A Ticket to the "Man-Chest"

Hello there,
I wrote a few months back that I had pitched a column at military.com. Well it took awhile for them to respond but...I am now in the company of Ollie North and many others as a regular contributor there. (To be accurate, Ollie is a so-called "Hard news" columnist, whereas I am a so-called "Lifestyle" columnist.)

I made my debut last week. My overall theme of "Purple Marriage, Purple America," is also the title of my first column. I plan to write "underneath and around" politics, drawing on my bipartisan marriage, personal experience, as well as interviews/ discussions and reading. Please have a look! In it I talk about B.'s "man-chest," which is not a part of his body, but rather a personal treasure chest of manly gifts. After reading the column I thought you might get a laugh out of the photo, taken on Christmas morning, as Uncle Cameron utilizes his Christmas gift from B., a "ticket to the man-chest." Enjoy!

p.s. if you have ideas for column topics, I'd love to hear them. I will be writing somewhere between monthly and quarterly, a reasonable schedule for this busy mom.

p.p.s. The only way I could bring myself to do the column is to ignore any "troll" comments I may get. So if I get them, please don't mention them!

Blessings to you and your families in the New Year!

Purple America

And other meditations on Overcoming Differences, Relationships, Politics, Fear, and Peace.

I’m starting up blogging again with a vengeance. This is the new me. The blogging me. The blogging without fear me. I am going to try something new for the rest of 2009. I’m going to get over my need to polish my work before I publish it, if only for a blog. I know it might seem odd to y’all that someone like me, who has published a book about her personal life, would be reluctant to “reveal” herself, but there it is.

The truth is Love in Condition Yellow is actually a fairly polished view of my private life. By polished I don’t mean “gilded,” but rather that I worked long and hard to get it “right,” in the sense of tone and three-dimensionality.

But I’m not going to worry about that here! You will get to observe the process of me honing down to an idea I might write a longer piece about. (There is a saying by Confucius related to sausage-making that may apply here…)

But enough blowing smoke. The writers among you know that one way to figure out what you want to write about next is to do “morning pages.” These may or may not happen in the morning, but morning is a good time to do them. Actually anytime you can get your sorry butt to do them is a VERY GOOD TIME to do them. Morning Pages are a sort of data dump of your thoughts. You put on a timer for five or ten or fifteen minutes and then you type. There is only one rule. You are not allowed to stop typing. You cannot lift your fingers from the keyboard. You cannot let them stop moving. Even if you are typing, “blah blah blah.” Or “oh my god, who wants to hear this? this is so naïve, what are you thinking, going into the maw of American politics, and talking about Purple America, trying to explain the left to the right and the right to the left. Girl, they are going to chew you up and spit you out!”

From the blog I will refine a nugget or two for a column that I am hoping they will still want me to do over at www.military.com. The Editor invited me but that was back in July and although I notified him I couldn’t start till September, I haven’t heard back. ‘Course out of about twenty emails I sent Ed., he only answered one or two and both of our phone conversations got cut short because of calls from the White House. BTW, Ollie North will be my fellow-columnist. But (I'm pretending)I’ve got no fear. Purple America, baby!