Do you write for others or for yourself? I was asked a variation of this question in a recent interview for a parenting magazine.

I’m definitely conscious of the fact that others are reading. In fact it keeps me going, knowing that somewhere out there, someone cares about what I’m saying. If you’re like me and would like some writing ideas, read on!

The first thing you need to do is some housekeeping on your existing posts, and that means:

• Weeding out typos
• Checking your grammar and making sure you’re using words in the right way
• Getting rid of cliches (or if you have to use one, put a new spin on it, e.g. instead of writing “I can’t understand why everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon,” you could try “Who wants to jump on a bandwagon that’s got a wheel in the ditch?“)

That’s the easy bit. The hard part is getting to the “soul” of your blog, which is what keeps your readers coming back. (It’s something I’m still working on myself.)

For a start, you could keep these questions in mind:

• Is this something I would read if it were on someone else’s blog?
• Why should anyone care about what I’m writing?

I don’t follow many parenting or kid-related blogs, but the ones that I’ve bookmarked have this in common:

• Links to useful information
• Original ideas (for crafts, learning, etc)
• A refreshing way of looking at the world
• A sense that the writer is a positive, down-to-earth person
• Humour is a plus

Above all I appreciate honesty.

I can be crummy towards people, sometimes yell at my children, often get road rage, and have even thrown a chair once while fighting with Ben (not at him, but towards the ground, thankfully we laugh at this now).

This made me smile because I’ve smashed one guitar (Alf’s) and torn or cut up countless things (including our Marriage Prep cert which Alf later had to replace so that we could get married in church) and I once threw a bottle at Alf and in return, was shoved so hard that I fell off my chair and lost the Mars bar I was eating to my dog Love.

We laugh at our “punch-ups” too (they involve actual punching, though way more comical than anything on TV). I have a bad temper, let’s put it that way. Oh, and yes, Alf will hit a girl if she’s game enough to start a fight. If you have the guts to throw a punch, you’d better have the guts to take one too. We both believe that. But we haven’t had a bust-up in a while so it’s all good.

For example, dinner tonight consisted of me mixing a can of baked beans with a can of corn and drenching the shit out of it with some tabasco sauce. I then proceeded to snarf it out of the pot while standing over the sink pounding a Diet Coke.

Not much better than the lunch I attempted to make myself today. Left the noodles in the pot for too long (because I was reading MetroDad) and they’d swelled up by the time I remembered them, so they had to be dumped. That, and I had to scrape noodle bits off my hotplate. At least I got to enjoy my drink.

I am having problems picking out even clothes to wear to pick up Jamie from school. If you have been to Jamie’s school and seen how some of other moms dress, you’d see me stick out like a sore thumb, pretty much like Megan Fox’s thumb.

Ok, I don’t have a wardrobe. I mean I do, but there’s hardly anything in there that belongs to me.

I made the mistake of spring cleaning before I could afford to buy new clothes, and now I’m left with two black dresses, a black gym top, two pairs of leggings (which Alf hates), and two blue dresses (one long, one short). Plus a bunch of Threadless tees and two traditional Indian tops that I received as a present recently (what a godsend!). Oh, and a dress that’s reserved for weddings and formal dinners, if not I’d be wearing it to death like everything else I own.

That’s it. Really. I’m also guilty of stealing Alf’s underwear when I run out of my own, but I promise never to wear them out. (I think VPLs would be the least of my problems then.)

So yeah, honesty works, possibly better than anything else I’ve suggested above. Try it!