Hi Readers,

This week I’m doing a cross-blog conversation with Aprile of The Steady Hand. Each day I’ll write a post to her, asking her some questions about her life and work. Then she’ll respond on her blog, answering my questions and writing questions back to me. We’ll continue on like this all week and you’ll have the opportunity to eavesdrop on the conversation. And if you have questions for Aprile, you are welcome to leave them in the comments here and I’ll make sure to ask them!

I hope you enjoy this blogging experience!

Keep Up with the Conversation

Here are the posts so far:

• My Day 1 Starting Post
• Aprile’s 1st Response

First Post to Aprile

Hi Aprile,

I loved your response when you said, “my blog is a virtual copy of me”. I kind of feel that way about Diary of a Smart Chick – it’s a little scattered and a little here and there but in the end it’s a fairly accurate representation of my daily life and changing interests. That makes perfect sense to me. I know that in this blogging world today it’s recommended that you have a niche but I kind of like the general blog that takes a personal “diary-like” approach to blogging like it often was when it first debuted at the start of this decade. And you do a great job of it. I feel like I really get a chance to know who you are through your blog … which brings me to my first question … Do you have any trouble determining what should go on the blog and what should be kept private? Are there any topics you absolutely won’t ever write about on The Steady Hand?

You asked me about the history of my two blogs, Diary of a Smart Chick and Crochet Concupiscence. Diary of a Smart Chick came first but hasn’t always gotten the most attention. I kind of accidentally fell into blogging. I was working as a freelance writer and I started seeing a lot of jobs for bloggers and frankly I needed the money so I learned to blog for other people. The first blog that I was the solo blogger for was San Fran Voice, which was a blog about life in San Francisco with an emphasis on the art and music scene. I didn’t own that blog but that was my first experience being the voice of a blog. My first real blog for myself was Real Words, which I intended to be a blog about being a freelance writer. I kept it up for awhile but I found that I didn’t actually enjoy writing about my writing life so it kind of filtered off after awhile and eventually I mostly let guest writers do the work over there. Then came the now-defunct San Francisco Is Sexy site which was all about the risque side of this fabulous city but ultimately I decided I didn’t want to write about that and took that site down. That’s when Diary of a Smart Chick was born. I wanted to be able to write about my life and to link to all of my other writing around the web without focusing on a specific niche. I’ve had this blog for a few years now but I revamped it at the beginning of this year, getting more active with it again and trying to make it a more personal blog. Crochet Concupiscence was launched one year ago and is where I write about all things crochet. That’s the blog I’ve kept active consistently and am truly devoted to but I want to also be as devoted to this blog as I am to that one.

That brings me to the second part of your question which is how the heck I maintain two blogs. Good question. I am a full-time freelance writer so what often happens is that I weave the blog writing in with my other daily writing tasks and it just ends up fitting in that way. It helps that often what I’m researching in one area inspires a post in another area. So I may be researching the health benefits of crochet for my book and it leads me to a topic I want to blog about over at Crochet Concupiscence. As for this blog, I consider it more of a diary and so I “journal” in it the way that you sneak in journal time for a regular diary, sometimes being better at it than others. This all makes me curious … about how much time do you spend working on your blog each week? You seem to update it really often so I imagine it can be time consuming. One category on your blog that really interests me is your missing child posts – can you tell me more about those and how you started putting them on your blog?

The other question you asked me about was regarding one of my interests (I need to remember to keep updating my interests page!) which is Jean-Michel Basquiat. He was an artist who became really big for about half a second in the late ’80s. He was this eccentric kid who lived on the streets of New York (even though he didn’t have to) and got attention for his graffiti art. He wasn’t actually a graffiti artist but rather an artist trying to use that medium, which was just getting popular with galleries, to get attention. He became sort of a star of the New York art world at that time. He was taken under the wing of Andy Warhol and he made a lot of money in a short period of time. However, it was kind of controversial because he was basically the only major black artist at that time and many people felt like the scene only wanted him as a token African American and that they exploited that. Sadly he ended up dying in his mid twenties of a heroin overdose. His art life intrigues me so much because it was such a strange time in New York when art really became a commodity and he was right in this weird controversial center of that.

So do you have any off the wall random interests like that to share?

Looking forward to your next post!

Kathryn

Summary of Questions:

• Do you have any trouble determining what should go on the blog and what should be kept private? Are there any topics you absolutely won’t ever write about on The Steady Hand?
• How much time do you spend working on your blog each week?
• yCan you tell me more about the missing child posts and how you started putting them on your blog?
• So do you have any off the wall random interests?

Do you have any questions for Aprile? Share them in the comments and I’ll ask!

Tags: blog chat, cross blog conversation