Sticking it to the Mouse

So apparently Disney has bought Babble.com, though my divorce blog does not seem to have been part of the deal. Yesterday I got several emails from friends who were exercised about the matter, both the buying and the de-blogging, neither of which I’d noticed on my own. (When I went back to check, my blog DID seem to be there, buried under a pile of dust, patiently awaiting an end to what is not a terribly interesting story in the long run–certainly hardly worthy of a two month wait.  But my profile and anything that would enable a casual Disney fan/Babble reader to find my blog has been deleted.)  It may be a glitch, or it may be my just reward for never updating, or it may be an intentional snub–but whatever it is, I sense the bell tolls for Divorced With Kids.

I’m not outraged. I’m actually relieved–I have been waiting for an excuse to bail on the Babble blog for quite a while. Having two websites means I write less on each of them than I would if I just had one.  And the Babble blog has been an irk since the beginning–I never felt I quite hit my stride, and I hated having to promote it. Hated, and also failed miserably at whatever half-assed promotion attempts I made, because I am not a nimble salesperson.  And besides, how do you really promote an anonymous blog?

The Babble blog was originally meant to tell the story of my divorce in chronological order.  When that proved too hard, I decided just to write about whatever I felt like, with an eye toward a bigger audience.  But not knowing one’s audience (or sensing that one’s audience is skewed in a particular direction) changes the way you write.  No matter how hands-off the Babble website was (and they were totally hands-off–so hands-off, in fact, that no one could ever find Divorced With Kids), writing for them always felt different than writing here.  Even the mandatory publish-with-a-picture format bugged me a bit.  What the hell was I supposed to be photographing? I disliked the stock images they’d use, but mine weren’t much better. And I tend to go on and on, while Babble posts are meant to be short and snappy.

I never got the hang of search engine optimization. I linked the Babble blog to an email address I rarely check–whoops–so I invariably missed important updates from Babble’s editorial staff. And then, when Steve Jobs died and everyone in the world was writing about him, I spoke to an editor at Babble about writing a quick piece about my brush with Apple (Jobs bought my ex-husband’s and my first house, when our older son was still a baby, back in the late nineties).

I’ve told the story a million times at dinner parties and the like–our fifteen minutes of Silicon Valley fame!–so I thought I’d simply dash it off.  The Babble editor urged me to put a “parenting” spin on it, which, when I thought about it, was already there. Piece of cake.  I took a pen and my notebook outside, and sat in the sun for a while. My older son, who had a half-day, came home and commenced talking. It was a beautiful afternoon. The story was due the following day. The essay I was writing suddenly got serious, and became about all manner of things–marriage, parents, children, divorce, estrangement. It was about six times over word count and still not finished.

My other son came home.  They wanted to go for a walk. I was in full swivet by this point–what was I thinking? I couldn’t write an essay in 24 hours on a specific topic with children around! I gave up, went for a walk, made supper, put the children to bed, swiveted a bit more, wrote a bit more, then gave up.

In other words, I finked.

The editor was–quite justifiably–pissed off.  I slunk around shamed for a while, both because I’d failed to finish the essay to my satisfaction, and because I couldn’t even say “Well, what do they expect, with such a short deadline?” because the whole thing had been my idea. What’s more, I realized that the Steve Jobs essay was exactly the kind of thing I write for this website–and that if I hadn’t had an editor, and a deadline, I probably would have finished it that night.  Writing here is easier and more pleasant and completely different than writing anywhere else. I have no idea why, but not even blogging for an unedited website feels the same. I thought, somehow, that writing for Babble would be just like writing here.  Getting paid was icing on the cake.  In the end, however, neither the ease nor the money was as great as I’d anticipated.

I sent an email to the Babble people this morning, asking what exactly was going on. If they permit me back online at all, I’ll wrap up the story I started in September, and then say farewell to DWK.  I whore my writing talents, such as they are, as much as I can–I make a living whoring them–so don’t mistake me for someone with noble ideals.  I’m just a bad combination of venal and lazy.

In other news, I applied for a temporary teaching job at my older son’s school, which I didn’t get, alas. A sparrow got stuck in the suet compartment of the bird feeder and seems to have died an excruciating death.  And the cat spent yesterday afternoon shitting, copiously and repeatedly, all over my younger son’s bed and comforter. Vengeful corporate deity, or complete coincidence?  You be the judge.

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