In lieu of showing shiny new things today I thought I'd share a little bit of what goes on behind the scenes at the Makeup Museum. Part 1 will cover the basics while in part 2 you'll see how I install my little home exhibitions.
So this is where the blogging "magic" happens – our home office. The big monitor belongs to the husband since he's a fancy schmancy graphic designer. I work on the laptop, which I hope to replace this year. You might remember the Marcel Wanders table that I didn't recognize despite working at it for years. I also just realized I still haven't removed the labels from the fall 2013 exhibition, whoops.
Our cork board, filled with silly bits of ephemera we've collected over the years:
On the adjacent wall is the Chairman – he keeps me on task, the bastard.
Here's the windowsill where I take pictures of the Museum's objects. Yes, it looks worn…the reason is that the building is over 150 years old and the historic association fights us every time we ask about getting new windows.
I attempt to use this very nice Canon camera that I acquired last year. I really wish I could figure out how to properly take pictures – it's a good camera but it's useless if you don't know what you're doing. Methinks I need a photography course. I leave the instruction booklet out with the vague hope that one day I'll actually learn to use all the settings.
As for actual writing, I am ALWAYS in my pajamas. I mostly blog at home, and while there I'm never actually dressed unless we have people over…plus I need to be comfy! (The pajamas shown here are seersucker ones from Anthropologie but I'm partial to the printed ones from Old Navy.)
While I write it's not unusual for a staff member to wander in and ask me what I'm doing.
They try to help but every time they end up googling cookie recipes and pictures.
I don't have a formal writing process. I generally have a basic idea of what I want to say when I start typing, but it takes a while to flesh it out and make it coherent. I will say that I have difficulty writing a post about an object without the pictures in the draft. I'm not sure whether that's an effect of this increasingly image-based culture in which we're all immersed or whether I'm just particularly in need of visuals, but it's much easier for me to write when I have the photos in the draft post. I'm also prone to falling down rabbit holes – researching one thing will lead me to many other things I find interesting or relevant, so it takes a fair amount of time for me to get a post finished. Finally, I'm always reminded at how vastly different blogging is than writing an academic paper, even though I've been blogging for years. I enjoy blogging but I would give anything to write a formal paper again.
Where and how do you blog? And do you have any tips?