I Got Myself a Blog
By: Michele Pittman
Tags: Life Lessons, Writing Life, Blogging, Personal Development, Productivity

Now what?

Image by Werner Moser from Pixabay

First, a little history: I was laid off from my job in the mortgage industry in 2008. I mean, really, who could have predicted that approving $500k home loans for minimum wage borrowers would blow up in our faces?

I had no job, no prospects, and no way to pay the mortgage. I was, am, a single mom to boot. I needed to do something and do it fast. The only thing I could think of that I was semi talented in was writing. Why not give it a shot?

I’m not a mommy blogger

2009 saw a phenomenon around mommy bloggers. It was a thing. Some were more memorable than others and some remain around to this day having parlayed their success into product endorsements, cookbooks or trips and reviews (Disney for free was something of a goal, I believe). Sometimes the “hubs” was featured in a post doing something typically male and causing nothing but overly cute exasperation. That wasn’t me. I had no “hubs” and my nature doesn’t allow for cutesy. My daughter was seven, the bills were piling up and it was all I could do to keep my home and my composure without trying to find some way to make my situation cute.

So I chose a different direction and began a blog called DubiousMa. The title was meant to convey the uncertainty of my parenting skills. It would be humorous. I would follow the “I have no business being a mother because of the crazy but post-worthy ways in which I parent” template.

I taught myself HTML and CSS, y’all. I wrote about what it was like to be unemployed with bills and have a child for whom I was solely responsible. I managed to find the humor in the bleak and wrote honestly and candidly. I had followers. I guest posted and became friends with like-minded bloggers.

I can’t even tell you what I wrote about specifically but I do know that I had readers. People waited for my posts to be published.

Then I got a job. Finally. But oh! What about my blog? Sadly, it died a slow death and I forgot about it in the minutiae of everyday life. I regret that.

The year of the pandemic

My renewed interest in blogging has nothing to do with the COVID-19 pandemic but everything is pandemic-related, no?

Again I’ve got time on my hands — not a ton as I’m fortunate enough to have kept my job when thousands were losing theirs — but I wasn’t leaving the house much and I wasn’t doing anything productive. I couldn’t even tell you how I got interested in writing again. I don’t remember that catalyst but it happened and I needed an outlet.

You’ll recall from this story I wrote that I saw an article online about a girl who was practically printing money by selling her writing. I had been thinking about writing again before I saw the article but her story lit a fire. I set up a profile on one of those platforms where you write thousands of words for something like $.35 net.

If I’ve learned anything in my months of preparing to prepare it’s that I should value my work and avoid opting for the quick fix over true creation. I knew I needed a home for my work and I already owned my name as a domain so I hired someone to set up my blog and now it’s finished…sort of.

Now what?

What the hell do I write about? I’m aware that the holy grail of a successful online freelance writer is a profitable niche. I don’t have one. I’ve done those exercises where you write down what you like and what you know and see what overlaps. There are a couple of ideas there, I suppose, but man, breaking into freelance writing is hard af.

What to do?

Well, I went back to that overlapping list of potential niches and I tried again. Then I put it down and did something else, something unrelated. I read some wonderfully resourceful posts on a few of my new favorite writing sites. I came back to the list, did some fact-checking on a few ideas and I put it down again. I practiced a little self-flaggelation by attempting to read another paragraph of The Republic and managed about eleven words before quickly putting it away because I didn’t deserve that. I finished The Queen’s Gambit and called it research (please don’t look for any chess stories). I wrote down dozens of ideas and began a ridiculous number of drafts on this very platform. I thought of nothing else but writing.

And that was the problem.

I was thinking too much. Thinking doesn’t get the words on paper, so to speak. I wasn’t doing. I was preparing again. I was comfortable in the inertia. Moving myself forward was scary. As long as I was thinking about writing and reading about writing, I thought I was doing something.

I needed to shove past all the preparing and actually do the thing I was preparing for. Those blog posts weren’t going to write themselves.

So I put the niche list away and just began to think of myself as a writer. I called myself a writer.

Then I began to write.