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There’s something mildly intimidating about a writer interviewing a writer. Think of it like being asked to cook mac ‘n cheese for the Iron Chef. Now when that writer being interviewed tosses around terms like “Naval War College” and admits to having been one of the first women ever to be sent out on a combatant warship, comfort food sounds pretty good. Then you meet Sheila Scarborough, a 47-year-old who laughs out loud with no fear of disrupting folks at the next table. A woman who has to hassle with her teenager to get the car. A woman who says, “I’m scared of (just) two things, thermonuclear war and cancer.” From the get-go, you know it’s going to be a fun convo.
“My New Year’s resolution,” Scarborough says at a local java joint, “is to look at my watch more.” Scarborough, who left the structured world of career military for the unrelenting world of online blogging, says she simply loses time. She also professes perfectionist tendencies. “I have an immaculate garage.” How many of us can boast that? But wait, there’s more: “My closets are all organized by type and by color.” By type and color? Yet, the living room, she confesses is “a wreck.” An intriguing combination – just like Scarborough herself.
Sheila Scarborough grew up moving. Her dad was career Navy. She met her husband Chris Fancher while both were on active duty. So moving, change and sacrifice are a way of life. The generally predictable conversation about raising kids while juggling work is anything but. Scarborough has two children, 16-year-old Nancy and 9-year-old Thomas. “[When the kids were little], I was deployed quite often with my daughter – with my son, I was in the NATO Headquarters.” As for preschool, “(Nancy) went to a Japanese preschool … My son went to a Dutch kindergarten.” (Scarborough was stationed in both Sasebo, Nagasaki, Japan and in The Netherlands.) It wasn’t until a change in the law, late in her career, that women were allowed on combatant ships, which Scarborough says she found frustrating.
While Scarborough was at sea, her husband played Mr. Mom, which helped her “compartmentalize.” The question comes up whether as a mom at sea she worried about her own safety. “I’m certainly quite obsessive, but I’m not scared of much. My attitude is you buy yourself a half-million dollar life insurance policy; you go stick your face in your life and what happens, happens.”
“If anyone wants to see how I write or how I approach the world I have four blogs, my Facebook page, my Twitter and my LinkedIn accounts,” says Scarborough, laughing yet again. She’s taken her approach to life, applied it to blogging and stuck her own face right in. “A blog is a way for you to present yourself the way you always wish you could be seen without editors messing with your stuff.”
When Scarborough retired from the Navy three years ago, she was second-in-command of ROTC at the University of Florida, and faced with a daunting question: Now what? “The Navy had been too wonderful for me to do something boring just to earn a paycheck.” She figured, “whatever I do next, I’ve got to love as much as I love going off to sea.” The answer was clear. “I love to write and I love to travel.”
“I had a foot massage in Beijing.” Beijing? Scarborough was recently invited to a conference for Chinese bloggers, a chance to network and gather blogging material for Family Travel Logue (listed in Real Simple magazine as one of three Best Travel Blogs) and Perceptive Travel. So she found herself sitting in the massage chair, “between one guy who’s read my family travel blog … who now has a family travel company himself … and a 22-year-old Dutch guy who’ll run the next web conference in Amsterdam.” There’s that full throttle laugh again. “There we all are with our feet stuck out, in Beijing having a foot massage, saying, ‘We love the internet!’”
“Don’t be old!” Scarborough says in a scolding tone pulling her hair back to reveal she’s going gray. There is purpose there. She now offers workshops with fellow Austinite Connie Reece, to share what they’ve learned. “Connie’s in her 50s, I’m in my 40s. We consider how we look as part of our brand. Women want to learn from someone who looks like them.” If you’re not on board, you’re overboard. “If you do any sort of communicating in your business, you have to understand all the ways to communicate.”
Since retiring from the Navy, Scarborough has spoken at the BlogHer Conference in Chicago; has developed Perspective Travel with two women she’s never met, “but if they walked in the room, I’d feel I’d known them forever because we’re part of this community;” and will be blogging from SXSW. She claims to be an introvert (this writer is not buying it) who loves the “comment” section on each blog page. As we leave, she pulls a pad out. Meticulous print covers the thin lines of each yellowed page; notes on China, workshops, a marketing plan. Wonderfully low-tech in a high-tech world – like comfort food.
More Info:
www.SheilaScarborough.com