2007, The Year I Made That Leap Of Faith and Changed My Blog Name

Me and Tori; she's just a year old. Aw.

2007 was a huge year. Tori was growing up, I quit my job, and I changed the name of this blog, and I changed the entire direction of my career and passions.

Yup. Big year.

After Christmas I started putting out feelers about changing my work situation. I had a wonderful job at a wonderful place, but I was incredibly unhappy being away from Tori so much. So I began to seek work-from-home opportunities, part-time work I could supplement with writing, a job that was more stimulating – basically, anything I could find that would help me find the life I wanted.

It was mid-spring when the husband of a friend said he needed someone to do a high volume of article writing for an educational website. He offered me 37.5 hours a week from home, at a great hourly rate, which exceeded my salary at the time just enough that I could buy myself health insurance. It was the perfect solution, and in May of 2007 I quit my job and began working from home.

I loved it; the website I was writing for wanted great, in-depth articles on subjects that were actually pretty interesting, and I found that I was a content machine, able to produce multiple articles a day. I couldn’t have been happier.

And then there was this blog. It was awkward making the transition from infertility blogger to parenting blogger, and even more awkward seeing the opportunity to become a blogging professional and knowing that there would be consequences if I decided to blog for money. I struggled hard with what to do.

The first thing, though, was to tackle the name of the blog. Although “And I Wasted All That Birth Control” was hysterical, it was hard for infertile women to land on my blog and expect to see a woman struggling as they were and instead be greeted by baby pictures. So I knew I needed a change. But I also knew I wanted to honor my readers, so I allowed them to nominate suggested titles. I sorted through the nominations and eventually selected six potential titles (five possibles and a runner up) that I knew I could live with, and put it up to a vote.

Uppercase Woman was the winner, and I know it was right because unless I look at the post with the other potential names, I totally forget the other options (although I still love “Three the Hard Way”, heh). I hand counted all 340 of those votes, too; back in 2007 there were no handy tools to use (that I knew of, anyway, and would work with Typepad) to calculate votes.

It was a great year. On a final note, I wrote one of my very best posts that year, one that still gets a fair amount of traffic and was even featured in a book. I hope I can be that fired up and succinct this election year.

Next up, 2008!