stuff like this, and beg forgiveness.

25 Random (or Not) Things About Me

I am from Newfoundland, but am actually a mainlander on a technicality: I was born in New Brunswick, Canada and lived there until my parents moved back to the island when I was nine months old.

My first memory is of being in the plane that took us there.

I have been wandering off and freaking out my parents since I could walk. The first time I went missing, they were about to have the river dredged when it was discovered I had toddled across the TransCanada highway to visit a neighbor. In my defense, I knew I where I was the whole time.

I turned ten years old in the West Indies. We lived in Tobago from November 1979 to April 1980, while my dad was writing a play. The first morning I woke up there, I set out on foot to explore the village. Didn’t tell anyone. Got lost. Two friendly guys in a really old car gave me a ride home.

Twice, I have lost almost everything I owned and started over from scratch. Once by fire, and once by divorce. Both were traumatic, but they made me very resilient. I am good at starting over, and I hold material “stuff” very lightly.

My parents had a cottage that had no plumbing or electricity. We spent a lot of time there. I feel lucky to know what it’s like to read or play scrabble by the light of a kerosene lamp, to play in the woods all day, to dig clay from the river bank, to pick wild strawberries and fiddlehead ferns, and to watch my mother stew them over a cast iron wood stove.

I was bored and miserable through most of elementary, junior, and high school, but I always had a few close friends, so I have lots of happy memories outside of class.

My high school summer job was canteen girl at the golf club.

In college, I was a cook at McDonald’s. After every shift, I would make myself a McDLT with cheese and as many pickle slices as would stay on it.

I was even more bored and miserable in college, and I quit after three semesters with about a year’s worth of credits and a whole lot of incompletes. If I was interested in the subject or teacher, I would complete a paper and then just not turn it in. If I was happy with it, I didn’t really care about the grade. If I wasn’t interested in the subject or teacher, I just checked out completely. Most of my professors were extremely exasperated with me. I heard, "If you'd only apply yourself" a lot.

My first office job was in accounting. Hilarity ensued.

My first “real” job was an editorial assistant for an industrial magazine in Toronto. I got around being barely nineteen with no degree by writing a personal essay that persuaded the editor to give me a shot.

I learned to cut and paste when it was actual cutting and pasting. I was working at the magazine when desktop publishing was introduced.

The wax pasting machine was a good place to accidentally on purpose bump into the art director, who I thought I was madly in love with. The art director I was actually in love with was in Little Rock, Arkansas at the time, probably flirting with some other editorial assistant over the wax pasting machine. We wouldn’t meet for another six years.

I met my husband on a Liz Phair BBS in 1995. If you don’t remember what a BBS is, or know who Liz Phair is, the rest of the story is bound to be lost on you.

I had come back to Newfoundland by that time (the art director married someone else), and thought I would live in St. John’s the rest of my life. I loved it there. On January 16, 1996, I packed a bag, boarded a bus, and left.

I ran off to Mexico with Patrick, to a little colonial city called San Miguel de Allende. My parents, to their great credit, did not freak out, though I did not really know where I was this time, or what the hell I was doing.

I moved in with Patrick, into a one room apartment in a foreign country, after having spent a total of ten days with him over a period of a year.

We came to Little Rock just long enough to make enough money to get back to Mexico, six months tops. Thirteen years, three kids, and two houses later...

I hated Little Rock when I got here. I love it now. Its small town-ness presses in on me, sometimes, but that is also its principal charm.

I will turn 40 this year. I love everything about getting older on the inside. I sometimes struggle with the outside, but I wouldn’t trade experience for perky bits.

I would like to get in shape enough to wear a bikini one more summer, but I’m probably not willing to suffer for it.

I am an optimist. I really do believe things are getting better over time, and that most people are doing the best they can at any given moment, given the circumstances.

As long as I can remember, I have had a very strong sense of the nearness of God. I don’t talk about it much, because that word conjures up images for a lot of people that are not even close to what it means to me.

The older I get, the less tolerance I have for judgmental attitudes. I realize that this is judgmental and intolerant of me. I’m working on it.

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The portrait is one Patrick did by hand, using Illustrator CS4, based on a snapshot of me at about twenty-one. My mother would like everyone to know I haven't smoked since 1997. Anyway, it was turning my skin green.

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With my little eye

I bought a new camera yesterday. I've been needing one for a while: my three-year-old Kodak EasyShare had been dropped on its head too many times. Also, having the word "EASY" plastered across my camera is far less cool in blogging circles than it is on double decker tour bus circles. Everytime I took a picture with it at the Blogher conference last year, I felt like I was standing up in high-waisted, elasticized jeans. Stonewashed. While everyone else was firing off their Canon Rebels and Nikon D's, I was shooting with the "Mom jeans" of cameras.

I don't pretend to be a real Photographer. But even with my humble point and shoot, I've taken a few photos over the years I feel good about, and I've learned some things. I have an eye for composition. I've gotten cocky enough to criticize my husband when I have to hand him the camera. There's a difference in mood between his and my pictures of the kids — he's not shooting through the viewfinder of his heart, I tell him. And I've become obsessed with natural light. I hate flash. I'd much rather sacrifice focus to keep atmosphere.

This is where my EasyShare was starting to frustrate me. I don't feel ready to move up to a SLR, but I'm ready to do more with ISO and exposure. And even though a digital camera is a legitimate piece of equipment for what we and the IRS —incredibly— now consider my "work," I couldn't bring myself to spend upward of $500.

In other words, I've outgrown the trike, but still need training wheels. So after much deliberation, I settled on a Sony Cybershot DSC-H10, for the highly technical reason that it felt good in my hand. It set me back about two hundred and fifty tax-deductible bucks. It has manual options for exposure and ISO, and other features that I won't even pretend to understand. Although it lacks an optical viewfinder and won't take easily replaced AA batteries, those are drawbacks I can live with. I've heard the Cybershots perform decently in low light and the 10X zoom will let me get even closer to my subjects in the wild. Not that my kids even notice me and my camera anymore. I am Jane Goodall with the chimps. But with 10x zoom, I can now blog about their earwax.

When I started blogging, I never would have guessed how essential photography would become to my process. My cats spilled coffee on my ibook about six months ago, and I have been typing without letters a, z, q and "delete" ever since (I copy and paste them in, and let me tell you, I've gotten pretty fast at it). So I can blog without a letter "a", but not without a camera. When Heather Armstrong said in a recent interview that she keeps a notepad handy to jot down material for her blog, I realized that my camera has been my notepad, my shorthand way of capturing a moment that I want to write about later (like I did with the red dress). I guess the shutter click is my way of saying, "Note to Self:"

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What a country.

I've been a fan of Leah Peterson's blogger interview series for as long as I've been a blogger (blog blog bloggity blog!). When she retired the series, she retired a fond daydream of mine with it. No way would I would never be in that number.

Enter Neil Kramer and the Great Interview Experiment, like a fairy godmother with a magic wand. Salagadoola mechicka boola bibbidi-bobbidi-boo (I think that's yiddish for abracadabra). Put 'em together and what have you got?

Me, being interviewed by Leah:

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When and why did you start blogging?

In the summer of 2005, I went home to Newfoundland for a month. I set up a Yahoo 360 blog as a travel diary to share with friends back in Arkansas. I thought it would just be a little travelogue, with vacation photographs. I sat down to write about some moose that we saw,and wound up writing about my expatriate experience; how it feels to live so far from home, and what it means to not really belong to one culture or the other.

It took me totally by surprise. I had never thought of myself as a prose writer. I had been a poet before I had children, and I hadn't yet figured out how to be that with small kids, because I had neither the time, nor the emotional space for poetry. But blogging can tolerate interruptions. I can (and do) blog with a child in my lap. I can get up and pour juice or apply a band-aid, and come back to it. And there is feedback. I'm very extroverted, and that makes it hard to be alone with my writing for long stretches. Creating a blog post feels more conversational. There's a receiving end.

Do you have any tips for people wanting to get their writing published in magazines etc.?

Write well.

The magazine stuff has been so surreal. An editor at Good Housekeeping found Notes last spring, and two posts have now been adapted for print, with more coming. I read somewhere that putting your best work out on your blog and hoping to get published in print is like putting your resume on your doorstep and hoping to get a job. Isn't that pithy? I almost believed it. Like I almost believed the advice to not put essay-length posts on the blog, but keep it light and short. I went to a Blogher workshop last summer where it was said that being a generalist will guarantee that your blog will never go anywhere. So much for conventional wisdom.

I write what I have to write, and I try to stay in forward motion. I tell myself the outcome is not my business—the work will get where it needs to go. I obey little nudges, and once in a blue moon, they actually work out. I had two guest columns in the Globe & Mail (Canada's equivalent of the Washington Post) because it popped into my head that they might fit well there. The editor agreed.

It's so easy to query and submit now. Learn the rules of querying, follow them, and then just keep writing, even though you never hear back, or a mailbot writes to say you suck. Rejection doesn't get any easier, but the acceptances make it all worthwhile. At the very least, you've still got your blog. Somebody, somewhere, gives a damn.

What were you like as a child?

A daydreamer and dawdler. Also precocious, sensitive and bossy. I haven't changed much.

Are your children like you?

I really work hard at seeing my kids for who they are themselves, because I think too many parents project their own stuff onto their children. But yes, there are a few undeniable traits we share. It's easy to see little me in my nine-year-old when he is carrying the weight of the world around or being a know-it-all. And the way my middle son can tune into his interior world for long stretches is very much like me. I think by the time the youngest arrived on the scene, all the available projections were used up, and he was free to be completely himself.

What's your favorite music?

Whatever I am listening to. I have wildly eclectic (some might say indiscriminate) taste. I try to keep up with the trendy stuff—indie rock, emo and even commercial pop. But there are a few staples I keep coming back to, mainly folk and alt-country. Tom Petty is the musical version of my very favorite pair of jeans. It sounds trite to say music is really important to me, because I can't imagine that it isn't for everybody, but music is REALLY important to me. My three children are a direct result of Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville album. You'd think she'd come over and babysit once in a while.

You recently wrote about some very personal financial issues. Do you regret it? What kind of feedback did you get? Would you do it again?

Opening up about our financial struggles last year was as naked as I have ever gotten on the blog. It got to the point where I couldn't not write about it. My husband's freelance design business had flat-lined for months. We were facing foreclosure warnings, utility shut-offs. It was all that was going on with me. It was starting to feel artificial to keep writing around it.

I did worry that people might judge, tell us to suck it up, get a couple of real jobs. I got the opposite response. My readers were incredibly supportive. They wrote to tell me what my writing was worth to them, they shared their own struggles, they even told me to put up advertising! It was the most amazing vote of confidence, and it kept me going.

Not only would I do it again, I am doing it again. I recently signed on as a blogger for AOL's money blog, WalletPop, and I will be sharing more as we wobble our way toward something like financial security.

Your writing seems to be so often inspired. Where do you find inspiration?

One of the great things about blogging is that you become an observer as well as an actor in your own life. The cliche is that bloggers are self-absorbed (like other writers aren't), but the absorption is really with life. Even the most everyday, mundane happening can be rich with story. It's an exercise in mindfulness.

I think one of the reasons people respond to personal blogs is the way it makes them think about the vividness of their own everyday experience.

Would you share one of your favorite poems that you've written?

This one was written for my middle son, on the eve of his fifth birthday.

Jars of Clay

All my poetry is broken.
Though it held up
to years and years
of life decanted.
Amphorae for two marriages.
An urn for my father’s ashes.
A corked bottle
with a scroll in it
for exile.

A vessel for every memory
regret, and desire
and not one of them
not all of them
could hold one drop of you,
four years old and crouched
in the garden, your hands
cupped around small life,
a rapt and tender god.

(Kyran Pittman, All Rights Reserved)

I'd love to hear about how you became a mail-order bride.

Ha! You'll have to wait until I get a book deal (or we get drunk together at Blogher). But you get an advance copy. xo

Any words of wisdom to share with the masses?

Drop everything and run toward the person you are.

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While You're Here...

A personal creed of mine is to whom much is given, much is also expected. Your readership is a gift, and I'd like to pay a portion of it forward by drawing your attention to a worthy cause or message from time to time. It's always original content over outbound links here at Notes, but as long as I'm running commercial advertising over on the right, I may as well use my powers for good over on (where else?) the left.

The charter cause for the "While You're Here..." spot is Women For Women, an aid agency that some friends of mine in Little Rock are raising money for, as a way to reach out to rape victims in the Congo. When the basket came around last month, I didn't have more than a few dollars to throw in, but I emailed the agency and told them I had a few online friends who might also have a buck or two. And that those friends might even have a few friends.

So check it out, toss in what you can, and feel free to grab the badge and code for your own platform. Make it your internet good deed of the day, and then feel free to spend the rest of it being naughty.

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Postscript: Okay, almost ALL of you are clicking out on "Naughty," and almost none of you on "Donate". Guess I know how to lure you to good deeds in the future...;-)

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Me, in Ten Seconds*

I was born in 1969, on the cusp betwixt Sagittarius and Scorpio. Ye shall know me by my confusing accent, like everything else about me, a bit of this, a bit of that. I am a proud Newfoundlander (please do not call me a Newfie), but am dug deep into Arkansas red dirt. I met my love on a Liz Phair BBS.** My father was a poet. My mother is a lawyer. My eyes are green. I like a nice syrah. I am willful, intense, self-absorbed, an incorrigible smartypants.

But I will make you love me, supposing it kills us both.

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*ten seconds in my Newfoundland accent; ten minutes in mid-southern drawl.

**He would tell you I am "a mess". Also something about a "tiger" and a "tail."

blogme2007

...so rude of me not to mention the source of this meme: the legendary Mochamomma

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Hardly Asked Questions

Because I have less than six weeks to prepare for my poetry readings in Ireland, and because I swore last night that from here on out, I would Get Down to Business, I am suddenly awash with nifty ideas for the blog.

One of these is to start a H.A.Q. file. For Hardly Asked Questions. Things hardly anyone is dying to know.

Here's how it works: you post your question in the comments section here, where you can choose anonymity if you like. In a day or two, I will build a link in the sidebar to the H.A.Q. and we can keep adding to it.

I will do my best to answer all relevant questions. Like, "Newfoundland— isn't that near Latvia?" and "My uncle works at the William Morris Agency. Do you mind if I send him a few chapters of your book?" or "Where can I get a Rottschund?" Questions along the lines of "Do you want these incriminating pictures back?" should be directed to my personal email.

You can ask serious questions, too. If they aren't too personal. For a blog. Which gives you pretty much carte blanche.

Please try and avoid life's big imponderables, like, "Why should I care?" or "Don't you have something better to do?" and "My God, woman, what could there possibly be left that you haven't told us?" Those are beyond the scope of the H.A.Q. or my ability to answer.

As for the person who came here wondering about "extramarital sex without ejaculation" while staying at the Hilton: yes, sweetheart, it's still cheating.

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My blogging brethren, feel free to develop your own HAQs. It would be fun to see it go meta.

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Original Packaging

I believe I have finally got my labels (sidebar section What I Write About) operational, after discovering that they would lead you to conclude that I Write About Nothing. In fact, I write about Everything.( Lack of focus? Or well-rounded? You decide.) Anyway, I have gone back and labelled a year's worth of posts, which is more than I have done for my kids' school jackets. The audience for Notes' pilot season was ittybitty select, and many of these posts are still in near-mint condition. Go ahead, get your sticky fingerprints all over them.

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Terra Nova

The future is curved like the horizon. Some of it is unavoidable, unalterable. Dead ahead, you might say. Some of it is plainly visible--on a clear day--but navigable. You can keep to the same course, and arrive straight where you are headed, or tack, and land elsewhere. There are maps and tools and eyewitness accounts to aid you if you are inclined to seek direction.

The greater swath of it lies outside our peripheral vision, and there are no instruments, no markers, no flashes of clarity by which to scry it. One day you are sailing along, the next you have run aground. You stumble around and wonder, "How did I get here?" You look behind, wondering how to get back.

But there is no way back, not for you or the place you have been cast upon, the paths you will have to clear, the people who were not expecting you.

It is a new world.

I never saw Arkansas on my own horizon line. Not in diary entries, doodles, or daydreams. Not in a train, not in a plane. Prior to 1992, I thought it was pronounced Ar-KANz-ass, and was adjunct to Kansas. Like North and South Dakota, or the Carolinas. Kansas and Ar-Kansas. If I had to come up with a mental image, it would have been borrowed straight from the Wizard of Oz. Tumbleweeds and twisters.

I was engaged to my first husband and living in his house in a nondescript suburb of St. John's, Newfoundland (ironically named Paradise) when Bill Clinton came out of nowhere into the world's consciousness. If this were a novel, it would be obvious foreshadowing that the first time I took notice of Arkansas, it was during a television interview about an extramarital affair. It would almost be overkill, and a good editor would tell me to give the reader a little more credit.

But at twenty-two years old, I was barely literate in life. If I cracked open the book at all, I was mostly interested in the pretty pictures. I certainly wasn't reading between the lines.

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Contact Me

I thrive on your comments, emails, and even warm fuzzy thoughts. My email is kyranp@gmail.com.

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