YP Moms Looking for Work-Life Balance

My latest story for YPNation is on a subject that's always been of interest for me: work-life balance. I think most young women with career aspirations and the hope to one day have a family realize that they'll be faced with the challenge of how to make it all work. I interviewed some intelligent, interesting women for this piece and they all had different and realistic solutions for the working mom dilemma.

A few novel ideas?

It's probably no surprise that I would one day like to write a book. (Maybe that day will come sooner rather than later if I continue to have a lot of free time on my hands.)

Anyways, I was recently strolling through my favorite neighborhood bookstore and took note of some of the new formulas behind best-selling novels. It seems to me that more bloggers and regular joes are turning their blogs and/or diaries from weird one-year experiments into books. And it works!

Take the huge hit, Julie & Julia. The book came to be after a NY Times writer stumbled on Julie Powell's blog about her year of cooking all of Julia Child's recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Simple enough to turn into a book, right?

Or Stuff White People Like. This NYT best-selling book started as a silly blog that Christian Lander created to amuse himself and his friends.

Then there's the do-something-odd-and-then-write-about-it category. (Julie & Julia is cross-listed in this category.) The Year of Living Bibilically is one man's story of taking the Bible as literally as possible. Someone must have thought about doing this before, but AJ Jacobs is the author who decided to actually do it and write a book.

You don't even have to do something as drastic as Jacobs to write a book-- you could do something as mundane as reading the entire dictionary (Reading the OED) or go traveling and soul-searching after a divorce (Eat, Pray, Love).

So it looks like I just need something to memoir-ize (or for this blog to become really huge with zillions of followers). I'm not sure if the success of these authors should be encouraging or discouraging to my literary aspirations. I guess I'll start brainstorming weird things for me to partake in for one year...


Flickr photo by A.Cranmer