Some guy comes to your office and removes the vowels from all the signs.

Welcome to THE DOUGH, an occasional series in which Manjula Martin talks with women in creative professions about money and work.

When I called AB Chao on the phone, she was in New Orleans painting the kitchen cabinets in her new apartment. The cabinets had been “a gross, rental off-white” and Chao was in the middle of a lengthy process of repainting them bright white, not being pleased with the results, then repainting them again. Chao is the kind of person who cares about which color white her cabinets are—she’s a self-employed decorator and interior stylist, though you may know her as a blogger who posts beautiful photographs of her beautiful home on her beautiful website.

Chao has been on the internet since about 1874; as a writer, she’s worked for herself, blogs, magazines, a television show, and at a desk job in communications. Since 2001, Chao’s faithful readers (a.k.a. Chao Nation) have received regular updates on her home (christened Camp Chao), her family (a guitar-playing husband and now-19-year-old daughter), and her headless selfies. In 2008, Chao’s love of photography and design led her to launch a side gig as an interior decorator. By 2012, she had quit her desk job at a telecom company in Monroe, Louisiana — where she grew up — and had relaunched her career as a full-fledged lifestyle blogger and life stylist for hire.

So, as of a few years ago, the business of being AB Chao was looking pretty darn good from the outside. Oh, the cabinets! Oh, the accent tables! Ooooh, that swinging porch bed! As a lifestyle blogger, Chao was genuine, chic, and above all achievable. She could be your cool friend; heck, she could be you, if you only could get your shit together and clear all that crap off your coffee table and develop a genuine Southern “y’all.” Over fourteen years of blogging and designing, Chao had welcomed the internet into her home, and so we felt like we knew her. Then, in 2013, she came out of the closet, telling her readers, “Y’all, I am real gay. For ladies.” She got divorced. She moved. And soon, her blog posts came less frequently. In 2014, she stopped blogging altogether. No farewell post, no “taking a break” — she just stopped. She didn’t, however, stop working. I caught up with her on the phone recently to talk about how she’s making a living now, how she manages her money and her business, and the difference between being a lifestyle blogger and being a real person.

What do you say when people ask, “So, what do you do?”

Wellll… it actually depends on the time of year. I have about 17 different jobs, so if I’m doing a lot of decorating I’ll say, “I’m a decorator,” or if I’m doing a lot of writing I’ll say “writer.”

This conversation first appeared in Scratch magazine’s Q4 2014 issue. Read more Scratch about the business of being a writer here.

In the publishing industry, most of the gatekeepers come from a place of race and class privilege. How does this skewed power dynamic affect the careers of writers of color? Scratch invited our panelists to have a conversation about their experiences as people who walk through those “gates” every day. Novelist and essayist Kiese Laymon, journalist and essayist Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, poet Harmony Holiday, and editor Chris Jackson (Spiegel & Grau) discuss inclusion, community, and how things are or are not different for writers of color in today’s media landscape. Scratch editor Manjula Martin moderates. This conversation was edited for clarity and length.

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Manjula Martin: It’s hard enough to write a book. But being published—and having a career—in an industry that’s overwhelmingly homogenous is an entirely different challenge. To start off, I’m going to put Chris on the spot a bit. You’re the only editor at this table. Can you give us a sense of what the conversation is like in big publishing houses in terms of expanding their lists to include more writers of color and their stories? What’s changing or not changing?

Christopher Jackson: If there has been a shift, it’s been a shift in the direction of there being less inclusiveness in terms of staffing among book publishers than in the past. Publishers Weekly just did their annual salary survey, and they included information about racial diversity for the first time. The sample is small—about 600 people—but the survey showed an industry that is 89 percent white, 3 percent Hispanic, 3 percent Asian, 3 percent mixed race, 1 percent black/African-American, and 1 percent other. So that’s pretty extreme. It’s even worse than I thought. Until I started walking around the hall and doing a head count, and I was like, yeah, that’s about right.

Do you like your job?

1. It’s fine
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