I agree - Grrl will be able to help a lot more women with a book than a blog. And if it makes her money after the insanely high costs of infertility, more power to her. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.

This post and the one from Friday on whether professional writers should blog prompted similar reactions:
A: God forbid that a professional writer should maintain a weblog! Weblogs should be left to conspiracy theory cranks, amateur pundits and people who insist on using an apostrophe s to indicate plural nouns.
B: God forbid that a blog writer with real talent and an interesting story to tell should ever be paid for her efforts. Blogging should be a free form of entertainment with daily updates and clever, well-written posts that provoke thought as well as laughter, and the authors should do it entirely for the love of it. To ask for money for this is a betrayal.

Whether it's a professional writer posting to a blog "on the side" or a blogger whose writing rises to the level where it can actually be marketed in book form, I'm just thankful when people who write well give it away for free on the internet.

FB: you said it better than I did. Good thing you've got a blog, say I.

People have had such a sense of entitlement with Getupgrrl, as if she and her words belonged to us, her readers. Um, no. People would plague her to put her archives back up, and they were actually angry when she didn't (when she stopped posting, it was even worse); some said in so many words that she owed it to the world to put her story up for everyone to see. Baloney. Grrl's story, her words, her life, belong to her. I for one am very grateful for having had the chance to read her writings for a couple of years, but she didn't owe that to me, and to say that she should continue to crank out her story for free just because it can do people some good is preposterous. If you ask me.

I did ask you. Thanks, Rachel.

I read Grrl's blog for a long time. In fact, this blog led me to that blog.

I have no problem with her writing a book about this. And we got the happy ending. Oh, it was a wonderful day when that baby was born.

Well, since I want getupgrrl to write a book I am fine with it. And I never thought she wrote her blog to help other women, I thought she wrote it to help herself - helping others was just a nice side product.

And, apparently, according to OW those who write for money are like prostitutes. Cool. Sign me up!

After little Gefullte was born I went back to the Getupgrrl blog and took some time to read some of the comments people had posted there since the baby was born and getupgrrl had discontinued blogging. There were a huge number of posts asking if getupgrrl would publish her blog entries (since they can no longer be accessed on the net). Maybe she has bowed to this demand and has decided to do this, in which case, is that really the same as writing a book? And if so, exactly why shouldn't she write a book anyway? I don't care either way - if the entries are published I will certainly buy and read and encourage others in similar circumstances to read it. If it's a totally different beast, then why shouldn't she write and be published, whether for herself or anyone else? I never felt getupgrrl was blogging specifically to help other women. I always felt it was possibly cathartic to write and if it helped others along the way then all the better. I sure hope she doesn't think that OW's opinion is typical as I'm pretty sure it's not.

Speak it, sisters!

I agree, agree, agree.

I look forward to her book, because I only caught part of the story. Sometimes, the comments were really beautiful too. I wonder if the book will take the form of a series of blog posts and if some select number of comments will get included.

I came in at the end of Getupgrrl blog, and only managed to get the entry talking about the birth of her son. From the quality of her writing, and from the feedback from other people, I am very sad that I didn't discover this work earlier. I would be very glad if she made it into a book, so that her story would be accessible in its complete form, to a larger audience than those who own computers. I think people forget that the purpose of writing (I think) is to record and share the stories of those we can't speak to. This way we have access to stories from the past, and from far away, and leisure to pore over them and reread them. While the Internet is a great medium for publishing, it's temporary. I think her story deserves a wider audience. As a university librarian, it would be a book I would gladly buy and recommend to nursing and medical students.

I whole heartedly support her if she is writing a book, whether its a compilation of her blog entries or something more traditional in structure. Surely writing a book about infertility is just as helpful as blogging about it. I don't quite understand that artificial divide between published writing and blogs. And why the hell shouldn't she be financially reimbursed for her efforts?

Of course she owns her words and she can sell them if she likes. I think it would have created a lot of goodwill if she'd told the truth about why she was pulling her archives - that she needed to keep them secret to put them in her book. We all wished her well throughout the course of her blog and it seems to me that she was dishonest. It would have been nice if she'd said honestly that she was stopping the blog to write a book. She never said anything about a book even though apparently she made the decision long before she stopped writing her blog. We all helped her sell a book by driving up her traffic numbers and it would have been nice not to have been lied to. A lot of bloggers have book deals - Mimi Smartypants for one - and they don't take away their blog. They have some appreciation and gratitude for their readers. Also, folks don't write books to help people. They write them for money.

Why does the fact that she's writing a book now mean that she was lying before? Am I missing something? She took her archives down because someone had tried to pass off one of her entries as their own writing. And spending time with a baby you've gone through hell trying to have sounds like a good reason to stop blogging to me. Nobody but Getupgrrl can say why she chose to write a book. Maybe it's to help people. Maybe it's for money. Maybe it's for some other personal reason. Whatever the motivation, it's her right to do whatever she wants to do with her story. After all, it's not just her 'story,' it's her life.

I second what Sarandipity wrote

OW, i won't even enter the conversation about whether or not she should, or shouldn't, have pulled her archives. whether she was, or wasn't, being dishonest.

but i can tell you this much: published authors make NOTHING. less than nothing. how do i know this? i'm a published author. bupkus. a dear friend of mine, he had his book on the NYT best seller list for several weeks. made very little. trust me, we writers don't do it for cash.

I couldn't agree more. I was one of those asking her to write a book as I couldn't bear not being able to re read some of her earlier stuff. I'm delighted that that is what she's doing. Whether or not she intended to do that in the first place, it doesn't matter (although my guess would be that she didn't).