The Four Stages of Being Freshly Pressed

So last Friday, I received this amazing email from the editor of WordPress’ Freshly Pressed. Being Freshly Pressed means your blog post will be featured on WordPress.com – and is made possible by one part skill and three parts luck.

For one, even if you write an awesomely awesome post, the editors have to find you out of the zillion of WordPress blogs. But here’s the real zinger – I was Freshly Pressed for writing about MATH. That’ll show me for going off topic.

Here are the four stages of being Freshly Pressed:

1. Shock
I thought my friends were playing a prank on me. I read the email over and over again. One of the best things about Freshly Pressed is that it features blog posts from unassuming bloggers – ones that have rarely been recognized except by their small but loyal following.

2. Fear
OMG, what if they hate me? I think this rarely happens because WordPress is careful about picking content people will like. But my math article compared a North American fear of math to the African-American community’s fear of drowning. Great, now everyone’s going to think I’m a bigot.

3. Elation
I had to call my boyfriend from a pay phone the day I was Freshly Pressed. I got so many email notifications from comments that my phone died. It was amazing to see how many people the post struck a chord with. And there was almost no hate mail – gotta love the WP community.

5. Motivation
A lot of people will tell you that they don’t care if anyone reads their blog. For me, that’s baloney. If I didn’t care, I’d write posts in a journal. I do care and this was validation that I might doing something right. (Are there right and wrong ways to blog?)

Don’t worry – I won’t let my momentary fame go to my head.

Photo credits: hollowtreeventures.blogspot.com

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