6 Articles I Barely Shared On Social Media

As both a deeply private person and a writer trying to build her portfolio, I've written a lot of pieces that I didn't share when they came out. Though I was proud of many of them, they weren't immediately available online and I forgot or the topics were personal enough that I could risk offending someone or there was some sort of error (from me or the editor) that overshadowed the awesomeness of the piece. Thanks to the marvels of modern technology, most of those errors have been fixed after the fact, but it was far enough after publication that I forgot to publicize the piece. Yikes. Anyhow, here's a short and strange look into my portfolio.

1. When "My $5,000 Wedding Budget" was published on Debt.com, we had gone a few hundred dollars over budget. I also don't like to admit that wedding planning triggered panic attacks, or that I think the modern obsession with weddings can turn the celebration into a pageant and that icks me out.
2. I profiled winemaker Randall Grahm for VinePair, and forgot to send the article to him for several weeks. He's an odd but interesting bird, and I got to learn about viticulture. Wine is cool.
3. This article on the geeky side of clarification in cocktails for Tales of the Cocktail came out a couple weeks after the third death in our family in ten weeks. Big, huge, sloppy thanks to the editors for their flexibility and generosity. I was too shellshocked to do anything other than read over it and file it away for later.
4. Sometimes I write about agriculture. FarmLife magazine is super cool, but the full issues don't go online for a bit. My first feature for them focused on a pair of brothers farming up in Quebec.
5. For the first few months of the year, my main coping mechanism was compartmentalization. Though many of y'all may not believe it, I wrote an article about the history of the Cosmopolitan for mental_floss.
6. People get real snarky about recommendations for starting a home bar. Really, people get snarky over booze recommendations in general because they're based on opinion. There's no hard and fast rules, guys, mmkay? Drink what you like. Here's my take for mental_floss.

This post topic was inspired by the suggestion to blog about 5 things you know. This month, I'm attempting to blog my way forward by writing every day as part of Blog Like Crazy.

2016, in a nutshell

As promised on Nov. 1, I'm going to use #bloglikecrazy to get a bit more personal on the Internet. But there's less than two months left in 2016, and it's time to face the music: This year was pretty shitty. There were some high points and a good bit of travel, but a lot of the milestones were negative. As a result, I've spent a lot of time on the couch with Netflix instead of socializing because I couldn't bring myself to leave my blanket burrito. Though I've nabbed three bylines in new-to-me national publications (and have one more coming), I've been seriously struggling financially with writing. Most online writing pays less than $500 per article, and the hours involved in researching and writing render the hourly rate less than ideal. Include time spent pitching and emailing, and the stats are downright grim. In addition to articles, I almost write copy for one corporate client, but the gig isn't steady.

Now, to the really tough stuff. In the first few months of the year, three family members passed away and we moved another into an assisted living facility, all in the span of ten weeks. All this happened before our first anniversary. Though none of them were completely unexpected, it was/is completely overwhelming. I worked through the first two deaths, but took almost a month off to try to keep our lives even marginally functioning. For several months, we were splitting our time between Birmingham and Guntersville. Thank goodness the Bears don't get carsick.

On to the positive: at the beginning of the year, Adam was offered a job with a local law firm (YAY!!!). I traveled a lot, and although it threw a lot of parts of my life out of sync, it also provided me a way to temporarily distance myself from the tough stuff. And we bought a house tucked away in a cute little neighborhood in Homewood. It's about twice as big as our shoebox apartment was, but it's a haven. It has a decent-sized back yard, which the Bears love, and lots of sticks and chipmunks for them to chase.

In the middle of all that, I dropped off the face of the Earth. Social media, blogging, social interactions: all of it was too much to face. Several of the articles I wrote during that time haven't made it onto social media. I simply haven't had the energy or motivation to do anything but hide from the world. When a publisher approached me about writing a book back in August, I jumped on it to have Something Important To Do. And to see my name on a book, of course. It was overwhelming, and I lost myself in it for six weeks.

If I'm being honest with the Internet, I haven't processed most of the changes from early 2016. To keep going, I've addressed the issues with a large(r than usual) dose of inappropriate humor, but that's a mask. I want to start back with therapy soon, even though I don't feel like I'm ready to face up to that much loss and anger and vulnerability. But that's life, in some ways. No way forward but through.

This month, I'm attempting to blog my way forward by writing every day as part of Blog Like Crazy.

Why I'll #bloglikecrazy again

Somewhere between the day-to-day grind of freelancing writing and the 50,000-word book project that consumed September and most of October, I lost It. For a few months, I lost the magic/motivation/desire/mojo/ love that gets you up in the morning and guides you through being self-employed.

A lot of things have lead to this break. I try not to get super personal on the Internet, but there's been a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that I can't/shouldn't hide from. So, during the course of November, I'm trying to write my way out of the tiny, dark tunnel in my brain where I currently live. To do so, I'm planning to share a bit more than usual to be honest with y'all, and with myself.

Part of this funk came from mental_floss's decision to cease print publication. I've been writing a cocktail chemistry column for their website for three years, and still don't have a clear answer on if my work has a place.

Despite my long-running pieces on their website, I was never published on the print side. It was on my bucket list, which is home to ever more annotations of "not accepting freelance submission," "closed," or "wtf happened." But aside from the professional concerns, I've been reading mental_floss almost since publication started. When I was younger, it was a reminder that there were other nerds like me who got to share their smarts in an achingly cool format. It was a haven, and I wanted to be part of it. In a small way, I've met that goal, but it still falls short.

I'm also burned out. The never-ending cycle of freelance writing, the pitching, rejection/acceptance, drafting, editing, and submission, and the scramble to catch up after falling behind from family stuff, last-minute projects, and part-time jobs, has gotten me down. These days, I have to fight to dredge up any motivation to write even the shortest article.

But here I am. I'm doing what I know how to do: writing my way out. There's no way forward but through, so it's time to start hacking away and see what happens.

Join me for the next 30 days as I make daily blogging an intentional practice. Day one of #bloglikecrazy: Why take on this challenge?