I have a post up over on Yahoo’s Shine! about my (finally, successful!) search for a non-clunky, smooth-riding double stroller.

Long weekend. Short week, filled with too many commitments. No time or energy for a post today, but I’d love you to read my latest Mama-Rama column, about kids and social media.

When I was a little kid, my parents had a closed-door policy about their bedroom. Kids going in there, unless in an extreme emergency, was Just Not Done. But my parents split up when I was young, and after that the bedroom policy became much more open-door. Mom’s bed was where you hung out if you had a nightmare or were home sick from school or just wanted to watch something different on TV from what was going on downstairs. My dad (and eventually, stepmother’s) room became the family hangout; where we watched Married…With Children and Spencer for Hire. Sure, if the door was shut you knocked (or when as a teenager you started figuring out what that meant, you went nowhere near that part of the house) but for the most part, their bedroom had an open-door policy.

I’ve brought that open-bedroom-door policy into our family life, much to the chagrin of my husband, whose parents had the “No Kids Allowed” approach to their bedroom. At first, it was pure practicality. Our kids all slept in our bed as babies, and for a long time we lived in small apartments and often had only one TV, which resided in our room. But even as our kids have moved into their own beds and we’ve acquired bigger homes and more TVs, the ‘just come on IN” approach to Mom and Dad’s room has stuck.

And I think I’ve about had enough. I’m pretty relaxed when it comes to clutter and chaos, but something about kids jumping around in and messing up my bedroom makes me over-the-top crazy. I can’t stand it when my bed gets unmade, or when one of the kids gives a bounce on my bed that slides it away from the wall. I mean, it upsets me so much that I actually feel my blood pressure tick up a few notches while my face goes hot and my fists clench. Maybe, in a house full of kids and mess and noise, I just need one space that I can count on to be quiet and neat? Maybe it’s time to lay down the law as far as the ol’ bedroom is concerned?

I’m guilty of putting the little kids in my room to watch a TV show while I work because it’s easy, it’s close to my office and the kitchen, where I spend a big part of my day, and, well, I know how to work the remote control up here. (the downstairs TV is still kind of a mystery to me). But I think it might be time to start the process of breaking the mom-and-dad’s-room habit.

Or maybe there’s a way to keep an open-door policy while still keeping the bedroom neat, clean, and chaos-free. Maybe the kids could have limited access to our room when it works for us, without them feeling like it’s their playland in there. Anyone been able to pull that off, or enforced a “parents’ room off-limits” rule after years of an open door?

…about working and raising a large family, over at lotsofkids.com. Check it out.

With food prices rising worldwide, keeping the family fed–without breaking the bank–is on the minds of many parents I know. During the month of April we’ve been talking about food–budgeting, meal planning, satisfying picky eaters, etc–over at largerfamilies.com. Head over and check it out, and plan to spend some time reading…there are some great ideas over there and plenty of, ahem, food for thought.

And another post from the Diapers to Deadlines archives! Oh, by the way, if you’re going to be in–or can get to–the NYC area on April 12, why not consider registering for the ASJA Conference? I’ll be speaking on a panel called “Full-Time Income, Part-Time Hours”.

Okay, back to the post, in which I answered the following question:

I keep reading about these e-mailed pitches that get accepted "immediately." Well, after 4 weeks I haven’t heard a peep about mine. Do I assume the editors didn’t like them? Follow-up on them? It’s frustrating to read about how great e-mail is for pitches and then not get a response, leaving me to wonder if I know what the heck I’m doing.

Thanks,
Lonely Inbox

Dear Lonely:

I am a fan of the e-mailed query. Though it does frequently take a while to hear anything back–and sometimes, you never hear anything back at all–it is far preferable to the responses I got during my short-lived period of only sending snail mailed queries (read: a handful of form rejections and no response at all to the vast majority of my queries, despite my care to always include a self-addressed stamped envelope.)

Do e-mailed queries guarantee immediate responses? Absolutely not. But in most cases, an e-mailed query is superior in several ways: first, the message is far more likely to get to the editor you’re targeting, rather than a slush pile on an intern’s desk. Second, if the editor likes your idea, he or she CAN respond immediately. This doesn’t always, or even usually happen. More often, he or she has to think about it, figure out if he has space for it, or pass it around to colleagues. But IF the editor is in an assigning mood and your query comes across at JUST the right moment, the opportunity is there for near-instant gratification. Third, if the editor DOESN’T like your idea, you are far more likely to get a prompt response with a rejection, and you can use that opportunity to pitch again quickly. Because of the ease of e-mail, you may even find that editors are more willing to give personalized feedback in their rejections.

But along with all this possibility comes an increased sense of frustration when you don’t hear anything back right away–or at all. You send off a query before lunch, and during lunch you wonder if they’re reading it. Maybe due to the magical speed of the Internet, you’ll have an acceptance in your inbox by the time you finish your sandwich!

Then the response doesn’t come, and it doesn’t come, and it doesn’t come. You think, "All they would have to do is hit reply, type "no", and click "send"–how hard is that?" For some editors, the answer seems to be "impossibly difficult". There are some editors I have categorized as "non-responders"; they never get back to you unless they want to assign something no matter how many times you follow up. Other editors need a few nudges. For the most part, editors are just like the rest of us–busy people who get lots of e-mail and sometimes lose track of it. Sometimes e-mail doesn’t get where it’s supposed to go–the editor may truly not have gotten it. For this reason, I do recommend following up on a regular schedule (I follow up at between 2 and 3 weeks after a query goes out–no sense leaving it languishing in Cyberspace forever).

I don’t know what has become of Lonely’s waiting queries. She may have been unlucky enough to stumble across a few non-responding editors at once. Following up is a good idea; it certainly can’t hurt. But people whose e-mailed queries are consistently ignored, even after follow ups, may want to ask themselves a few questions:

Don’t give up! The other nice thing about e-mail? It’s free. There’s no need to ponder whether those SASEs are personally funding the mail room departments of all those national mags you so diligently pitched. If you don’t hear from an editor after a few weeks, follow up. If you still don’t hear, you can follow up again or move on. Re-tool your idea to make it perfect for a new publication, and get it out there again. And remember–the best way to keep from obsessing about the fate of the queries you’ve got out is to be querying all the time. There will come a time when you can’t even remember how many you’ve got out at once–and that’s when you get those surprise responses in your inbox. Lonely, I hope I answered your question. Please, ask more–that goes for all of you.

Readers: how "instant" are the responses you get to your e-mailed queries? Have you found any tricks or tips for getting more, or faster acceptances? Please weigh in in the comments!

this post is adapted from an entry I wrote for the on-hiatus website From Diapers to Deadlines, which Toni and I collaborated on a while back. The site is down for now, but we had a ton of great content in the archives, and I thought some of my readers who are interested in freelancing might enjoy reading it…so I’ll be re-posting selected entries. If you have a burning question about writing or balancing freelance or at-home work and motherhood, drop me a line–I’ll respond here, or maybe dig up an old post that covered the issue in-depth.

Now, on to the post…

How many times have you done one of the following?

Put off getting childcare you desperately need to work because you can’t justify the cost. No, you’ll just find a way to write that 2,000-word article (or whatever your freelance job requires you to produce) after everyone’s gone to bed, when your eyelids are hovering at half-mast

Found yourself interrupting your work to tend to requests for snacks or break up a squabble–when your spouse is also in the house, watching TV or reading the newspaper

Apologized to your spouse for asking him or her to watch the kids while you make a deadline

I’d like to tell you something I learned the hard way: nobody is going to take your work seriously until you take it seriously yourself. Not your husband or wife or partner, not your kids, not your mother, and certainly not the editor or client you’re trying to impress.

It can be really difficult to do this, whether we’re just starting out or have been established for years. When we aren’t widely published or making a lot of money freelancing, it’s hard to justify the time we spend working on it. Sometimes, even when we are well-established, it can feel like we’re letting somebody down if we’re taking time away from family needs to work–even when we’re squeezing writing into the hours nobody else wants from us (usually sometime after midnight). Hiring child care or household help can seem like a luxury we neither need nor deserve. Asking the spouse to help out in the off-hours just seems unfair. After all, doesn’t he (or she) deserve a break, too?

But here’s the thing–if you’re serious about having a freelance career, it’s illogical to try to cram work in after every other commitment in your life. It simply won’t fit. There has to be an investment made in your role as a freelancer, whether it’s financial, or time, or even emotional–the mindset that you deserve to have it and that it’s valuable not just to you but the whole family. Think of it this way: if you were working outside of the home, it’s not as though you’d look at childcare, or a work wardrobe, or a business-related trip as an expense you couldn’t justify. And I’ve never heard of a single mother expecting her husband to tote a toddler to the office with him.

I’m not arguing that every writer or web designer or (fill in the blank) needs or has to have child care when they’re just getting started. I didn’t for a while, for a variety of reasons. Often, money is so tight that the budget simply won’t allow for child care expenses, no matter how badly you want a sitter. In those cases, you have to improvise for a while. Some people make a commitment to keeping their children at home while they work, and I respect and admire that (and have been that person until quite recently). But if they’re going to gain momentum–without completely losing their minds and burning out after a few months–there’s still going to have to be compromises made in some other area. It’s not about child care, specifically–what you really need is a mindset that your work gets priority–not necessarily before family or kids, but just…somewhere in the top ten. If it’s shoved to the bottom of the list somewhere after vacuuming the drapes, it’s not going to get very far. If that means you have to get somebody else to vacuum the drapes, so be it. If you don’t want to use a sitter, then your partner or spouse might have to take over for you in the evenings and on weekends so you can work. Don’t apologize for it. Your career is not unimportant, and it’s not selfish. Even if you aren’t making money yet, the time you’re putting in now is building a solid foundation for income later. That’s what owning your own small business–and really, being a freelancer is running a small business–is all about. You put in a lot of hours at the beginning for a payoff down the road.

It’s not always easy to convince the people in our lives that what we’re doing is important and valuable and that there will be a return on investment later. That’s why you have to convince yourself first. If you aren’t certain that you deserve or need the family to invest in your career, fake it until you make it. Don’t apologize for your work. Don’t grovel or beg for scraps of time. Figure out what you absolutely need and arrange to make it happen. Expect some resistance, but don’t give in. Just re-state what you need over and over until it sinks in.

Take yourself seriously. Start right now. What is one thing you can do to invest in yourself and your work? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

I wrote about my vow to unplug my kids–Monday through Friday, anyway–in my latest column:

When my kids were little, I was adamant that I would never allow video games in the house.

“Those things rot your brain!” I’d protest to my husband, whose brain, I figured, must be at least three-quarters rotted by then.

I wasn’t entirely scientific in my protest. My only evidence was a gut feeling that there was something really WRONG about the look that came over a kid’s (and, OK, my husband’s) face when they were deeply involved in an on-screen battle or quest.

read the rest, then do tell us about how video games work in your house. Do your kids play? Do you or your spouse? Do you set limits or give them free reign? And most important: do you play Rock Band?

Both Meagan and I hope you’re having a productive 2007 so far. While you’re busy fine tuning that writing career, we’d like to ask something of you, our wonderful readers. What questions would you like us to answer about juggling kids and career? Ask away, and we’ll post your questions and our answers here!

Thanks! Watch this space for more new content, interviews with professional writers who wrangle both diapers and deadlines, and Q&A features!

–Toni

With Halloween fast approaching, I thought it would be a great time to talk about what scares us.

Money is a huge hot-button issue with me. My dad struggled with a layoff that ultimately led to him forming his own business when I was a preteen. But those lean years in between jobs had us all skittish, and I think some of that "the bottom might drop out" fear stayed with me much longer than it should have. I think this is why it’s taken me a while to make some rather serious business investments that have helped grow that business substantially this year.

It was pretty easy for me to invest in attending a writers’ conference in Chicago. That’s for "work," so it felt okay sending a lot of money toward a concrete "investment" in my career. However, this year I also decided to double the amount of hours I use for in-home child care (a "mother’s helper" arrangement) and I hired a monthly cleaning service. Where before I might have considered these things luxuries, the brainpower and time I’ve saved from not having to continually juggle work and kids or scrubbing that icky netherworld behind the toilet seat have proven invaluable.

I know it can seem scary to invest in our writing businesses, especially when we’re just starting out. If you’re not yet ready to make moves this substantial, what are some other risks you can take to grow your business? Maybe you can afford to hire a high school student one day per week so you can brainstorm or refine queries. Maybe you can study a dream market and work on targeting them with some killer queries. Perhaps it’s time you attended a conference or joined a professional writers’ organization. Sound off in the comment box and share how you’re conquering what scares you!

–Toni