Big news about my blogging. Since last week, I’ve been blogging for The New York Times (that’s why it’s been so quiet over here!). The blog is called Shifting Careers, and it will be the daily complement to my twice-monthly Shifting Careers column. (If you haven’t been keeping up with the column, you can read all the past ones here.) I’m posting almost daily to the blog, so be sure to subscribe to the blog’s feed here to stay current.

While I get up to speed on the NYT blog, Heymarci will go a little quiet. But I expect to begin posting again soon, with a slightly different focus. So stay tuned, and keep it on your feed if you subscribe.

I don’t have time to listen or watch every audio or visual doodad I encounter in a blog entry, so I imagine even some of my most loyal Heymarci readers didn’t listen to the podcast I posted yesterday after I went on Karen Salmansohn’s radio show for a discussion on women/work/balance/fit/glass walls/fish and lots of other good stuff.

I still hope you’ll to find some time to listen to it; but if you can’t, this is your lucky day because Hannah Seligson, a smart young writer whose work I just discovered, nicely summarized the whole thing. She also highlighted the new word, “imperfectionist,” I coined during that radio talk. Read the post, and work on becoming an imperfectionist. I think it is the key to achieving happiness.

Deborah Siegel also blogged about the podcast this morning over at Girl With Pen. Deborah is a thought leader and excellent resource on pretty much anything related to women’s issues, so I was tickled to see my name in one of her posts.

Last week I took part in a radio chat with a smart and opinionated group of about writer/thinkers about what’s going on with women these days. Think Chris Mathews’ Hardball meets The View.

The panel was hosted by Karen Salmansohn, the author of 29 books and host of the daily radio show, “Be Happy, Dammit” on the Lime channel of Sirius.

The other guests were Eve Tahmincioglu, author of From the Sandbox to the Corner Office/columnist for MSNBC.com; Cali Williams Yost, work+life strategy consultant/author of Work+Life: Finding the Fit That’s Right for You; and Leslie Bennetts, contributing writer at Vanity Fair/author of The Feminine Mistake.
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The first time I saw the word, “meme,” was on Dan Pink’s blog, causing me to realize that it is probably a word I should know.

I like learning words by seeing them in context. Here’s the blog entry where Pink used it:

6 words, 6 sentences, no waiting

The ultra-short story meme continues to thrive. Virginia Backaitis has launched a blog devoted to mini-tales that asks, “What can you say in six sentences?” Also, if you haven’t seen it already, Wired‘s November issue asked a bunch of novelists to try their hands at 6-word science fiction. Margaret Atwood’s is my favorite: Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

Posted on 01/03.

{CORRECTION 08/20 – The “Six Sentences Blog” was actually created by Robert McElivy. Virginia Backaitis is a contributor.}

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My single girlfriends in NYC have long been wondering where all the eligible men are lurking. I found it. Happy Ending Lounge on the Lower East Side is home to Varsity Letters, a monthly reading series celebrating sports writing. (If you’re wondering about the name of the venue, the bar’s former life as a certain kind of massage parlor confirms that it was always a popular haunt for men.)

I went to the July 5th event because the beau and I were invited by our friend, Rich Ackerman, a sportscaster and contributor to Being There: 100 Sports Pros Talk About the Best Events They Ever Witnessed Firsthand, by Eric Mirlis. Ackerman’s radio voice turned a “reading” into a live broadcast. The beau, who has spent almost his entire career around sports, also knew one of the other readers, Lee Lowenfish, author of a new biography of Branch Rickey, who is renown as both a jazz writer and a baseball writer (Lowenfish trivia: he sports a perfect slash business card, featuring a baseball in one corner and a musical note in the other.)
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The avalanche of emails responding to my Shifting Careers column on self-promotion continues. When I wrote that column, I didn’t think self-promotion was a women’s issue and I know that many men — and many folks who were just raised to think being humble is good manners — also have a problem with it. But a lot of the experts and commentators believe that women have a harder time with it than men.

Lisa Cullen, Time.com’s workplace blogger (the unidentified friend who called me a “master of self-promotion”), blogged about my column. For her, it all came down to the estrogen factor. Read what she has to say here.

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This week my Shifting Careers column, “Women Build Businesses Their Way,” will appear in two places, its traditional online home at the New York Times online, and as the Thursday Small Business feature in the print edition of the paper. It’s about Ladies Who Launch, a social networking group for entrepreneurial women, and the bigger subject of whether women run their businesses (and their lives) differently than men. As I reported this story, I could have taken quite a few detours since the topic was rich. And I have a feeling it’s a subject I’ll be circling around for a while.

A few interesting links I stumbled on while working on this story:

• A great post at Blogher, about different approaches to corporate women’s networks: “BusinessWeek Takes a Second Look at Women’s Networks”
• “The Real Reason So Few Women,” a post from Marty Nemko (who has appeared in my Coach’s Roundtable) about why there are so few women at the top. Perhaps it’s just that women want different things than men, or that we have differing definitions of “the top.” Marty’s archives are encyclopedic. He’s got an article or a handful of articles on pretty much any work-related topic you’ve ever thought of. And often, they are smart and provocative, like this one.
• Penelope Trunk, whose archives are also rich with smart posts, wrote this post last week about male CEOS.
  
• Commentary from The Center for Women’s Business Research, that “. . . both sides (of the opt-out debate) ignore what at least some of these women are doing at home in addition to raising their children: they are starting businesses. Read more here.“

I have a feeling we are closing in on a time when referring to a feminine style of doing business might be seen as a compliment.

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When I first started writing, I had an inordinate number of mentors. One of them, Tamara Loomis, was about a year ahead of me on the law-to-journalist train and I thought I would never catch up. Tamara treated me as a peer from the start, made time for all my silly questions, and inspired me by the way she quickly became a professional, and then by the ways she continued to reinvent herself — first as a legal reporter for The New York Law Journal, then as a freelancer/new mom. But now I think she’s found her calling, as a snarky, smarty pants daily columnist/blogger for Cookie Magazine, the hippest of the parenting pubs. Even if you’re not a mom, you’ll agree that First Feeding is good stuff.

So, in honor of Mother’s Day, I give you Tamara!

Looks like yet another program — this one at Pace University’s law school — has been born to help mom/lawyers get back to work. A move in the right direction, and no surprise that Deborah Henry of Flex-Time Lawyers (whose story is told in my book) is involved. Here’s the article from NY Lawyer (registration might be required.)

* For those not bothering to register, the program is called “New Directions” and is set to launch in May, 2007.