Reset Button

I forgot to post on Saturday and I only realized it Sunday morning. When I did, I wasn't overcome with frustration with myself and felt no sadness about the fact that I was not going to meet the goal of blogging every day in 2014. In fact, I felt relieved, so much so that I chose not to blog yesterday either. The weekend was full in the best possible way. Friday night, we went out to dinner with our friends and their children (six adults and five kids) and it was loud and fun which is not a combination I always enjoy. Saturday, Luisa and I took the kids to the Lego Movie and we took pictures of ourselves with all the stupid things in the lobby and ate too much candy and popcorn. That night, I played Minecraft with my kids and we had so much fun together that we didn't want to go to bed. Yesterday, Luisa and I went skiing with Zeca while Miguel did homework and then, last night, I went to my writing group which I needed so very much.

I spent a lot of time thinking about blogging and internet life last week and at one point, thought, "Remember when you were writing a book?" It's not so much that I had forgotten but more that it was easy to put it aside once I finished the draft. I do that a lot - I almost finish things.

And then, last night at my writing group, Tracy and I talked about blogging every day and Nina asked if it helped us or took us away from other writing and my thought from earlier in the week came back to me - my book.

Yes, blogging every day takes away from my other writing goals.

When I set out to blog every day, I envisioned it as writing practice and hoped that it would keep my brain firing so that I would be full of energy and ideas for my other work. I also hoped that I would produce some quality posts, even though I knew not every one would be great.

During the actual practice of blogging every day for the past six weeks, however, I'm not sure the quality was there, though I did reconnect with my more humorous roots. I also realized that it wasn't serving as writing practice - I found myself scrambling to post most nights. It was late and I was tired and there was no way to spin gold from the cobwebs in my brain.

The fact is that I do a lot - VillageQ, Listen To Your Mother and recaps for Autostraddle. Blogging every day here is not realistic right now.

So, with that realization, I am letting go. Goals are important but it is also important to set new ones when you realize the old ones aren't serving you.

This post is my reset button. I'm not abandoning the blog but I won't be posting every day. We'll see what goal emerges next.

PHOTO CREDIT: VIKKI REICH

On Writing and Privilege

It started, as many things do, with a conversation on Twitter. Katie Sluiter had written a review of Stephen King's book, On Writing, and she and Kerstin Auer were discussing it and I chimed in with my own observations. In summary, they both loved the book and I did not. When they asked me why, the first thing out of my tweeting fingers was that Stephen King has a tremendous amount of privilege and the book was written from that perspective. Of course, the second thing was that I hated the way the cover felt. The more we discussed his privilege the more I realized that in being so quick to point out his, I was completely ignoring my own.

I grew up in a working class family. My father owned a bar and my mother was a typesetter. After my parents divorced, my mother had a difficult time making ends meet and, years later, I found out that things were hard enough at one point that she hocked her jewelry just to buy me Christmas presents. My mother couldn't afford to miss work and often worked overtime so that she could pay the bills. Sometimes, I think growing up working class impacted my world view more than anything else and I am an expert at recognizing class privilege though sometimes I forget to notice my own.

In calling out Stephen King, I had to stop and recognize that I quit my job just over a year ago to write. At this very moment, I am sitting on the couch with my cat and my laptop writing. It doesn't matter that I don't make millions of dollars from my writing - I still have the privilege of sitting here doing it. I still default to thinking of myself as that little girl who lived in a trailer park with a family who struggled, with a mother who punched a time clock, with a dad with a rusty old truck. I still remember watching my mother do bills and knowing that some would get paid and some wouldtn't.

But I am not that little girl.

I am a grown woman with a Master's degree who had a career as a professional and can return to that if the need arises. I have a partner who financially supports me and, though I don't talk about it often, my kids go to private school. Privilege? I have more than I could have imagined when I was 11 years old and watching my mother making breakfast from the previous night's leftover mashed potatoes.

So, the discussion of On Writing reminded me that, before I throw out "privilege" as a criticism of someone else, I need to check my own.