What I’ve been doing with my life

Oh, hello. I hope things are well in your corner of the earth.

When last we spoke, I looked a little something like this:

Right now, I look more like this:

You would not believe the influence that a ten-dollar box of hair dye can have. This one simple change, from red to almost-black, has been received with shock, indignation, disappointment, excitement and cries of “How could you?” Granted, most of these responses have come from people I have never met — people who make themselves known via YouTube comments and Facebook replies. But the reaction from my real-life friends has been similarly pronounced.

My hair had been red since high school. I originally dyed it because I was an X-Files fiend, and flame-haired Scully was my smart-is-sexy, power-suited, judgey homegirl. At the time I was in search of an identity. I was fading, both physically and emotionally, and changing my hair to a vibrant shade seemed a simple way to say “Hey, I’m here! Notice me!”

The red stayed for 11 years. It became an intrinsic part of my personality. I would tell people that I was meant to be a redhead, that there had been some genetic mistake. I liked the fact that red was less common than brown or blonde or black.

At the same time, I felt a bit trapped by it. Defining myself by my hair color — for example, calling my blog “Sprinkle of Ginger” — made me feel like I had to stay that way forever. It began to feel like a caricature.

It’s a well-known trope that women make drastic hair changes in response to upheaval in their lives. Midway through this year, things got chaotic. My employment situation became unstable and scary, things got weird in the realm of romance, and I became eager to shake things up. The obvious answer was a Bettie Page hairdo.

After a brief identity crisis — every time I passed a mirror I would do a double-take — I am happy to be free of the red. This does bring up a vexing matter, though: what to do with Sprinkle of Ginger? Convert it to Sprinkle of Pepper, perhaps? It’s not like I’ve been updating it lately, but I hate the idea of it vanishing into the digital ether. I may just leave it up in archival mode. Still pondering that one.

So, now that you have an essay on why I changed my hair, here are some of the other things I’ve been up to since my last post.

I was in a music video for a delightful Australian band called Boy & Bear. I got to dress up all steampunky and run through the forest toward my astronomer sweetheart. Here’s the video:

I left Rocketboom. In the two years I was there I had some incredible experiences — interviewing Cookie Monster, learning trapeze, swordfighting, re-enacting scenes from Ghostbusters outdoors when it was below freezing — and met some kick-ass people, many of whom I continue to collaborate with. There were a lot of changes going on behind the scenes, though, and it was time to say toodle-pipski and seek out something new.

So you know how I like writing, yeah? I mean, it’s a thing I do from time to time. Well, it’s kind of my main thing now. It began when I co-wrote The RecordSetter Book of World Records, a process that took almost a year and forced me to strangle the demon in my head that yells “Your writing sucks! You’ll be the laughing stock of the universe if you submit this awful manuscript!”

Thankfully I was working with an amazing project manager who was all smiles but didn’t let me get away with missing deadlines or falling into a spiral of self-hate. He also brought these little sugar-free berry-flavored candies to the office, and I ate so many that I finally learned the meaning of the phrase “Excessive consumption may have a laxative effect.” Thank you, Marc Haeringer.

The book is available now and you can find out more about it — and buy it, if you want to make me really happy – here.

For the last year I’ve been volunteering at 826NYC, a non-profit dedicated to helping kids with their creative writing skills. I mainly help out at the storytelling field trips, which involve getting a class of whippersnappers to write a story and have it published within the two-hour session. We get them to brainstorm characters, settings and conflicts, emphasizing that there are no limits beyond being original.

The ideas these kids come up with are brilliant. It’s been inspiring to watch them excitedly propose a new plot point without restraint or any sense of self-censorship. Their stories are funny, adventurous and a delight to read, and the joy they find in the creative process is something I think about when angsting over the way to word a sentence. Here’s the first page of a story by a class of first-graders:

At the moment I am writing the Atlas Obscura book. It’s a big project that will take me well into 2012, and I am beyond delighted to be working on it. Atlas Obscura is a compendium of the world’s most wondrous places, and I’ve been spending my days reading about lost explorers, looking at photos of ossuaries and having long conversations about Tesla with the other adventure-loving nerdlings in the office. As someone who used to pore over encyclopedias as bedtime reading, this is my dream job. And I get to work with Marc the Compassionate Taskmaster again.

Lastly, I just started a project that I am most excited about. I launched a podcast. It’s called Ellipsis, and it’s pretty much the audio continuation of my Sprinkle of Ginger posts. I talk about creativity, inspiration, going nuts, living in New York, embarrassing childhood memories and many other things. There is a different guest every week. Press play to hear the first episode, featuring Mememolly:

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If you like it, I’d love it if you subscribed in iTunes. Here is the link. There is more info about the podcast at its own site, ellipsispodcast.com.

So that’s about it. What have you been up to lately?