Normalarkey No More: Meet Midlife Mixtape

It’s kind of a mixed blessing when a friend says, “I love your blog. But I can’t pronounce it.” One of the basic rules of branding is “try not to piss off your audience” and having a nonsensical blog name flies in the face of that tenet; just because it worked for Google.com and Dooce.com doesn’t mean it’ll work for me. So I’ve been thinking about giving the name Normalarkey the boot for a little while.

But more than that, this blog that I thought would be an ode to the absurd in everyday life (hence the amalgam of “normal” and “malarkey,” in case you wondered) has evolved into something more. It’s become a music blog, a parenting blog, a blog about working, a blog about modern life, a blog about my childhood family. In short, it’s a mixtape of what life looks like for a lot of us here at the midpoint, a blending of the demands of family, marriage, work, memories, with those things for which we’re still got some righteous passion – in my case, music in all its guises.

Hence the launch of Midlife Mixtape.

For better or for worse, what I wrote about on Normalarkey is exactly what I’ll write about on Midlife Mixed Tape, just organized a bit differently and hopefully easier to navigate. (Endless thanks are due to Nicole of The Pixel Boutique for helping me bring my vision to life so clearly.) I hope if you liked me there, you’ll like me over here too. And don’t worry, email and RSS subscribers will still get their alerts as before. If you’re not already subscribed to the site, hey, get in on the ground floor of Midlife Mixtape by adding your email address in the “Subscribe” box on the MM site! I’ve also set up a Facebook page for you to officially “like” me, and you can find me on Twitter at @midlifemixtape.

One other change worth noting: in recent months I’ve been approached by a number of companies who want me to write about their products. While I have always said no, I have decided to consider these on a careful, case by case basis, and to agree if and only if a.) I love, love, love the product and can come up with a good story around it and  b.) the company will provide me something tangible, desirable, and useful that I can pass on to my readers in a giveaway. I figure if I can get you something cool, who am I to deny it to you? But rest assured these posts will be clearly marked as such, and kept to a minimum.

There are some more blah blah blah details on my new About page if you’d like to read more about the new name and design, but I won’t bother you with them here.  I mostly want to say thank you to all of you who take the time out of your own crowded mixtape lives to read my posts, to comment, and share them with friends. If you guys didn’t inspire me to be better all the time, I’d probably still have a blog called Nancy’s Notes (yes that is too the first name I came up with. Sigh.)