I started blogging in 2002, as a way to affirm life after a 9-day bout of the stomach flu. My first-ever blog post was called “A New Beginning”, probably because I was so glad to not feel sick anymore, plus the blogosphere of that time was my oyster, People. I was a stay-at-home-homeschooling mother in my mid-thirties, and I felt like I had found my “tribe” in the Godly Woman Subculture (wherein I felt included but also interestingly “edgy”…since my Proverbs 31 credentials may or may not have been forged or from an unaccredited institution). At that time I didn’t even know what a digital camera was, so I didn’t understand how these women always had photos on their blogs from THAT VERY DAY, too quickly to have had film developed while they were already so busy with bread baking, latin games with the children, plus being the kind of wives whose husband’s desires were always at the very forefront of their humble and modest thoughts. Anyway, I digress. The point is that I started blogging at The Home Realm (where I wrote a few okay pieces but mostly, too many posts from my smug young mother vantage point) and I continued there until about 2006. I also had a few (basically unsucessful) forays into “business” during those years, and a short and forgettable stint on the now-defunct Intellectuelle blog (it’s my contribution that was short and forgettable, not Intellectuelle itself).

In 2007, I discovered the world of home fitness and became obsessed enough with that to start a blog called Eclectic Domestic Works Out. I chronicled my P90x experience and documented my workout DVD collection as it grew to over 200 discs. I gave up on that blog in 2009, but I kept working out almost daily until Moppet 5 was born in 2011. Since then I have been more sporadic with exercise, but I have retained a lot of my fitness gains and I do work out fairly often in short spurts. I have no idea why that blog even exists in cyberspace anymore.

No Spring Chicken was born in 2010, a year or so into my Midlife Crisis. I was considering getting back into zinemaking at that time, but I guess I didn’t and started that blog instead. I still talked about diet and fitness a bit at first, but overall, NSC is a good screen capture of Who I Am Now (in germinal form). There are a lot of thoughts and feelings chronicled there, which were clarified for me a few years later, when I heard art historian Dan Siedell interviewed on The White Horse Inn, and then found Mockingbird. I last wrote on that blog almost exactly two years ago, when I started my eponymous blog (which shares characteristics with No Spring Chicken but has definitely also been a precursor to the business blog that will hopefully “go live” in early December.) I am also a “contributor” to the Creative Circle Blog, where I have not contributed since probably February.

One thing that concerns me about having a business blog or being a “contributor” or “guest poster” is how I will manage the contant drumbeat from the biz gurus to Stay On Brand, and even better if your brand is so inspiring and inspirational and full of those bright colors I hate. I’m sure I can come up with a somewhat cohesive and/or coherent “brand” (even with my various interests) but I don’t like the feeling that I can’t let the “brand identity curtains” get at all frayed. Like if somehow people get a glimpse behind the curated image, that’s a negative for your business. But since my business is called Rough Edges Life, I don’t want to feel trapped by my brand or like it is a facade. I need to have a place for my honest writing (especially since the zine is on hiatus) but not necessarily interspersed with “content” on a business blog. I think I will just keep this blog and link to it in my new About page, so anyone who might want to risk seeing “behind the brand” can do so.

Two women who were small-time bloggers on the periphery of my early blogging circle are undoubtedly millionnaires by now (Pioneer Woman and Ann Voskamp). I think it’s unlikely that I’ll become a millionnaire, but I am ready to “embrace the blog” again and see where that leads me.