Ras: Annals of Mommy Blogging: SomethingGirl

“I blog because I must….” SomethingGirl

Here is the Canadian blogger who calls herself Natasha, a.k.a SomethingGirl (her Twitter name), telling about her self, her family, and her blog called Becoming Something:

“I started this blog in July of 2008 for the purposes of catharsis, writing practise, and very likely a need for validation, which, I’m happy to say I no longer care about so much anymore.

“My husband is ‘Jude’, blog-named after Jude Law, my back-up husband in case mine dies. I will mourn in England where I’ll accidentally run into Jude Law and he’ll fall in love with me, convert to Mormonism and move to Alberta. So many movies are made in Canada these days anyway. After ten years of marriage I’ve realized that the weight that keeps Jude from floating up to heaven is probably… me.

“Together we’ve made four ideal children, though, truthfully, I did most of the work. Project accompli. Lulu is 4, Daisy is 6, Josie is 8, and Montana is 9. Those are fake names I let the kids pick. Other ideas they had were Person Person, Tomato Milk and Half-Peony All-Long-Distance Beef. Seriously.”

What Natasha has in seemingly effortless abundance is that elusive quality called voice. It’s what all writers crave – a distinctive way of telling stories that could only be hers. Voice is what lets you recognize after two sentences that you’re reading Virginia Woolf not Jane Austen, Nora Ephron not Erma Bombeck.

Natasha is part of a relatively new Internet tribe – “mommy bloggers” or sometimes “mom bloggers.” There’s much controversy about the term itself (more in a future post), but the best definition I could find is from Answers.com: “Mommy blogger is just what it sounds like: a mom who blogs. Mommy bloggers provide an often humorous perspective into the world of motherhood, from the busy career woman to the busy stay-at-home mom.”

Here at 3:17 a.m. we’re connoisseurs of story telling in all its many forms, and we think mommy bloggers are telling some of most interesting nonfiction stories around.

I’ve been following SomethingGirl from my earliest days in Twitter back in the summer of 2008. Can’t quite remember how I first hooked up with her tweets, but her 140-character nuggets about house-training a puppy and the sayings of her kids stood out in the stream of self-promoting new media mavens who dominated my Twitter follow list in those days. SomethingGirl offered a wellspring of real, mundane life seen as an adventure and a set of comic challenges.

Natasha does blog about important stuff – how to tell the cool bloggers by their photos, what she wants for Christmas, a breakfast bickering incident over banana pancakes (which reads like a mini-radio play in the making), and a favorite article by Anne Lamott which she titles “Wildly, Messily You.” But the key to her appeal is Natasha’s unique angle on everything – she comes across as a genuine person with all the complexity, contradictions, wit, and weaknesses that entails. It’s hard to be real in Media World, but Natasha is always wildly, messily Natasha.

Here, for example, are items 1-7 from her 99-item list of “Things I Want To Do Before I’m Dead/Crazy”:

· Learn to play the freakin’ guitar already.

· Taste black truffles.

· Meet Oprah and thank her.

· Go white water rafting again. Maybe a girlfriend getaway.

· Visit New York City for two weeks.

· Build a self-sustaining healthy house on a plot of land large enough to have a big, gorgeous dog that never poops close to home, some sheep, a big garden, and fruit trees but close enough to other people that if someone came to murder us, there would be people to hear the gunshots. Yes, I think of these things. Often.

· Publish a work of mostly fiction. Change the names and details of people I know such that they really have no idea I’m writing about them, the fools.

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We’re delighted that Natasha has agreed to answer some questions about Becoming Something for us.

Why did you start your blog?

For writing practice, and to share information about my religion with friends and family, in an unobstrusive way, here and there. There are a lot of misconceptions about Mormonism and one of them is that Mormons are stuffy, prudish, and don’t mix well with others. In reality, I and many other Mormons are highly tolerant of different philosophies and ways of life, even when we don’t agree with them. And having a forum where I can write my own opinions and intersperse the religion with lots of other fun topics, has served me very well. My non-Mormon friends have grown closer to me and respect both me and Mormonism more, and people who never would have taken an interest have done so, because they were interested in me and I made things approachable. It’s widened my circle of
friends and made my world a better place.

Becoming Something – how did you come up with that name?

Becoming Something is all I’m trying to do with my religion, with my writing, with my relationships, with my goals; all help me become something better. “Something” is vague enough to cover anything I’d like to write about and it acknowledges that some days that’s all I’m becoming: something. Something wise, something happy, something weak, something garlicky. Some days are a crapshoot.

What keeps you going, putting in all the real work blogging requires?

I don’t find blogging to be very difficult. I spend zero time on PR. I don’t read blogs and comment so that others will read and comment on mine. I read and comment on the odd thing, if I feel moved to. I blog because I must, and so that makes it easy. I don’t spend a ton of time on it, either. I write quickly, edit once, post what I’ve written and then inevitably see a few things that need tweaking. My blog writing is not the best writing I can do but I have a lot of thoughts in my head that I’d like to get out so I can sleep at night, so it needs to be done quickly. Some might be used for book fodder one day, some merely journaled for my children’s benefit, some are designed to influence others. It’s really Natasha’s dumping ground and it feels so good to dump there. Churning things out quickly and quickly getting feedback has afforded me more practise and improved my writing than anything else I could have done at this time in my life as a mom with young children at home. I’m starting to itch, wanting to try my hand at more serious writing, so I’m paring back the blogging.

Are you OK with the term “mommy blogger”?

“Mommy Blogger.” Ehn. I’m not crazy about it because when I hear the term I think of a stereotype of women who blog mostly about parenting and who do giveaways and contests, all wanting to be noticed by PR firms so that they, too, can make money from home blogging about their children. It’s a real boon to stay-at-home-momery but I don’t feel it describes what I do on my blog. I have four children, yes, and I do write about them sometimes, but you’re never going to find posts about breastfeeding and the virtues of one discipline strategy over another.

Do you have ambitions for taking your blog to the next level – whatever that might be?

The writing practice was for a faint goal in the back of my mind to maybe write a book one day. I have no illusions that I’m going to be some famous blogger. I don’t want to be famous, but if it gradually comes upon me and brings with it an audience of intelligent readers with interesting points of views to share, then I might be okay with that.

I just focus on finding my own style and voice and keeping it consistent. Even when my posts change from long to short, serious to tongue-in-cheek or outright silly, I think my fingerprint is still apparent. After a year and a half I’m fluctuating around 190-200 subscribers (depending on the accuracy of FeedBurner), and while I have no idea how that would be considered to most people, it seems good to me. I see it as a reflection upon my writing, not my ability to socialise, making blog friends. This is another reason I don’t worry about PR: I can’t stand flattery and sycophant comments. I want a true gauge of my writing, to help steer me in the right directions. I want to really know how far I can push certain limits. It seems the devoted readers really are devoted because of the content, not because I pet their egos on their own blogs.

So, I’m only interested in growing my blog naturally. And I’m only interesting in continuing the blog in as much as it still serves my needs.

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Thank you, Natasha. That’s a bit about one mommy blogger – more to come in future posts about other mommy bloggers.

If you’d like to know more about mommy bloggers generally, an excellent short piece is Jessica Smith’s “Top 10 Misconceptions About Mommy Bloggers” on Mashable.com.