“Sweeeeet!” I said, and before I’d struck the final syllable I thought, Dear Lord, when did the word “sweet” enter my vocabulary? Then I remembered how fat I’ve been for most of my life and realized the word “sweet” probably entered my vocabulary before I was tall enough to grab ice cream out of the freezer. But I was not using the word to describe the taste of cupcakes or the unexpected kindness of a friend. No, I was stretching out the “ee” in the middle as if my lower jaw were arthritic and needed extra time to swoop in to make the sound. I was using the word as if it were substitution for “Narly!” or “Rad!” or some other slang from a subculture I do not belong to. I began using it sometime in the past few months, and every time I do I feel as though my mouth as been possessed by a ventriloquist.

I know many books and doctoral dissertations have been written about the acquisition of language. I hope the writers of one of those works can explain to me why I suddenly find myself using a phrase I don’t consciously seem to be choosing. I’m not sure if I have a prejudice against the word “sweet” or if I’m just annoyed whenever I notice a verbal tick of mine. A few years ago I noticed that I say, “Oh, okay,” a lot when someone else is telling a story. I suppose I do it to acknowledge that I am engaged and listening and have understood what they’ve said and am proving these feats of mental focus with three simple syllables, typically accompanied by a double head nod. But now that I’ve noticed that I do it, I’ve noticed that I do it all the time. I suppose I should search for a replacement phrase, or rather an artillery of replacement phrases, so I’m not just subbing one tic for another. I need an instant thesaurus for my mouth.

Not all of my vocabulary expansions are mysteries. A girl in my junior high school English class used “Dude” to start half her sentences, which I initially thought was really weird. Now I throw out several dudes a day—uh, the word, not actual dudes. A guy in my senior high school English class used the word “random” a lot, which I eventually adopted, too. When Battlestar Galactica was on the air I’d occasionally ask “What the frak?” which was the clever way the sci-fi show found to curse on basic cable—by making up their own curse words. When I watched Farscape it was “What the frell?” I guess we’re always learning new words, like “tweet” or “iPod,” or using old words in new ways, like “I’ll text you” or “I’ll google that.” (The original definition of “google,” as taught to me in 2nd grade before there even was a world wide web to search, was the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes.) I wonder if I’m losing words too, like all the ones I crammed into my head before the SAT. I feel like I should know what “supercilious” means, but I’m only 50% sure I do.

Do you keep recycling the same words and phrases over and over? I’ve noticed some tics in my friends and family, that I will keep private so they do not feel self-conscious and murder me. But I don’t think any of them have been saying, “sweeeeeet.”

I haven’t posted a new entry for over a week now, which might be a record for me. There were moments in the past week when I thought, “I should post something. People will wonder if that IKEA bookcase I assembled fell over and crushed me dead.” But then my next thought was, “What should I write about?” and the honest answer was, “I don’t have anything I care enough to write about right now.” Sure, I’ve got dozens of little notes saved for post ideas, many of which are worth writing about eventually. But during each moment I thought about posting last week, nothing seemed so immediately important that I had to write a blog entry about it RIGHT NOW.

Certainly, there is something to be said for writing when you don’t feel like it. If you want to be a professional writer, you’ll spend plenty of time writing when you don’t want to. That’s why it’s a job, because it’s actual work. However, I feel that bloggers feel extra pressure to produce something daily, quickly, endlessly, or else we’re told we’ll lose all our visitors and our pagerank will decrease and no one will care about our blogs anymore. There have certainly been times when I have posted entries out of fear of losing everything I’ve worked hard to build. Those quick and dirty entries are sometimes funny and good, but sometimes they’re kinda’ shit. And I don’t want to be shitting on the Internet.

So, for this past week, I decided to keep my mouth closed and my fingers still. And it was good. I didn’t pop in to tell people, “Gee whiz, I haven’t posted for awhile, have I?” because I figured you are observant enough to notice that without me commenting on it. And commenting on it serves no purpose, other than to give into that fear of being un-Google-able, which seems like a silly thing to be afraid of. Spiders? Sure. Low Google search results? Eh, have you ever had a nightmare involving your pagerank? (If yes, you should probably keep that to yourself.)

This attitude towards my blog is something I hope to continue. I want to stress quality over quantity. I stopped checking my web stats several months ago because I got sick of wondering if people were visiting my blog and where they were coming from and all that rigmarole that is so easy to get sucked into. I’ve been blogging for over 5 years now, and I feel like I’m getting too old for that shit. I’ve seen my stats go up, and then down, and then up again, and then down again, and then…you get the picture. There was certainly a time when I chased pageviews and hoped for more visitors, but I feel like I’ve been there, done that. Yeah, having lots of visitors can be fun and it’s got its own advantages, but it’s got disadvantages too. When I think about what I’d like this blog to be, I’d rather that it be well-written, thoughtful and entertaining than it be published daily and have a bazillion readers a month. If I want it to be the former, I can’t really think about the latter.

This type of philosophy has been around for awhile, typically referred to as the “Slow Blogging” movement. The term is partly a reference to Alice Waters’ slow food movement which emphasizes cooking quality meals that take time rather than consuming fast food that is quick but less nutritious. You can read a New York Times article about slow blogging from 2008, and a slow blogging manifesto here, though I prefer the one listed in the sidebar of this blog which says:

1. Slow blogs are well written (the writing would still be considered good had it not been not published on the internet)
2. Slow blogs are focused on content over format
3. Slow blogs celebrate authenticity
4. Slow blog writers don’t feel restrained by formulas
5. Slow blogs posts are sometimes long
6. Slow blogs are original (not composed of mostly recycled material)
7. Slow blogs do not have, as their primary aim, the goal of selling things
8. Slow blogs are not unfairly critical of bloggers with different agendas. It’s still a free world.
9. Slow blogs encourage community building
10. Slow blogs are worth the time

None of this is to say I’m going to try to drive visitors away from my blog either. I’m not going to stop certain posting habits I like that I also know are considered to help increase readership. I’ve been trying to post a picture with most of my posts lately because it makes the entry look more enticing and readable. I think this increases the quality of my posts, so I’m going to still do it, regardless of whether it brings more readers or not.

It also does NOT mean I’m going to write posts weeks and weeks in advance and revise them heavily before posting. Blogs do tend to be in the moment, and I don’t have a problem writing something in the moment like some of the slow bloggers seem to.

I can guarantee there will still be typos.

Overall, I’d just like to blog when I want to and not because I think I have to. So, you might be seeing a little bit less of me. There still might be weeks when I feel a need to post four entries. There might be weeks when I post none. We’ll see. Let’s just take it slow, ok?

So, Jennette, how is that book going?
The book exists…as a Word file!

It’s currently a 262K word file, which seems ridiculously small since I’ve worked on it intermittently for almost two years now. I finished a draft at the beginning of the year and I’m currently working on revisions that are due at the end of June…right when I’m moving out of state! Because I am an excellent planner that way.

I’ve already finished the majority of the revisions, most of which fixed pacing issues or clarified things that were confusing or cut out brilliantly written bits that didn’t advance the story or were results of my compulsive need to constantly edit everything I’ve ever written, including this blog entry. All of which is to say, it’s in a really good place. When I reread it after several months, I didn’t remember every microscopic detail like I did when I was immersed in the thing. So I’ve found myself laughing in several places and thinking, “Ha, that’s clever! Hey, *I* wrote that! Look how clever I am! I even amuse myself!”

Awesome! When does it come out?
It’s currently slated for release in February of 2011.

Are you going on a book tour?
I have absolutely no idea. I haven’t talked to the marketing department yet, but I probably will within the next few months. Once we have a game plan, I’ll let you know when/if any book events are happening.

Wait, did you change the subtitle?
Yeah, the official title of the book is now “CHOCOLATE AND VICODIN: My quest for relief from the headache that wouldn’t go away.”

I can’t wait to buy a copy!
Thanks! I really, truly, sincerely appreciate that. I’ve worked really hard on the book and I’m glad to know I’ve presold some copies. I’d forgotten how much work it is to write a book, but let me tell you, it’s a shitload of work. Think of how much work you think it is and then triple that and then double it again for good measure. Then add a smidge more work and that’s how much work it is. Work, work, work, work, work. Work that is fun, but still work. So if you’re writing a memoir, you’d better damn like yourself because you’re going to get sick of yourself regardless, even when you’re already sick!

And that covers just about everything I know at this point. So if you have a question I didn’t answer, there’s a 90% chance I don’t have the answer yet either. I will let you know when anything else noteworthy happens on the book front. Thanks for asking!

I set my alarm clock for 8:30am, but I’m usually awake before then. Nature’s alarm clock goes off first when sunlight streams through the Venetian blinds on the eastern wall of my bedroom. Then I’m up and the cats are skittering about my feet, mewing as I walk to the kitchen and fill their bowls with food. I fill my own human bowl with oatmeal, precisely measured out like the kibble at my feet. Then Mr. Coffee starts brewing some Folgers Classic Roast for me as I eat my breakfast and perhaps catch a clip of Good Morning America. With coffee cup in hand I head to my office, closing the door to keep kitties out. Then I open the curtains and read my emails, sometimes in my pajamas.

After the emails are sorted, I go put on pants and get my second cup of coffee. Next up I tend to any estimates that need estimating. This requires lots of thinking and analyzing and spreadsheeting. I break down the project into the different parts, estimating how many hours each task will take. I look at the timesheets I’ve kept on previous projects to see how long similar jobs took. I might also have to explain some technical stuff to my clients, so I work on translating technobabble to English. Sometimes a client wants something that I’ve never done before, so I have to poke around the Interwebs, checking out plugins or programs or documentation, figuring out the best way to handle their problem and how much to charge. Then I look at my schedule, which I have been keeping in Google Calendar because it nicely color codes work projects and personal commitments. I can also easily drag and drop tasks when I don’t have time to do them that day, not that that happens, of course not. I scan the days and see when I will be free and add that start date to the estimate.

By then someone else has replied to something I emailed yesterday or last week or back when grunge was cool . I pull up the email and momentarily wonder, “Who is this person? What did they want? How much did I say it would cost? What color is their dog?” and think to myself that I must keep better notes because constantly rereading all my emails is confusing and taking too much time. I have not seen my clients’ faces or heard their voices and all this text looks the same. So now I take notes in a spreadsheet with different pages for each estimate. I break down each task and how much it will cost by row, and I have text files which contain my common replies, all of which I use to copy and paste information into an email with the estimate information. If the client decides to go ahead, I create another spreadsheet where I track my time when I work on the project.

This also means I have to bill the client and track how much they’ve paid and for what. There was a spreadsheet for this too, but it didn’t integrate with my email, so now I’m using Freshbooks which makes pretty little invoices, tracks payments, lets me enter expenses, and makes handy, dandy reports which will be priceless come tax time, which is every 3 months now that I’m a freelancer. Uncle Sam wants his money as I make it, not in a big lump at the end of the year. I can also analyze how much I have billed this week and how much I’ve been paid this week and compare that to the goals in my business plan.

Now it’s on to, oh yes, the actual work, the work I am now contracted to do, but look it’s already noon! Off I go to run and eat lunch, maybe with a friend, and pet my kitties who want to be let out onto the porch. Then it’s back to the office, which my oh my is rather hot, isn’t it? That’s what happens when you keep the door closed and have an eastern-facing window. At least I have my fan circulating air past my face. Now I am working on a project, actual web design work, which I will do for 3 or 4 hours, until my body starts to ache. Maybe I’m done with the work now, so I email the client with mockups or links to check out. Then they email me back later and I think, “Who? What? Where am I?” but now I have my notes which I refer to and can remember what my name is and how old I am and what I am working on and that their dog is brown.

Then perhaps I shall write, either a blog entry or a chapter in my book. Or perhaps I will surf the Internet or chat on IM with a friend. It might be someone from my old job and I will laugh to myself when I see that the home page is broken and it is not my job to fix it. Ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha! Happiness is HTML you don’t have to fix.

Oh my, it’s evening now and I am tired. I might go to my bedroom and read a book or watch some TV in the living room. I might make some dinner, but I’ll probably just zap something in the microwave. Then I’ll check my email before bed and respond to people if it’s easy or sort messages to reply to tomorrow if it requires thought. Perhaps I didn’t get as much done today as I wanted to because I felt tired and unmotivated, but oh well, got to work. Got to pay the bills. Got to cash the checks.

It is fun though. And exciting. And new. And I know why the word “freelancer” starts with “free.” (Hint: It’s not my hourly rate.)

“So, why are you leaving us?” she asked.

“Well, I just got an offer on my book proposal!” This was also the point at which I expected to ride home on a unicorn via a rainbow, because that is another thing that only happens in dreams. I was probably the happiest exit interview the HR lady ever had the pleasure of conducting. I smiled and laughed and bounced around happily in my seat before dancing back down to my desk to reread the email I had just gotten. Then I told my boss and my coworkers about the offer and they were happy for me, and slightly stunned, but I’m sure the “I’m quitting to pursue writing!” speech I’d given last week suddenly seemed a lot less flimsy.

So yes, I have been all sneaky-like and wrote a book proposal, which I sent to agents, and one of them liked it, so we joined forces and she suggested revisions, and I made them, and then the other agents at her agency suggested more revisions, so I made those too, and then she sent it out to publishers, and I waited, and then one of those editors liked it and offered me money to sit at home and write it, which means I can afford to buy food, which will make the experience all the better because writing is easier with chocolate pudding on hand.

I do not have a release date yet, but I would guess my book will come out in 2010, perhaps 2011. It’s tentatively called Chocolate and Vicodin: And Other Failed Cures for the Headache that Wouldn’t Go Away and you can pretty much guess what it is about. As the announcement in Publisher’s Lunch said yesterday, “[Jennette Fulda] humorously explores the twisted maze of eastern and western medicine as she visits doctors, acupuncturists, and chiropractors, and ingests pills, pot, and obscene amounts of ice cream, all in search of the elusive cure for her chronic pain.” It’ll be released by Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. Look! They have a cute little kangaroo for a logo:

Big thanks to everyone who helped make this possible with their advice and support, especially the fabulous Miss Holly, Rachel, Jen, Erin, Wendy and Jennifer (who I don’t have a link for). I did not simply skip into the lobby of the publishing house and pick up a book contract at the receptionist’s desk. I’m truly grateful this deal happened and I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to write another memoir. Just because you write one book does not mean you necessarily get to write another. But really, if you’re going to have a headache for over a year, you may as well get a book deal out of it. There was a TON of work that went into making this happen, and the process only reminded me of how much toil and trouble goes into putting out those bound sets of pages.

I also wanted to thank you, my readers, for sending me crazy emails. They really made the proposal pop. Don’t worry, I won’t include your email addresses.

I am so grateful for having that job for the past 18 months. It gave me respectable health insurance benefits during a period of medical distress. It paid well enough for me to cover my medical bills while also saving up money for this leap. I got to work in an office where my coworkers genuinely enjoyed each other’s company (most of the time). I learned a lot about web design and how corporate politics work (or don’t work). I benefited a lot from that job, but it was time to go and there was no use in denying it.

At this point you may be hollering at your screen, “PastaQueen, have you not seen the eleventy billion reports about the economy?! Do you not know that 9.7% of the population does not have employment?! How can you possibly dare to quit your job? Have you been drinking the crazy juice?!” Why, yes I have, and mmmmm is it tasty!

If you have read this blog for more than 5 seconds, you will know I almost never do anything without a plan, a couple spreadsheets and detailed graphs. I have looked at my budget and my finances. I have written a business plan with concrete goals, dates, and numbers. I have paid off all my debts, save for a student loan which has such a low interest rate that it basically accounts for the rate of inflation. I have saved up 6 months of living expenses. I have cut expenses by moving to a new apartment.

Most importantly, I have mined several freelancer friends for advice. They’ve told me about the ungodly amount of work it is. They’ve told me how scary it is to have no work one month and then too much work the next. They’ve told me that I will not be able to find decent, affordable health insurance. They’ve let me know that if I do not socialize and stick to a schedule I will find myself “pantsless at 3pm, eating peanut butter out of a jar and staring at the television blankly.” They’ve told me that this is the worse they have ever seen the business during their 10 years experience. They have told me all these things and still I have been thinking, “Sign me up!” I suppose that means this is a calling, though personally I wish I’d been called to be a rich lawyer or doctor instead of a poor writer/web designer.

This wisp of this a dream appeared in the back of my mind a couple years ago, and back in August of 2008 I wrote it down on paper and made it my secret goal, which drove many of you crazy. Sorry, I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend like many of you guessed, though a husband with health insurance would be fabulous to have right now.

Yesterday I drank a big beer at my going-away party and this morning I slept until 9:30am and now I am officially working for myself. We are three hours into it and it is going well so far. As I said, I have 6 months of savings, plus some projects lined up which will earn at least another 6 months of income. I’ve been building up freelance web design clients on the side and have officially launched my blog design company, Make My Blog Pretty. If you are in need of web design services, please check it out. I will be at the BlogHer Conference in two weeks, handing out business cards and hopefully generating more business. I am also looking for writing gigs that will bring in the cash, so if you know any of those, feel free to contact me. I promise to keep you updated about any other projects I contribute to in the future.

I also want to say, “Thank you.” If I didn’t have this blog which led to that book, and if I didn’t have all the support you guys have given me, I don’t know if I would have the confidence to do this. I believe in myself. I’m betting on myself. Five years ago I wouldn’t have done that. Sometimes people say weight loss is silly or vain, but losing all that weight taught me what it was like to make a dream come true. It taught me that absurdly great goals can be achieved. It’s made me the type of person who will run off to Europe because she feels like it and who will quit her job because she wants to do something else with her life.

I am relieved to finally be here. There was a day back in April when I sat down in front of my computer and looked at my to-do list which included:

• Work at full-time job
• Plan trip to Europe
• Find cheaper place to live
• Work on a zillion freelance projects
• Exercise and eat well
• Maintain blog
• Make business plan for freelancing

As I reviewed everything I had to do in those next few months, I thought I might collapse on my mouse pad and be brought to the hospital for exhaustion, like Mariah Carey or Jay Leno. “I have taken on far, far, too much,” I thought. But there was no stopping it. I couldn’t place anything on hold. Somehow I soldiered through and here I am on the other side, still with many things to do, but significantly less stressed about it all. If I have seemed a bit distracted lately, or somewhat off my game, that is why. I hope to pay more attention to the blog now that I’m not running off in a billion directions every day.

Now I am three hours and 15 minutes into my new career, and things are still going well, though I’m getting a bit hungry and will go make myself lunch. I hope I don’t start eating everything in the kitchen now that I’m working from home.

On the down side, I read an article announcing that tomorrow is the First Annual Freelancers Put On Your Pants Day. Sheesh, I’ll only be one day into my new career by then and already they are setting such high demands!

The 2009 BlogHer Conference is coming up in about a month, which means I need to figure out what the hell my blog is about. This will be my third BlogHer, and I can well remember the question, “So, what do you blog about?” which is repeated over and over in elevators and corridors and frequently at lunch right after you’ve taken a big bite of salad. I can also remember trying to figure out how to give a stranger an impression of the tone, style, and topic of my blog in just 2-3 sentences as I chewed that salad slowly.

At BlogHer 2007, I said, “I’m a weight loss blogger,” which made people give me curious looks because I wasn’t fat anymore and they had no idea how big I used to be because I only wave my fat pants around at special occasions. At BlogHer 2008 I said I wrote about health, fitness and weight loss, trying to place less emphasis on the weight part, since I was personally focused more on fitness and feeling good than being super skinny. Even that felt odd, because I knew I was planning to open up the blog to other topics as soon as I finished all the laborious work on my redesign.

So now I face this question yet again. What is my blog about? What can I say to people who’ve never read this blog that will make them understand the general vibe around here? How can I interest them enough to check out the site even though they’ll have a hundred other blogs hurled at them that weekend? I’m not really sure, so I thought I’d open it up to you guys. You read me. Some of you have been lurking around here for years. What the hell is my blog about, in three sentences or less? Thanks, and I am equally interested and terrified to read your responses.