Who the hell is this Fraulein person?

Guest-posted by Fraulein

It was the winter of 2004, and my full-time job was taking care of my newborn baby girl. This was disorienting on many levels, partly because I had been working in a fairly high-stress legal marketing job practically up until the day the nice people at the hospital managed to break my water. I had worked as a professional writer--first as a newspaper and magazine reporter, then later as a corporate communications and marketing writer--nearly non-stop since graduating from college in the early 1990s. Then, suddenly, with the arrival of this new little person, it all came to a screeching halt.

The days of hanging out with my lovely and enchanting Peanut (as I call her on my blog, Purple Ink) were amazingly satisfying in so many ways, but I really missed writing. I especially missed the push and pull of conversation with individuals who did not spend much of the day spitting up on my shoulder. And George W. Bush was giving me nightmares of epic proportions. There's nothing like new parenthood to bring the ills of the world into sharp relief. In those cold, dark days, when many of my fellow Americans still thought the Iraq war was just awesome, I needed people to commiserate with. Even if said commiserating was purely virtual.

And with that, Purple Ink was born. I proposed to write purely what I liked, and to tackle, in no particular order, the topics I was most interested in: motherhood; the sorry state of journalism; literature and pop culture; and the horror that was the Bush regime. Given that I've had to simultaneously juggle parenthood and wife-hood, along with, in the last couple of years, a new full-time job, I've never managed to post on my blog as often as I would if, say, I won the lottery tomorrow. But I keep trying. As with most things in life, I think it's the effort that counts.

Since Carl and I stumbled across each other's thoughts on the Intertubes, we decided we would try a little experiment in cross-posting. I'll be hosting some of his excellent posts on Purple Ink, and some of my stuff will show up here. If you like what you see, give us a shout and let us know!