Welcome to the spiffy new redesigned phoebenorth.com. I’d make apologies for not blogging for the past week or so, but I’ve been spending a lot of time putting lots of love and hardwork into making this website look both professional and like an awesomely space-themed Trapper Keeper, so no regrets!
Choosing to jump ship from my old blog wasn’t an easy one. I’ve been writing over there since 2007, (sporadically) through my entire tenure of Gainesville residency, and so, in many ways, I was pretty attached to the little space I carved out for myself there. It started as a joke between my husband and I–he’d take pictures of me eating with his cell phone camera, I’d mug and wink, he’d joke about starting a for-pay site for pervy dudes who wanted to watch me eat. When I decided to start my first (vaguely) comprehensive personal site, I wasn’t yet ready to write under my own name and the URL he suggested–phoebeeating.com–was just too good to let go.
That’s not to say it was without problems. Because, when it came down to it, I’ve never been a food blogger, even if I do occasionally write about food. And so I’d try to explain my site to people, and they’d be (understandably) confused. It also got a little tiring, after three years, to be known as “the girl who eats”–to have to mug for the camera in the middle of a meal. Guys, this is why it’s a bad idea to get a tongue-in-cheek tattoo. Three years of any joke can kill the humor, much less a lifetime of it.
It also posed problems when I first decided to start up phoebenorth.com. There’s something just plain messy about having two domains, particularly when you use one more frequently, but house your email at the other. It’s confusing. It’s reader-unfriendly. It’s not great for self-promotion or marketing or any of those things.
Speaking of self-promotion and marketing and all of those things, when I was considering this switch, author Johnny Dale sent me a link to this blog post on author Jody Hedlund’s blog. Basically, the jist is, authors who have never blogged before hear they’re supposed to and also think it might get them a book deal and they’re all like, blog?, I can has blog?
The funny thing is, blogging has never been a question for me. I’ve been journaling online in one form or another since 2001–egads, nearly a decade. I’ve gone from opendiary to diaryland to livejournal to livejournal to blogs under my own domain name, and while my style has shifted from something resembling normal teen girl journaling to sparse, artsy fartsy poetics to the more conversational tone I prefer today, it’s something that I can’t imagine not doing.
For me, blogging is primarily a way of conversing with people. Let’s face it; I love to hear myself talk, and even if I didn’t blah blah blahg, I’d still write this kind of stuff for myself. But sharing it with others gives my thoughts depth and breadth that they wouldn’t have otherwise. You guys–my audience–challenge me. You keep me on my toes. You help me think better and more sharply about the things that I care about. Nowhere was the integral nature of blogging in my life better demonstrated than when I posted my teasers for Seas Run Dry–weekly sharing of my work meant that my first-draft writing was better considered, better edited . . . just plain better!
So that’s why I blog–not for promotional or marketing purposes, but because sharing myself with the internet helps me to be a better version of myself. It draws me out of the ivory fortress of my own mind and forces me to consider my audience of their perceptions of me. In short, blogging helps me be me.
And so I want my blog to reflect me, too. For years, through all of these online journals, I haven’t been myself, but a constructed self–someone else, either “jacklovesyoutoo” or “andnothingon” or “going2georgia” or “sixcylinders” or “phoebeeating,” someone intent on projecting an ironic, self-conscious image to the world. I was the 16-year-old girl who loved Fight Club, or the 22-year-old who loved The Mountain Goats. I was not the girl who stayed up late watching Star Trek with her dad. These people were kind of me, but they weren’t really me, not quite. They were aspects of me, specifically shaped to fit a certain image. And that image, often, was divorced from the real truth–that I’m not really all that cool, that I’m a big ol’ dork.
Hence the new name–and honestly, hence the star-spangled Trapper Keeper look, too. The banner at the top of the page has stars in it not just because stars are awesome but because, in sixth grade, I started signing my name with a little star on the end. In my head, I wasn’t just “Phoebe North”–I was “Phoebe Northstar!” I know, I know, that’s incredibly dorky. But I don’t care. Because, as I say in the biography section of this site, the past few years have been a return to form for me. I’ve been getting back in touch with my true self, my dorky, unabashed self, the one who loves aliens and stars and laser beams right down to the bottom of her heart.
The first is a short story for kids called “Sandy, Piper’s Foal on Tau Ceti 8″ over at Spaceports & Spidersilk. I’m really excited to share it with you for the following reasons:
The second story is a short story/teaser I gave away with my business card at BEA. It’s been up on goodreads for awhile, and you’re welcome to read it there (and I would love to hear your reviews/reactions there if you have the time!), or you can download via the links below. It’s called “Under a New Star” and it’s a 15-page short about an angsty teenage alien who thinks he’s the last person on his WHOLE PLANET to get laid–ugh!
