In Which I Finally Impress My Husband

So this weekend I was talking about the book and blogging at the Kansas City Literary Festival. The festival had a great turnout. It was a beautiful day. 

My panel was at five.

Many people had gone home.

Still, Mike Lundgren and I had about 15-20 people under our white tent, and they asked a lot of great questions.  The main question that always comes up for mommybloggers, it seems, is privacy.  I pointed out that putting your name on your blog is not so different from putting your name on your memoir, or maybe your Sunday op-ed column, and really, putting your name on something you wrote is what writers do. I initially bought into the privacy fear, but the more I wrote, the more I realized I never used to worry when I put my name on the articles I wrote for KC Weddings or Greater Kansas City Business.  I never worried about putting my name on the poems I published or the things I wrote for any of my jobs. Yes, I want to protect my daughter's privacy and my husband's privacy, and by privacy I mean "freedom from having nutjobs break into our house or kidnap my child," but really, if I totally respected their privacy, I would not write about them on my blog.

I think that's an unfortunate side effect of being in the family of a writer.  Anything you say or do could become material. Not that we are walking around trying to expose people's foibles, but even fictional characters are composites - how else could you write what you know?  How else could you capture the life-like details that make a complex character jump off the page?  I definitely have more boundaries than people probably realize -- there are some subjects that are completely off-limits, and things happen all the time that I wish I could write out to figure out my feelings about them, but to do so here would be so totally inappropriate I can't fathom doing it. 

I also talked a little bit about the narrative nonfiction form, which is really what we do when we blog.  We're telling a story, and usually it's a true story.  I read a post last week from Kyran talking about the blog-to-book phenomenon and what it means to blogging.  Dutch made a point that we'll really see how bloggers hold up when they produce successful fiction. I love Dutch's writing, but I disagreed in the comments with his point.

Here was my comment:

Traditional publishers are not yet sure if bloggers can sell books. I will tell you that. I had 11 pages of links to mainstream media coverage of the bloggers in my anthology, and many of the larger publishers still weren't sure they wanted to take a chance on it.

I do think that the blogosphere is going to have to show they want to buy print versions of the favorite bloggers' writing in order to create more demand for bloggers' books. I know my book wasn't the first blog anthology, but I'm hoping it will be one that is delivered with a proper marketing campaign, and that campaign is coming from outside the publisher as well as inside it. It has to. There isn't enough money in publishers' publicity budgets to help a new author succeed unless he or she takes it on. The success of a first book (for those of us without two-book deals) will determine whether or not we move forward with another.

I disagree that fiction is the ultimate stronghold. I went to school for fiction writing and have placed a few things, but I find the narrative nonfiction form to be just as relevant and one that my readers better relate to. David Sedaris and Anne Lamott have done just fine with it, and they are two of my favorite writers. Why would you change a formula that is working for you? Just a question. I know Lamott has written novels, too, but my favorite books of hers are her nonfiction offerings.

Is this the beginning of a new trend, blogs to books? No. But it may be the first time the mainstream will become aware that it's happening. At least I hope the mainstream becomes aware, because if it doesn't, there may not be many more blogger books. Publishing is a fickle beast.

But - back to my husband?  When we went to dinner after the panel, he admitted he'd thought because of the time, I'd end up with like four people.  He was actually impressed we got the amount of people we did. 

But then he said if I REALLY wanted to impress him, I'd start spouting sports scores.  So there you have it.

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Talking about how childless people really feel about your pregnancy on BlogHer today.