If you haven’t gotten this question from you friends, family, coworkers, or random strangers at Target yet*, it’s just a matter of time. From the moment that I made it known to my friends and family that I had set up my own digital space to tell my stories, people in my life have wondered when, exactly, they would make their grand entrance on my blog and immediately start receiving their residuals.
*Hey, it could happen.
Almost four years into my blogging stint, my friends and family now know that I would never write anything personal or sensitive about them, and even if I did, I would vet the post with them first. None of us lives life in a vacuum, so it’s important for us to exercise discretion when we share our world on our blogs. The truth is that there are other lives in the mix, lives that may or may not appreciate being read about.
Being a parenting blogger, I’ve struggled with the question of boundaries ever since my daughter was born. She’s a toddler now and only associates my blogging habit with me drinking gallons of coffee in one sitting. But I know that, eventually, the day will come when she’ll want to read what I’ve written about her. And since she’s going to hate me anyway when she’s a teenager, I’d rather it be because I wear God-awful jeans that come all the way up to my boobs and not because I shared too much about her on my blog when she was small. The older she gets, the more I try to write in broad strokes about her and avoid the embarrassing, personal stories that aren’t really mine at all to tell.
What about you? What boundaries do you have in place when you write about your family or friends?
Once upon an time, in a land across the oceans, a girl named Cecilia was born. If that sounds like the start of a fairy tale, it’s on purpose. Though speaker Cecilia Gunther’s life hasn’t actually been a fairy tale, its zigs and zags have been so fascinating that it could easily be written up and sold as fiction.
Mother of five. High school drama teacher. Director. Photographer. Film industry professional in London. Quite honestly, any of those roles could be easily be a subject tackled by a script developer (another former career), but the shift from where she was to where she is now — down home on the farm in Illinois, growing her own food and raising animals with the moral support of her blog’s community of farmers — sounds like the kind of Amazon or BBC series I’d binge-watch in a weekend (well, if the writing was good, obviously).
We discovered Cecilia when we asked on the WordPress.com official Hot Off the Press blog if readers could suggest any great bloggers that we should consider for Press Publish. We’re so glad someone brought her to our attention! Her photographs are amazing, and seeing the connections that have formed in her commenting community is an example of the social richness that blogging can bring into your life.
But back to that fairy tale… this isn’t the first time Cecilia has been on the farm. As a teenager, she came to the U.S. as an exchange student. Cue a meet cute on the farm followed love, loss, travel, and all the other things that come with living. Fast forward a few decades to London, reconnection, more love and travel and another wedding, and back to the farm! I’m leaving out lots of details, but you get the idea that Cecilia has kind of an incredible story, right? Don’t worry, she’s going to tell you all about how she wound up where she is, and how her blog has helped her succeed and make great friends along the way. You won’t want to miss this session, and you definitely don’t want to miss her photographs!
Here’s our usual interview to help you get to know Cecilia, and you can also chat with her in her community conversation on how blogs evolve over time.
A. I came to live in the Midwest of America from London (though I am a New Zealander) about nine years ago. I was used to being surrounded in people and the prairies felt very wide and very lonely. Not being happy with the food in the supermarkets I decided to grow my own food embracing the challenge of self sufficiency. I took advantage of the land around my house and began to grow my own food. I started blogging to document the development of my little piece of land, taking photographs so that my own grown children and friends who do not live anywhere near closeby, could still drop in on any given day and see what I had been up to. I continue to blog with a growing readership of like-minded and very clever individuals who are always ready to help a lady farmer.
Q. What kept you (and still keeps you) posting regularly?
A. I promised myself and them that I would tell the truth of every day and that every post was about what happened yesterday and that the images would be what I saw that day. When I travel I take the readers with me, but 99 percent of the posts are just me pottering through an ordinary day farming, raising and cooking my own food using old fashioned methods. Mostly Organic. Mostly sustainable. Always tasty.
I post every day at about the same time. So, routine has a lot to do with the continued posting of the blog. I work on the images in the evening and write and post early morning – usually around dawn just before I go out to start my chores. The blog is a soap opera. Slow moving, the dialogue is not terribly challenging and there are lots of pretty pictures. I have made it easy for myself. And easy for my readers too.
Also the blog has developed a life of its own. All day as I work in the fields and the barns, usually completely alone but for the animals, I find myself collecting images and anecdotes to tell my readers the next morning. The blog itself has become a dialogue, my cup of tea. I guess you could call my readers my neighbours and we meet for a cup of tea together every day. I am no longer lonely out here.
Q. What’s your most popular post? Is that also your favorite post? If not, what are a few of your favourite posts and why.
A. Do you remember the morning we skyped (when you were at the beach in Hawaii and I was at the beach in New Zealand) and you asked me what my favourite post was? I was totally stumped. Each post is a continuation of yesterday’s post, they work as a unit (I have had new readers start at the beginning of this blog’s life and read every single post to get up to date) and I have TOO MANY favourites because few posts stand alone.
Firstly the most popular post (which is not my favorite post by the way).
How to Steam Eggs — No Need to Boil at All. This post is an old post in the previous free WordPress format so it has been squeezed into my new format and is now kind of awkward. But many people seem to want to know how to steam eggs!
Also for you, with the help of my readers, here are three good favourite posts that might help you get a handle on what my blog is all about.
My Enemy. We had been having trouble with an animal killing chickens and I had put a wildlife motion activated camera into the hen house to see what was doing it. This is the day we realised that we were up against minks. I chose this one as it is in fact an ordinary post about the day to day running of an old fashioned farm but shows the drama of ordinary farm life and the dangers faced by pasture-raised animals.
The Day I Almost Married the Marlboro Man. I wrote a series of stories about my life as a child growing up on a beach. These rose from the ‘I can’t do it because I don’t know how’ discussion. Many of my readers were saying that they could not do what I do. They could not grow their own food because they had never done it before. One of the main aims of this blog is to show that we can all be involved in the growing of our own food — no matter what our background is — even if it is only herbs on the windowsill. I did not grow up on a farm you see. I grew up literally just above high tide on a beach. Laying about in the sand. The day I met the Marlboro Man still makes me smile.
Feeding Sugar Water to Bees — This post carries some of my most favourite images of the bees that I have on my property. Chosen because of its beauty. Bees are magic, having them down in the back is always a joy. They are hard to keep alive here too, because we are surrounded in the GM crops of corn and beans. But the honey is magnificent and we have excellent pollination levels in the gardens.
Q. How have readers responded to your writing?
A. My readers respond with kind and informed support — always. My readers are called The Fellowship. They play a massive part in supporting me and keeping me informed on farming practices. They are an integral part of the blog. Many are actually so emotionally invested in the blog that they read daily and make intelligent and informative comments daily.
Very early on in the ever-developing life of the blog The Kitchens Garden, they began to form into a very strong collection of real people, soon naming themselves The Fellowship. This was such a tidal movement that none of us can even remember who came up with the name. We call the comments section The Lounge of Comments. This is where the commenting members of the fellowship gather every day. And I mean gather, often they will pop in and out a number of times to read each others’ comments. Sometimes when I am busy on the farm they even answer each others’ questions and if one of The Fellowship is ill or needs support, or has a farm question, this is where they support and inform each other.
We have a page called Join Us — pop in if you have a moment. It is a startling collection of personalities: this is where many of The Fellowship introduce themselves to me and each other. Even the ones that seldom comment.
The Fellowship have published one book already — Letters for my Little Sister — and are working on another. The books began when I wrote a post about menopause and the comments in the Lounge were so full and so interesting, that I decided to make the comments into a book. My readers expounded on their initial thoughts and sent these letters to me and with the help of another member I produced a lovely book (It is on its third print now and is sold on Amazon)
The second book is underway: I am presently collating Letters for my Baby Girl this winter and then we will begin the third in our series. The Letters Books are a direct result of the Lounge of Comments and the honesty and wealth of information that the readers of The Kitchens garden share with each other. So, you see, the readers of my blog are like a huge engine chugging along underneath my farm, moving us all forwards.
Q. Is there anything you’re hoping to share with the Press Publish audience?
A. I take it that you mean the talk that I shall give?
I am hoping to talk about the relationships that we build throughout our lives that strengthen our blogs. I believe that everything comes down to relationships. The ones we develop with our readers, our screens, our writing, the weather, our images – our content – even our time management- the people in our lives and from our lives – even our relationships with the people who have left our lives. Even the relationships we develop with technology. To develop a clear linear thread between these relationships creates a clarity of thought that, as bloggers riding the waves of the interwebs and as People in a fast moving world, ENABLE and feed a curious strength.
Once that strength is collected and fed and decanted we can draw on the strength created from these relationships.
I call this energy The Benevolent Monster. It has become a kind of THING. Once we have done our home work, made our plan, put the pieces of our plan in order and pushed Play we climb up onto This Benevolent Monster, we have informed him and fed him, now we trust him and HE begins to carry US through. This is paramount in a blog. Trusting ourselves and our readers.
For example: think about your work on this conference – you are developing a clear series of relationships, you collect the people, you carve out the time, you reach out with your fingers and gently cajole the information from your team and knit it into a cohesive mass. Soon you will have created a beautiful Benevolent Monster, and when your gathering work is done – you climb up his weathered and elderly hide (you might need a ladder!) kick your heels in and then TRUST The Benevolent Monster to walk forward unaided and bring your work to fruition. Everything is in place, your work has gone Live, the conference begins and The Benevolent Monster takes over. An idea has become an entity. From then on you say Yes to each problem as it pops up confident in the Monster. I love the Monster.
This is what I will talk about and extend for the people of Press Publish. This and more! What do you think?
Q. Is there anything you’re hoping to learn at Press Publish?
A. I need to learn so much! You mentioned that you were bringing people to speak about technical matters. I am deeply low-tech at the best of times. I live a very sheltered life out here on the Mid West. I don’t even have TV. And I know I am not using the WordPress machine as well as I should be. So I am excited to be able to listen to your speakers and streamline and clean up a lot of my own antiquated practices.
As an example I shall go over to your earlier email right now and try to work out how to do an online signature!!
I am also looking forward to your other speakers. Learning how they approach their days and their own time management and motivations. How they power their own Benevolent Monsters. Bloggers are inherently solitary so it will be good to cross the divide and discuss this medium with other bloggers.
Jerry’s story of how he and his partner Drew had twins via gestational surrogate has been told in a Modern Love column Jerry wrote for the New York Times and in this Today Show piece from October 2012. Like many of us, Jerry blogged regularly for a while and then took a hiatus. When he came back to his blog after becoming the stay-at-home dad of twins, he found himself writing the kind of blog that he couldn’t find but wanted to read — and as it turns out, it was the kind of blog that a lot of other people wanted to read, too! It’s hard to imagine Jerry cooking up those hilarious posts about playground etiquette, minivans, and The 5 People You Meet as a Gay Dad and gathering over 16,000 subscribers during naptime, but I guess they don’t call him Superdad for nothing!
Jerry’s blog has a somewhat unusual, “you get what you give” comment policy. He doesn’t require comments to be approved before publishing, because he doesn’t want to discourage anyone from writing. He warns, “When I do respond to a comment, I try to do so in the same tone and spirit of your original comment. If you’re nice, I’ll be nice. If you’re snarky, I’ll snark back.” The comment threads on many Jerry’s posts read like a fun dinner party, with a lot of interchange between Jerry and his readers, and between his readers as well.
Jerry Mahoney will be flying in from New York to speak at Press Publish Portland on March 28 about his experiences in publishing, including how he mobilized his blog’s community to shoot his book to the top of the Amazon charts. And in the time-honored tradition of our speaker spotlights, here’s a great interview with Jerry:
A. I was working on my memoir, the book which eventually became Mommy Man: How I Went from Mild-Mannered Geek To Gay Superdad, and my agent told me that if I wanted to get it published, the best thing I could do for myself was to build an online platform. At the time, there were not a lot of gay dad bloggers I could relate to, so I figured I had a perspective people would appreciate hearing. I loved the idea of writing something, publishing it instantly to my site and within minutes, getting feedback from readers. My book took over two years to write, with no guarantee it would get published at all. I probably would’ve gone crazy trying to get it done — and who knows if I ever would’ve finished at all — if I hadn’t had the blog along the way to provide instant gratification for my creative itch and to reassure me that I had a voice people wanted to hear. So at the same time I was building an audience for the book I hoped to publish, I was learning just what that audience wanted to hear from me.
Q. What kept you (and still keeps you) posting regularly?
A. The more I wrote, the more I realized I had to say, and the more I connected with followers, the more encouraged I was to say it. I really felt like my blog was adding to a bunch of conversations — about parenting, about LGBTQ people, about twins, about raising kids in the 21st century. And people seemed to appreciate my sense of humor. That’s the great thing about having your own space online. The people who think you’re funny/informative/interesting will stick around and the people who don’t will find other sites to read. So you end up writing for a very supportive and appreciative group of people.
Q. What’s your most popular post? Is that also your favorite post? If not, what are a few of your favorite posts, and why?
A. My most viewed post is called “I Won’t Be Your Gay Friend If…” I wrote it in response to people like Kirk Cameron and Sarah Palin defending their anti-gay remarks by saying, “I have lots of gay friends.” I figured people like that deserved a little refresher on just what friendship means. I’m very proud of that post, but I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite.
I think the most representative of my blog is probably “How to Talk to Your Children About Gay Parents, By a Gay Parent“. My kids are still very young — they’re in kindergarten now — and I know my family probably confuses a lot of their friends. When my kids tell people that they have two dads, it introduces a topic into a lot of families that they weren’t expecting to discuss with their kids so young, so I figured it was only fair that I offer some suggestions on how to deal with it. That post got lots of attention and was reprinted a lot, which made me feel like it struck a chord with other parents. That definitely makes me feel good.
I also like a post called “The 10 Biggest Secrets I Keep From My Kids“, including “I was an even pickier eater at your age than you are,” “I don’t know how we’re going to pay for your college,” and “While you’re napping, I shove my face full of chocolate chip cookies for two hours straight.” It’s one of my more fun posts, and at the same time really honest about some of the hard parts of raising kids.
Q. How have readers responded to your writing?
A. When I first started my blog, I was a little nervous what I might be opening myself up to. There are homophobes out there, obviously, but beyond that, parents are some of the judgiest people on Earth. I wasn’t sure what kind of response I’d get for, say, confessing that I let my kids watch TV before the age of 2. The amazing thing is that the comments on all posts are usually 90% positive, if not 100%, and the ones who disagree tend to at least be respectful. Trolls are few and far between. That’s because people usually share stuff they agree with, which brings in other people who appreciate what you’re saying. Over time, the people who keep coming back to your blog are the people who relate to your perspective.
There are exceptions, of course. Every once in a while, something I post will anger some community or other and a bunch of people will come in and rant. I get the feeling that someone’s riling people up and saying, “Hey, this guy said this. Go let him have it!” The good thing is, if it becomes disruptive or abusive, I can always shut down their comments.
Overall, having a blog has been a great way to connect with people who think like I do, relate to my struggles and laugh at the things I find funny. I feel in some small way like I’ve built my own community online. Now when a hater swings by to leave a nasty comment, five other commenters swoop in and smack them down before I even can.
Q. Is there anything you’re hoping to share with the Press Publish audience? Is there anything you’re hoping to learn at Press Publish?
A. I’d love to share everything I’ve learned about using my blog as a platform to publish a book, finding your niche and your point of view, writing share-friendly posts and using humor to connect with an audience. Of course, the main thing I want to share is my URL!
I’m looking forward to meeting other bloggers and hearing about their experiences. I’m always looking for ways to make my blog look better and to reach a wider audience, and I’m sure I’ll pick up lots of great tips on how to do both.
When people ask me what my blog thekitchensgarden.com is about, I often find myself pausing to think a moment. My little blog has developed and blossomed in a number of unexpected directions. Like a bloggy middle-aged spread. It is not only about my big kitchen-garden anymore. It is so much more. It has a personality of its own. But to describe it in a couple of words is difficult.
Is it a sustainable farm blog? A farm food blog? A homesteading blog? A lifestyle Blog?
Many of us blog straight from our eclectic hearts and our blogs evolve during the journey. So after a while it is hard to pin us down to only one genre. Has this happened to you? Has your blog evolved, and changed over the years? Has it come very far from its beginnings? Is your blog a toddler, or a teenager or maybe even All Grown UP?
Let’s talk drafts. Do you ever peek at them and wonder why you didn’t press publish? For some reason, I always ignored my drafts folder, but recently one of the titles caught my attention and I realized I was on to a great idea when I started the post. I don’t remember why I abandoned it, but I opened that baby up and finished. I think it came down to timing, I just wasn’t feeling it back then. Sometimes it can be a touchy topic, and I need to sleep on it before I commit. Often times, in that situation, it just feels great to get thoughts out of my head… and then I end up deleting it. But the overall experience motivated me to check out my other drafts as well. Some are hits, others still need to cook a bit.
My takeaway is that I’m going to use my drafts folder as a holding place for ideas that aren’t quite fleshed out. I can start the posts, add in my thoughts, and when I’m ready – or in need of some content ideas – I’ll have a head start!
How do you handle your drafts? Do you delete them or pick up and finish?
I used to start a lot of posts with, “Sorry it’s been so long since I posted anything.” Sound familiar? When you make a habit of posting regularly, and then you miss a few days or weeks (or longer), I’ve found that there’s sometimes a weird combination of guilt and obligation that somehow makes it harder to get back into the swing of things. Eventually I realized I didn’t need to apologize, that I can post whenever I want to my blog and if there’s an unscheduled hiatus it’s really not a big deal. Since then I’ve been much happier!
How about you — have you ever felt guilty for not posting? If so, what helps you break the cycle?
Press Publish 