Dude, Where's My Niche?

I had originally envisaged this post as a guest post on Problogger. Lofty much? And this evening got the rejection e-mail. Darren was of course very kind in his rejection and said he hoped I wouldn’t take it personally because of the sheer volume of emails he gets over at his monster blog. I’m grateful for the sentiment. But the day I don’t take a writing rejection letter personally, is the day my heart stopped beating. So rather than chance my feelings again by submitting it to another blog, I thought I’d just change it a bit and post it here. I know poor readers, subjected to my already rejected writing. I feel sorry for you. Just not enough to not post it.

Confession. I have a personal blog and I don’t stay on topic. I am wandering around in the dark niche-less!

The rules of personal blogging are simple: be attractive or famous (or both, be both!) and take good photos. Harldy seems fair does it? Oh and great content. How did I forget that? It’s easy to forget when you’re scared and lonely and in the dark. Remember? I’m niche-less.

Now some would look at my blog and say that’s easy that’s a mommy blog. There’s you niche! Get in your perfectly round hole, square peg! And yes I have a 21 month old and a lot of what I write about does involve sleeping and tantrums and photos of her. And shh!! don’t tell anyone but I occasionally have an actual emotion about motherhood and I have the audacity to write it down. And sometimes I even have an opinion about parenting in general and I might write that down too. But I also write about being a neurotic perfectionist who misses her shoes.

I’m uncomfortable with the tag ‘mommy blog’. I think it’s condescending and I really don’t even like typing it without putting quote marks around it – just so everyone knows that I have nothing to do with that nasty little turn of phrase. I think it’s limiting and reductive. And I think for a huge group of women who blog (myself included) to spend 90% of your day being a slave to a tiny tyrant and then have all of your writing reduced to ‘mommy blog’ is annoying. As though your talent for writing is equally proportionate to how much you don’t talk about your kids in your blog.

Does this rant sound familiar? That’s because I’ve ranted about it before at Raising My Boychick where I asserted, that before I was a mother, I was a woman. Crazy stuff. And I can’t shake the feeling that it has the stench of sexism about it. That if women write anything about their children, they’re not real writers – they are biased, view their kids as more special than they are, and are generally mind numbingly boring.

Which still leaves me niche-less, by choice.

Tagged as: 'Mommy Blogger', blogging, guest post, sexism, shoes, Writing