A Bit of a General Update and Notes About Stuff on My Mind
Just a short bit so that my last entry isn't the first entry you see when you come here, because it's been put to the lie this weekend. I mean, sort of. I mean, my latest GeekMom article went up Saturday, on wordless picture books, and it got lots of raves and shares and by the end of the day as I was scrolling down Feedly, I spotted a "100+" beside it in the column where the "popularity" of posts are noted, and I kind of gaped. When I look up and down that list, most of the blogs I really respect and think of as children's-librarian-blogosphere-must-reads don't get near 100. The Bloggess gets lots of "500+"s, and she's definitely the outlier. GeekMom in general has a lot of 100+s and 200+s, but that is not by any means on ALL the posts there.
And, yeah, by this morning-- or actually yesterday-- the number beside mine had gone up to "200+."
But this isn't about the numbers so much as it was EYE-OPENING. All those posts, whines, frets, things I've said about feeling like there was nothing anyone needed to hear from me, that my voice has been done a thousand times, that I have nothing to contribute-- I hope you realize that I wasn't just looking for sympathy or fishing for compliments. I HONESTLY BELIEVED I had nothing unique to say. It was kind of a shock to be snapped out of it, by seeing so much wide-spread love by strangers over something I'd written. It forced me to look fresh at what I'd written. Sure, other people write about picture books. They even write about wordless picture books. But it's not like I'm NOT more knowledgeable on the subject than the average person. And even among the other people who write on the topic, I've never seen nearly enough gushing over Barbara Lehman the way I do. Maybe I really have added to the discussion, made a little bit of a difference, by drawing more attention to her work.
With my eyes open, I even caught a bit of a Twitter discussion, a We Need Diverse Books discussion, about how much stories about kids who practice religion incidentally, where it's not an extreme example of the religion, are needed, and I realized, Oh right, I'm a Bad Catholic, and there aren't nearly enough voices of Bad Catholics out there, showing how someone may not strictly follow every tenet of their religion and may even strongly disagree with aspects of it, but they still believe and they still get something out of it. I mean I AM constantly seeing that disconnect, that two-extremes way of looking at it, and I'm like, you stupid white middle-class cishet American woman, THIS IS YOU ACTUALLY BEING DIVERSE and you knew it all along, you KNEW that voice needed to be heard and you still denied that it was yours!
Speaking of which, current events make me feel it's really important to relink to a post I posted earlier this year. Right, that was me saying something important, something that needed to be heard, and needs to be heard even more now. Why have I doubted my voice for so long.
Anyway, I've got a lot of other stuff to work on today, so I will sign off now. I just needed to get this on the record, if only to remind myself when I forget again.
And, yeah, by this morning-- or actually yesterday-- the number beside mine had gone up to "200+."
But this isn't about the numbers so much as it was EYE-OPENING. All those posts, whines, frets, things I've said about feeling like there was nothing anyone needed to hear from me, that my voice has been done a thousand times, that I have nothing to contribute-- I hope you realize that I wasn't just looking for sympathy or fishing for compliments. I HONESTLY BELIEVED I had nothing unique to say. It was kind of a shock to be snapped out of it, by seeing so much wide-spread love by strangers over something I'd written. It forced me to look fresh at what I'd written. Sure, other people write about picture books. They even write about wordless picture books. But it's not like I'm NOT more knowledgeable on the subject than the average person. And even among the other people who write on the topic, I've never seen nearly enough gushing over Barbara Lehman the way I do. Maybe I really have added to the discussion, made a little bit of a difference, by drawing more attention to her work.
With my eyes open, I even caught a bit of a Twitter discussion, a We Need Diverse Books discussion, about how much stories about kids who practice religion incidentally, where it's not an extreme example of the religion, are needed, and I realized, Oh right, I'm a Bad Catholic, and there aren't nearly enough voices of Bad Catholics out there, showing how someone may not strictly follow every tenet of their religion and may even strongly disagree with aspects of it, but they still believe and they still get something out of it. I mean I AM constantly seeing that disconnect, that two-extremes way of looking at it, and I'm like, you stupid white middle-class cishet American woman, THIS IS YOU ACTUALLY BEING DIVERSE and you knew it all along, you KNEW that voice needed to be heard and you still denied that it was yours!
Speaking of which, current events make me feel it's really important to relink to a post I posted earlier this year. Right, that was me saying something important, something that needed to be heard, and needs to be heard even more now. Why have I doubted my voice for so long.
Anyway, I've got a lot of other stuff to work on today, so I will sign off now. I just needed to get this on the record, if only to remind myself when I forget again.