Blue sky, sunny day

Image by TrombaMarina via Flickr

My blog title is an oblique reference to the Allman Brothers‘ tune. You know, the one with the lyric, “Goin’ to Carolina, won’t be long till I’ll be there…”

Okay, enough broad hinting. We’re moving. Although I held off saying anything “officially” for fear of jinxing it (our first offer on our house fell through; the buyers couldn’t get financing, and I figured it was as likely as not that in this economy it could keep happening).

But our second offer was solid. We close on May 29, Rain Dog’s birthday, and next time I blog we’ll be in the sunny (warm!) Piedmont region. Greenville SC for now, though Asheville NC is not out of the question. We love the area, have for a long time. Having both grown up in urban environments, we’re looking forward to 1) no longer having to drive an hour to get anywhere interesting and 2) having lots of interesting places to pick from.

Oh, and the weather. This past winter about did us in!

In the coming months I hope to blog a little more regularly about life as a full-time writing mother, like how cool it is that I have clients who don’t mind hearing little voices in the background, because they have their own, and some other stuff I have going on. No promises but it’s never been my intent to let this blog languish. It just hasn’t been a priority while I’ve been getting business rolling.

I’ve already made some contacts via Twitter and I’m looking forward to getting to know the area, which on our first visit we realized was a place where people work to live — not live to work. If pulling up roots is about making a better life for our children if not ourselves, then that’s just what we’re doing. Thanks for coming along for the ride!

Mom award? Me? ;)

Brittany at Rewriting Motherhood was kind enough to award this to me, even though I never comment over there much less update over here. She is a sweetheart and I hope to meet her in person soon!

Here are the rules:

First, admit one thing you feel awful about involving being a Mom. Get it off your shoulders. Once you’ve written it down, you are No Longer allowed to feel bad. It’s over with, it’s in the past. Remember, you’re a good Mom!

(I’m cadging Brittany’s response. Because I feel the same. Exact. Way.) I feel bad that sometimes I care more about having peace and quiet than I do about being with my own children. I find myself trying to tune them out, find ways to put space between us, and really thrill at the idea of the day when they both attend half day school five days a week. It’s not that I don’t love them, but I have the energy level of an introvert, and must have peace and quiet to internally reboot.

Then, remind yourself you are a good Mom, list seven things you love about your kids, you love doing with your kids, or that your kids love about you. These are the things to remind yourself everyday that you rock!

1. I am totally serious and intense, so I love it when I surprise my boys by doing something totally off-the-wall and silly. Their eyes get really wide and then they open up with laughter. It is the best way to connect with them!

2. I love sharing scientific facts and interests with Hamlet. He has such a mind for detail and even though I can’t get too in-depth with him yet, he really wants to know how things work and why. I love being the person to show him.

3. I love what great friends they are. Even when they spend much of the day fighting, they really do love each other and it shows. I hope they are such good friends for the rest of their lives.

4. I do have to laugh when they argue. It’s near constant and they never agree on anything. It is just so funny sometimes to hear them go back and forth as they each try to differentiate themselves from each other.

5. I love when I get to take a break from work to go do something fun with them.

6. They love when I let them do grown-up things like press the button on my camera, type something on my laptop, or help me cook dinner.

7. I love that I have finally grown into being a mom. It took quite a bit longer than I ever expected, but I am so thankful that it was “OK” and for the most part I was given room to allow it to happen naturally. I think it ultimately made me a better mom, even if I do long for more space and time! (Who doesn’t?)

Finally, I am supposed to link 5 other mothers across the Blog-o-sphere, to nominate them for this award.

ML at Yes, I DO Mind

Joanna at Greenie Weenie

Bethany at Mommy Writer

Kristine at Inner Voice

Amra Pajalic

Behind every good writer…

Is a good website that explains who she is and what she does.

My site, christammiller.com, did that for about 18 months. I had started to get my short fiction published, and was trying to sell my novel. The two-sided site hinted at an equality in the two kinds of work in my life.

Last year, all that changed. And over the last six months, I began to suspect my website would have to change with it. I had paid a small amount to have a friend design it for me, but I had no idea how to get rid of the information about my novel, or change emphasis on various places where my career seemed to be headed.

I’d heard great things about WordPress themes as versatile content management systems, and I love working with the interface, so I hunted down a great free theme. A new contact, who’s a lot more versed in WP technical issues than I am, installed it for me, and I found it pretty easy to tweak (or at least to get him to fix when my tweaks went wrong)!

So here it is: http://christammiller.com. It casts a broad net, but I figure I can tweak that as business goes along and begins to fall into place. Meanwhile, it’s a great place to showcase my published work. For free and easy, what more can you ask?

Top 10 Reasons to Quit Your Job (for dads)

10. You get all the time with your kids that you thought you were missing out on.

9. Your wife’s happily vindictive grin when 4 p.m. rolls around and you collapse on the couch in exhaustion while the boys climb on you, shrieking, still with another three hours of energy.

8. Time to complete all the household projects you were too tired to complete on the weekends. (Provided your wife’s workload allows.)

7. No more meetings.

6. No more getting up at 4:45 a.m. This means you’re not in bed at 9 p.m. anymore, and you and your wife can do husband-and-wife things. Like…

5. You can watch all the movies and TV-to-DVD shows you’ve been missing out on.

4. Did I mention no more meetings?

3. You actually make it easier for your wife to be self-employed, because you’re not spending valuable cash on gas, coffee, or work clothes.

2. You can finally read all the books your wife has been telling you you would love.

1. You’re writing again. Fiction. Good fiction. Stuff your wife thinks will get published. If she can find the time to help you do it!

Crazy

It may seem crazy to donate money to a family I’ve never met, via an online contact I’ve never met either. But things have been crazy around here for a long time. And, well, crazier has been done, in worse ways, by much worse people.

So please read David Armano’s blog entry about his friend Daniela and her family. Their situation is what’s crazy. Donating just seemed sane by comparison.

UPDATE: They have raised more than $14,000 – nearly 300% of their original goal. I know I’m not the only one who has more faith in humanity now!

The times, they are…

Big changes afoot here in the Miller household. Only now do I have enough of an idea of what’s going on that I feel comfortable telling my mother talking publicly about them.

Rain Dog quit his job nearly three weeks ago. I knew it was coming–he’d been coming home from work daily saying things like, “I’m not going to last the year” or “Can I quit tomorrow?”–but I thought he’d probably wait until after Christmas break. He didn’t.

For a couple of years we’ve talked about the possibility of my taking my freelance business full-time. Again, I thought we might wait until we’d moved south, the cost of living being so much lower and thus better able to sustain a small business and a family together. But everything this year has been moving toward that goal now. The contracts I worked on over the summer, and especially, the incredible opportunities I’ve found in the last couple of months… the last three weeks especially.

The timing feels exactly right, so I’m making a go of it. I’ll keep writing, and I’m learning social media in hopes of becoming a consultant. (More on that once it’s more firmly established.) Rain Dog is going to enjoy being a stay-at-home dad, something he’s dreamed of since Hamlet was a baby. It will be unconventional, and it will be hard. But it will be more fully us.

How I spend my days

When Hamlet went back to school, I had the idea that I might be able to get at least a little more writing done during the day. Puck seemed better at entertaining himself than his brother had been, and surely the incredible creative synergy I’ve been experiencing this year meant that I’d be able to jump right back into it. Right?

Well… not so much.

Puck is better at entertaining himself. But he’s still 2 and, like most 2-year-olds, still needy. (In fact, honestly, if his entertaining himself was enough for me to write, I’d have him checked for autism or some other pervasive developmental disorder.)

So what am I doing with myself during the six hours we’re alone together–other than our walks, playgroups, other activities, and chasing him off surfaces higher than himself? I’m networking. No, really. Stop laughing! I’m networking! Online! With sources and clients and other writer friends and readers!

Seriously, Maurice Broaddus talked about this recently. “Friends make things easier…. Networking isn’t about using or ass-kissing people, it’s simply about building relationships, for their own sake.” And it’s not, he wrote further, about goofing off; although anyone watching me sit in this chair, toddler on my lap, trucks between him and my keyboard, my hand on the mouse, would think otherwise.

What they don’t see is what’s going on in my head. I read blogs about social media and think how I can apply the subject matter to a column proposal. I read friends’ blogs, their updates on Twitter. I chat and IM, and what blessings those all are, the platforms I can use to dash off a quick note before Puck pushes my hands away. I can build relationships with people, not just prospective sources and clients, but the people who read my stuff, whether it’s for entertainment or education. The people who need what I have to say, in other words, the people I can help.

So no, not much deathless prose going on while I hang out with my 2-year-old. But in the grander scheme of things? Something much more deathless than that.

Love and horror

Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story didn’t resonate with me as much as his earlier works, namely The Shining and Salem’s Lot, but one thing that stood out was his great affection for his protagonist–not meant to be his wife Tabitha, but certainly based on her and his love for her.

At the time I read the book (shortly after its printing) I wondered what it would be like for love to inform fiction to that extent, to write a story meant as tribute (which I think, in some small way, The Shining was also–to fatherhood, if not specific children). The fiction I was writing at the time was very dark indeed, and as the year wore on, I had the sense of writing the same story over and over again. I think this was partly what led to my “block” during the spring and summer of this year–this feeling, and the desire to change it.

In the last few weeks, I got back to writing fiction. And was surprised, when I returned to an old and already-published piece, to realize that I don’t think I could have written it today. Just as I don’t think I could have written this month’s story last year.

The difference? I think this year, I developed a greater appreciation for the people in my life. Last winter was brutal on many different levels–cold, snowy, and worst of all, isolating. I had two young children home with me (the younger of whom couldn’t yet walk well enough to enjoy playing in the snow) and no real adult contact; I didn’t feel lonely or depressed, but when I got back to work in the spring? I felt alive again. Work led to new friendships and, in turn, the realization that strong attachments were the difference between burnout and fulfillment. (Sadly, Rain Dog is experiencing job burnout for just that reason.)

So when Hamlet inspired me to write a story about a little boy who figures out how to “turn werewolves into pussycats” (his words!) I finally got to write a story informed by love. It won’t be published for awhile yet–I need to find a taker–but it was a lot of fun to write, and I hope it will make him proud someday. More importantly, I think it represents a turning point in my fiction, one I am looking forward to exploring during the coming winter.

Promos for my peeps

I can never figure out whether to lead with my own stories, or end with them. Psychologically, what does either choice say about me? What if I buried my self-promotion in the middle?

All right anyway. I have a new story, “Going Gandolfini,” at Demolition. Beware readers: it is one of my darkest. If you don’t mind being shocked and depressed, especially by the end, please read. I’m sure new dad Bryon would appreciate the traffic. While you’re there, read the other good offerings by Kieran Shea, Nathan Cain, and Doug Perry.

Speaking of new dads, I want to share info on two blogs I recently discovered via Twitter. Christian author Tricia Goyer writes about parenting advice for Gen X at Generation Next Parenting, while Dad-O-Matic gives some great insight into the mind of the men in your kids’ lives – dads, stepdads, dads no longer living with kids, dads of toddlers and dads of teens. It has become one of my favorite daily reads thanks to Chris Brogan.

I also want to promote my friend and neighbor’s creations. Aimee recently joined Twitter to promote her SoBenArts bibs and other hand decorated baby items, available on Etsy. Go visit her and buy her stuff!

And finally, I would never have known it was Blog Action Day if not for Taxgirl Kelly Phillips Erb. Read her poignant post, then figure out what you can do for the poor. Back in December I said my New Year’s resolution was to spend $10 or so a week to buy things for our church’s food pantry – the things food stamps don’t cover. And you know what? That’s the only resolution I’ve ever kept for this long. And how much more important it is these days!

UPDATE: Stephen Blackmoore snuck a good one in after I wrote this, but his post about a sudden rash of foreclosure-related suicides (and murder-suicides) is one of the major reasons I admire him. What can you do for friends and neighbors facing financial woes?

Through Google’s lens

Reading Brian Solis’ “The Socialization of Your Personal Brand,” this jumped out at me:

It’s been said that Google is the new resume. Truth be told, any search engine, whether social or traditional, is the resume – it’s the Wikipedia entry for the rest of us. It’s no longer what we decide to curate onto a piece of paper or onto one traditional one-page digital resume. It really is moot in a world when anyone can practically piece together your story without the help of a document designed to shape and steer our perception.

“Seventy-seven percent of recruiters report using search engines to find background data on candidates. Of that number, 35 percent eliminated a candidate because of what they found online.”

– Kevin Donline, Star Tribune Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minnesota

Not because it made me think about myself, but because it reminded me of an ethical question that’s taken me a long time to answer.

A few weeks ago, as my collaborator and I discussed potential article ideas, he brought up a friend of his. “Great investigator,” he told me. “Very knowledgeable.” And then he had to get off the phone, leaving me alone with my questions–and Google.

What I found frankly shocked me. My collaborator has an excellent reputation as an investigator and trainer. His friend, however, had been brought up on an infraction: supplying alcohol to a minor. He’d pleaded no contest, paid a fine, and resigned from his position at the police department he worked for. The defense attorney representing a pair of individuals took that infraction a step further, however, insinuating that an inappropriate relationship existed between this detective and the minor, a police Explorer in the same department.

I fired off an email to my collaborator: “Tell me there’s another side to this story.” There was. The detective and the Explorer had participated in a sting which resulted in the arrest of a liquor store proprietor. When it was over, the detective bought her something to drink. She picked an energy drink–one that contained alcohol. This was before the demand to repackage alcoholic energy drinks, so neither of them noticed the problem. “I would’ve done the same thing,” my collaborator said.

In the ensuing investigation, “energy drink” became “beer,” and the friend’s union rep gave him what my collaborator called bad advice: to resign before he was fired (a probably unlikely scenario). The friend went to another agency, had no problem getting hired. And the lawyer’s claim? Well, apparently, that was just a defense attorney doing what a defense attorney does best: using any trick available to introduce reasonable doubt.

The problem, of course, is that this presented one hell of a trick. Because it didn’t just affect that case. It also affects my ability to use this investigator as a source. Not only do I have only two sides to a story; anyone else Googling this man’s name (say, to get his contact information) will find what I found.

This makes me contemplate how even the most innocent of interactions can be blown out of proportion. And how the most devious of intentions can seem so innocent. (Think pedophile asking a child to help him look for a lost puppy.) Ultimately, I don’t think I can use this guy as a source. I hate to say that, because I do trust my collaborator’s judgment. Yet even he, not privy to the full investigation, doesn’t have the whole story.

He understands my dilemma, tells me it’s okay. (This is not the first time we’ve dealt with ethics; the reason we call ourselves “collaborators” is to continue our close working relationship more easily than “a source who became a friend” would explain.) Still, though I’m doing my best to be responsible to my publishers’ reputations as well as my own, it doesn’t feel too good to think I might be perpetuating a stain on an otherwise good cop’s reputation.

Had this happened to my collaborator, incidentally, the reader Googling his name would find very different results: news stories about the infraction, and the sheer amount of training he’s done, not just for other cops, but also for community groups and business leaders. It would, in other words, give the reader a hard reason to stop and think about the cop he’d otherwise be so quick to judge.

Solis is right when he says, “Indeed, there are many stories that fuel the urgency for everyone to take control of their online persona.” As I start my own personal branding efforts via various social media, I wonder to what kind of writer, mother, human being people see. And the extent to which what I do online makes as much difference as what I do off. How the two complement each other, and how they contradict. I’d like to think that the online isn’t very much different from the off.

And you? How do you come across to the people you love and the people you serve? How much does it matter to you?