I have a day job right now — I’m the content strategist for a sprawling pharma website.  In case you wonder what “content strategist” means, know that sometimes, I wonder that too. I can tell you this: I look at the material that’s on the website and try to decide if it’s the right information for their audience. If it is, I help make sure it ends up in the right place, it’s it’s not, I make recommendations about what should be there instead. It’s a lot of intuitive work backed up by research. Ultimately what this means is that I sit in some meetings where a lot of blobs and boxes end up on white boards, and then, I write some reports that help people understand what they should do next.

Working. Making music. Writing, both travel and technical. We’ve talked some about travel for 2012, about finding a way to go see the extended Eurofamily again, but for now, we are grounded. This is not a bad thing. I feel great about staying home right now, about working with people I enjoy and respect (all around, in PwP, in the day job, in the band).  I love having a somewhat regular paycheck coming in and I love that it makes such mundane things like coffee and a movie with the husband an easy thing to do. All that 2011 travel was spectacular, and I continue to sell stories as a result of it, but it will be a while before I refill our somewhat depleted treasury chests. Time away traveling is not as lucrative, not by a long shot, as time staying home working on tangled up things like content strategy. I worried about money in November and December, I fretted over the cost of airfare to visit my Dad, to attend my uncle’s memorial, to pay our bills.

I fret when we’re in an economic slump. I’m not poor-mouthing by any means, I’m keenly aware of what a privileged life I lead. But doubt about my choices surfaces — I should have taken a real job, I should have taken J. up on his offer to support me if we lived in Austria full time, I should have… it’s all nonsense, of course, but it is easy to get wrapped in doubt as you watch your bank account numbers decline and your health insurance rates increase. It passes, always, I find more work, I sell a story, something shifts in our house to make everything slide into the chaotic stability that defines our unpredictable existence. It feels a little magical, though my intellect knows that you make your own luck, that when things come back together it is the conclusion of hard work completed in earlier times. Happy clients, showing up for practice, taking the time to observe and trying to write well and honestly.

This is the long way of telling you why there have been so few posts from me, why I opted to run guest posts for January, and why I’m going to continue to run them for a while longer. I’m focused on the work that pays and on getting more of it. In the interim, I love introducing you to the generous writers who share their work here. I appreciate their help in keeping the blog alive while I’m preoccupied elsewhere. If you wanted to send in a guest post and didn’t, please do — the guidelines are here. If you sent one and I haven’t responded, well, you can see why and know that it’s in my inbox, and I just haven’t got to it yet. I also want to tell you about a project I’m launching. It’s a book, a sort of best of the blogs compilation, and it’s to benefit Passports with Purpose. All the information on that is here.

We’re at home. I work and write and play music and I am very attached to the current state of things as they are lovely, indeed. For now, it is perfect and probably, it is temporary, as all things are.

I made Some Random Dude mad at me last week. I posted a picture of what I thought was a travesty of an opening line from a travel piece in the Register-Guard, a paper out of Eugene, Oregon. The photo included the writer’s byline and the name of the paper.

Said line? “Recent reports of shark attacks on surfers not withstanding, there’s nothing like a visit to the coastal enclave of Seaside to rekindle one’s imagination of an early 20th century Pacific resort.”

My associated comment? “Worst opening line…. ever?”

What, exactly, was I doing wrong? I leveled some sharp public criticism at a piece of publicly available work. In a fit of weakness, I deleted the post from my Facebook page, something I now regret. It’s not that I don’t have the muscle for argument, it’s that I have a policy of not engaging when the argument is a fallacy. The defense was that the writer  was respectable and hardworking, people were uncool for making fun of his work. George Lucas is respectable and hard working. The Phantom Menace still sucked.

Some Random Dude was mad because the writer’s name was exposed and I was engaging in unprofessional hatchet jobbing on that writer. The writer was a hard working guy, it was disappointing for Some Random Dude to see supposed pros piling on him like this. Another participant in the conversation suggested that I should have obscured the writer’s byline. That’s when I pulled the post. I didn’t feel like getting into it on Facebook and the whole thing was making me depressed. How is it we are so tender when it comes to criticism?

In my career as a writer, I am grateful beyond words for my art school education. If you think art school is just some feel good love fest where everyone gets to express their genius and wander out in to to the sunshine feeling great about themselves, well, you did not go to school with my professors and classmates. You did not hear, repeatedly, “Yeah, I think that’s an okay start, but you’re nowhere near done yet,” after you’d wrung yourself out and decided it was laurel resting time. You did not hear, “Uh, I totally understand the words that are coming out of your mouth, but I don’t see at all how they’re related to this work,” on a weekly basis. You did not hear, “Look, it’s basic technique, but still everyone gets it wrong. That’s why everything has turned to that awful muddy red brown. You can save it, but you’re going to have to…” You did not hear, when presenting your final body of work, the stuff you knew was good and were proud of, this: “Yeah, this is some really great work. What are you going to do now?”

I’ll never forget the first round of reviews I went through when I started writing as a full time job. What a bloodbath. And so it’s been, not quite every day, but often, for the last 15 years. My stuff gets taken apart, before press, if I’m lucky, after press (both online and in print) if I’m not. I’ve worked with bad editors who change my meaning and intent, and good ones who refine my work and make it better. I take a blow to my ego weekly. If I’m lucky, it’s a small one, just something that says, “Yeah, that’s not clear.” When I’m less lucky, it’s a rejection letter, or a painful edit that calls out every single error in my work. It stings, and you know what? It makes my work better.

I’ve learned to evaluate criticism based on the content and the source. Sometimes, people just don’t like your work. It’s not personal, it just doesn’t do anything for them. We all want people to like us, sure, but that’s a losers game. Sometimes, though, your critics are on to something. You’re rambling, you don’t have a point, your story is lost. You’ve opened a story about how great a seaside resort is with reference to shark attacks.

If I can get out of my own way when I’m on the receiving end of the critics, I will take it for what it’s worth and act accordingly. Sometimes this means making changes to my work. Sometimes it means I have to explain my choices.  It’s not a bad thing to have your work questioned,  and it can be quite satisfying if you have a solid grip on the answer. Other times, it’s frustrating because some editor has made hash of your story and your name is still on it. That’s the worst for me, but at least I know why it happened. When people shake me down about it, I can tell them, “Yeah, the edits. Would you like to see the original?”

Criticism takes a lot of different forms. Sometimes it’s brutally sharp and satiric, sometimes it’s snarky and fast, sometimes it’s a thoughtful deconstruction, sometimes it’s a bloodbath of rev marks and red pen. If it’s not personalized — “You’re a jerk and your work is stupid!” — than it’s worth consideration. It can also be remarkably helpful in making us better at what we do. I feel so lucky to have had both a formal education and some serious on the job training in taking criticism.

I’m guilty as charged on snark attacks and I’m probably not going to stop. I’ve been on the receiving end too. Sometimes, it hurts. But most times, I’m wearing my armor, a thick skin I acquired in university.  I’m not claiming to always be successful at deflecting the barbs, not by a long shot. But I know the difference between what’s essentially a valid critique — “Uh, you might not want to start your glowing prose about the shore with shark violence” — and a personal attack. “You blog too much about blogging” is one I’ve received, in snark attack format. You know what? That’s a valid critique. It’s not personal, it focuses on my work, and it gives me something to consider. I’m okay with that.

Buck up, people. Weigh that criticism for what it’s worth. Pull your own ego out of the mix and listen to people who make good arguments, who offer valid counterpoints. You can ignore the stuff that sounds crazy or sloppy, but not every piece of criticism is invalid simply because it doesn’t support what you’re doing. Your critics could be totally wrong. If that’s the case,  you’ve been given another opportunity to stand solidly behind your work. But check it out, sometimes, your critics are right. Then, you have the opportunity to do something amazing. You have the opportunity to be better.

HomeAway has sponsored Passports with Purpose several years in  a row and they’ve sponsored my travels personally. I’m a HomeAway fan, not just because of their support, but because I’ve used the service, spending my own money to book vacation rental properties. It works, there are great deals to be had, and while I like a nice hotel as much as the next person, getting a place with a kitchen, a place in a neighborhood where you can feel at home is a great way to travel.  I’ve stayed in opulent city apartments and cute little neighborhood houses — a full range of accommodation, all booked through HomeAway.

There are a bunch of restrictions on the voucher, of course, as is typical with these things — the voucher is good for one stay only, meaning you can’t split it between properties.  but splash out and get something nice, why don’t you? I’ve been poking around to see what you can get for $1000 — just short of a full month in a studio on the island of Kauai. Two weeks in a one bedroom in Manhattan. A long weekend in a ski condo in Jackson Hole. And yeah, there are lots of listings outside the US, how about this studio in Vienna, Austria? You’ll need to use it before the end of 2012, but that’s not going to be a problem for you, right? Hey, you could the use voucher to house your visiting relatives when they stay in your town, too. And lookit! You could stay here if you come to visit me! (Seriously, it’s in my neighborhood.)

If you want a shot at the voucher, all you need to do is make a donation to Room to Read through the Passports with Purpose site. I promise it will make sense once you click through. You’ll put your donation on the voucher line in the catalog of stuff we’ve got as incentives.Your tenner goes directly to Room to Read and helps fund those libraries we want to build. Then, at the end of our fundraising efforts, we’ll pull a name at random and someone gets a voucher. Maybe you. And a community gets a library. No small thing. You know this if you’re a lover of reading. And I’ve said it before, if you couldn’t read, you wouldn’t be here right now.

Give ten dollars. Get a shot at a HomeAway voucher. Support some kids in the gift that is reading. You can do that right now by going here.

I’m essentially writing postcards — a photo plus a detailed caption that’s kind of a micro-story of 100 words. It’s a gig that was designed especially for me and combines two things I love, photography and pithy remarks. It’s also hugely challenging, the limited word count makes me choose every single letter with extreme care, but so far, I’m enjoying it tremendously. I hope you’ll check out what I do there and, if you like it, leave a comment saying so. If you’d like to know more, here’s a Q&A. And here are my first and second posts.

“Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.”
– Groucho Marx

There was a bit of a flap amongst some travel bloggers last week. The issue? A post by John O’Nolan at a site called Travelllll.  (I’ll call the site T5 going forward, I can’t bear typing that name over and over.) O’Nolan blasted bloggers who are selling links, telling them “If you sell paid links, you are less than worthless as a travel blogger, and you should be ashamed of yourself.”  The post also threatened to expose link selling bloggers to T5′s readership. O’Nolan revised the remarks later, generating further ire over T5′s revisions policy. There was a swift reaction from bloggers, many were insulted and defensive. Others agreed with the post and in the comments thread, there’s some serious outing going on. It’s ugly. I found it an awful “can’t look away situation.” (Here’s the original, unrevised post.) There’s also quite an elegant apology, make of that what you will.

That’s the back story. The bit that interests me is the reaction from a number of different bloggers who have written response posts (guess I’m jumping on that bandwagon) or left comments along the line of “I thought this was supposed to be a supportive community! I thought travelbloggers were supposed to help each other out! WTF?” I’ve also seen “What’s with all the hating, travelbloggers? I thought we were a community!”  I’m simplistically interpreting this as “You’re tearing us apart!” and “I thought we were friends!”

Defining online community is tricky. I went looking; I found interesting stuff from some terrific web nerds, but nothing that suggested we all agreed or offered carte blanche support for our collective practices. Here’s Jeremiah Owyang:

An online community is: Where a group of people with similar goals or interests connect and exchange information using web tools.

Nancy White has a great compilation of definitions of online community but perhaps my favorite is this from an unnamed FCC judge:

 Community is like pornography, I don’t know how to define it, but I sure know it when I see it.

I’m a fan of community building initiatives. I think it’s extremely valuable for people who share their interests to work together, to exchange ideas and information, and, if it works out, to build things. These can be things like TBEX, the Travelblog Exchange conference, or forums where issues are discussed, or the project founded here in Seattle, Passports with Purpose, the travelblogger’s fundraiser. Once or twice a year we gather the Seattle Consortium of Online Travel and there’s the Seattle Travel Bloggers Happy Hour group on Facebook. I like all of these things, a lot, they build excellent communities.

But I’m also extremely opinionated and critical.  I tend to respect those that share that quality a lot more than the “can’t we all get along” types. I don’t want or need to get along with everyone, and furthermore, that sounds dead boring. If I wanted everyone to agree with my practices or opinions, I’d never leave the house. Or turn on my computer.

I think the mess at T5 was caused by poor writing. It’s never a good idea to insult or threaten your audience. T5′s “You suck and I’m going to tell on you” rhetoric was amateurish and kind of embarrassing. This is where I respond to another common complaint I’ve seen as a result of the T5 flap. “When did this community get so judge-y?” Guess what? I judge your work all the time. I judge your photographs and your writing and the things you link to and define as interesting or valuable. I’m your reader, dammit, I get to judge the quality of what you’re putting in front of me.

I suspect you judge my work as well. And I admit it: I like it when you say nice things, I like it less when you don’t. But I never expect you to agree with me, nor do I expect you to support me if I engage in practices you find offensive. The fact that we’re both travelbloggers implies one thing to me: We both blog about travel. That’s all it implies by way of commonality. We’re going to have to go deeper if you want to draw a circle around us and declare we’re a community.

I was peripherally involved with “the mommy-blogging community” some time back, oh, that was a contentious place, boy howdy. Have you ever looked at “the political blogging community”? Bare knuckle boxing, you’d better be ready.

On the positive side, I love the community we’ve built for Passports with Purpose — we strive towards a common goal and set aside our style and editorial differences while we capitalize on a platform we all use to do good work. I loved the Book Passages community, a group of people who gathered because of their common love for creating beautiful work about travel. These are smaller, well defined communities that share a common goal. Raising money for a good cause. Making good work.

We build our own communities. We define them ourselves. We gather people whose work we respect, whose opinions we trust and we build our communities with them, around them. There’s my travelblogging community and your travelblogging community, and odds are quite good that they are not the same thing. Before we start taking shots at how the travelblogging community behaves, I think we need to define, in specific detail, who we mean.

What do you mean when you say “the travelblogging community”?