“When I first told my husband what I was going to do, he was dubious,” says Stallings. “He’s the one who brings me the laptop in bed. But I’m in my 10th week now and it’s going great. I’m doing a lot more reading and crafting and even taking a dance class.”

Stallings calls her project a “raging success,” although there are still occasional twinges of online envy.

“My husband’s not doing the unplugged thing; he doesn’t feel he needs to,” she says. “So there are nights that I’m unplugged and he’s checking his e-mail and surfing on his laptop, and I’m like, ‘Grrrrr.’”

Read the full article.

Reporter: A lesson for home as well. Ariel Meadow Stallings evenings were constant busy work. On the internet, on her cell phone, email from work.

Ariel: I would just watch hours sort of slip away.

Reporter: Now, one night ever week, she turns off the electronics.

Ariel: There’s just a re-engagement in the world — that sense of how time passes.

Reporter: …Discovering life just works better when there’s time to think.

Watch full segment here.

By Jill Serjeant

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Sharon Sarmiento knew it was time to unplug when she realized she was blogging in her dreams and hearing imaginary instant messages.

For Ariel Meadow Stallings, it was the hours lost while surfing the Internet that left her feeling like she had been in a drunken blackout.

Stallings, 33, a Seattle author, blogger and part-time marketing manager for Microsoft Corp, made a resolution in January to spend “52 Nights Unplugged” this year.

“I love technology. I’m not a Luddite. But I realized it was a problem when I would sit down to check my email and it was almost like I would wake up six hours later and find I was watching videos of puppies on YouTube.

“I’d try and think what I had been doing for the past two hours and I had no idea. I associate that kind of time loss with blackouts when you’re drunk,” she said.

Read the full article.

By Michelle Goodman

Ariel Meadow Stallings, a marketing manager on Microsoft’s staffing team, publishes the company’s “Microspotting” blog.

The job: “I never thought my silly Internet addictions would actually be useful,” says freelance writer and author Ariel Meadow Stallings, who’s kept a personal blog since 2000. But in the Microsoft job she’s had for the past year, being Facebook-savvy isn’t just useful — it’s essential. As a marketing manager on the software giant’s staffing team, the Seattleite spends much of her time publishing “Microspotting”, a blog profiling some of Microsoft’s most notable employees, from a Peruvian rockstar to a technical editor known as That Goth Girl to the company’s infamous mystery blogger Mini-Microsoft.

Read the full article.

THIS movement to unplug appears to be gaining traction everywhere, from the blogosphere, where wired types like Ariel Meadow Stallings (http://electrolicious.com/unplugged) brag about turning off the screen one day a week (and how many books they’ve read so far this year), to the corporate world.

For the record, I believe the journalist is referring to some other “wired type” with the book reading thing. I could never brag about how many books I’ve read this year, since the number is about, oh, two — the most recent being a vampire novel written for 13 year old girls.

…But speaking of books, cross your fingers that this makes things easier for my literary agent, who’s been shopping around my book pitch for 52 Nights Unplugged: A Digital Junkie’s Rehab.

Anyway, I love the closing paragraph of the article:

Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.

Read the whole thing: I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really.

Ariel’s Story
“The story of my ladder-climbing at Lotus is that I built the ladder,” Ariel Meadow Stallings laughs from her Seattle domicile on a chill December afternoon. Lotus is a magazine with content centered on electronic dance-music communities, and Ariel is its editor-in-chief. In a couple years’ time, she rose from reading Lotus to running it.

While working at Lotus, Ariel has continually diversified her abilities in the communications field, working jobs that require different skills. She had worked organizing content categories for a Web site, editing for Microsoft, and writing product reviews for Amazon.com. Holding these jobs has paid her bills as she puts together each issue of Lotus.

Ariel, 25, learned an early appreciation of writing and gained the confidence to pursue her ambitions. Her parents showed her women could have successful careers.

“I was raised in a very gender-egalitarian family,” Ariel remembers. “My mom was and is very career-driven, as is my father. But both important careers: she’s a midwife educator, he works to convince more people to use public transportation.”

Ariel’s parents also taught her to love stories. Evenings, her father read books to her. At age 7, Ariel began writing. She kept a journal sporadically until she was in seventh grade, when she began to write every day.

“Long before I’d ever been published, I was writing and writing and writing and writing,” Ariel says. “Granted, I was writing about what happened at lunch that day, but I was still writing pages and pages everyday.”

When she left for college, attending the University of Washington, she didn’t pursue a communications degree. The communications program there was on the verge of being eliminated, so she majored in sociology and focused on media.

Ariel didn’t bust straight through college. In 1996, she took a year off and moved to San Francisco. She did ho-hum work at a law firm — filing, making photocopies, and typing. She also dived full-force into the local rave scene. Despite the diversion raving offered, six months into her break from school, Ariel found herself bored. In what she calls “a rare moment of self-awareness,” she asked herself what she would really like to do, and realized the answer was to write. Her first published articles appeared in a San Francisco women’s magazine called Spunk!.

Finding Lotus Magazine
In January of 1997, Ariel found Lotus Magazine in a San Francisco club. It snatched her attention from the flickering lights and raging beats.

“I totally forgot about dancing the rest of the night,” Ariel remembers. “I was hunkered in the bathroom reading the magazine — it the only place in the club with decent lighting!” Lotus’ content focuses on rave culture, publishing articles on health, spirituality, and community. It’s distributed free: stacks sit in cafes and music stores waiting for hungry readers.

Ariel was impressed with her first read of Lotus and called its publishers, volunteering to write event reviews. Then-editor and co-founder Jon Kavulic asked her to send a sample of her writing so they could check her style. Most reviews that run in Lotus are about 400 words long, but Ariel submitted a 1,200-word review of a party in February of 1997. She never heard back from the publishers. Weeks later, a friend told her she’d seen her article in issue 7 of Lotus (it’s now on issue 29).

“I picked up the magazine, and there was my review … in all its terribly over-written entirety,” Ariel laughs.

Fall of 1997, she left California to return to Washington and finish college. She told the Lotus publishers she was taking the magazine with her back up to Seattle.

“I basically appointed myself regional editor,” Ariel chuckles. “I was like, ‘I am now the Northwest editor.’ I had a vision for the magazine…even though I was just a nobody!” The publishers didn’t argue, because, as Ariel points out, “who could complain about an enthusiast offering to promote your product for free?” First they only sent her one box per issue, then two, then more. In Seattle, Ariel organized distribution, recruited writers, developed content ideas, and edited regional articles. More Northwest-related content ran in the magazine, and its popularity up and down the West Coast grew.

Ariel’s attack of the project was right in keeping with her character. “She’s an incredibly hard worker,” says Naomi D. Sheikin, who met Ariel in 1998 when Naomi was doing a photography internship in Seattle. Naomi’s been a photographer for Lotus for two years since.

“If Ariel has something in mind, she’s gonna make sure the it’s seen through to the end. She finishes everything she starts and is incredibly ambitious and determined.”

Ariel worked on Lotus without pay while taking 15 to 20 credits a quarter through her senior year at the University of Washington. Summer of 1998, she earned a bachelor of art’s degree. Also that summer Ariel scored the top position at Lotus after Jon Kavulic, the magazine’s founding editor resigned. Jon says, “I thought she was the person the best qualified — intellectually and in terms of her intent — to take over the magazine.”

He describes the original vision of Lotus was of a medium was to express its creators’ views of the electronic dance-music community, and to educate the community.

As editor-in-chief, Ariel manages a staff of about 60 volunteer writers. She helps them develop story ideas, assigns stories, enforces deadlines, finds new writers, and edits the material for publication. She says she has used her experience at Lotus to break into other work in the communications field.

Working “Above-Ground”
While editing for the underground, Ariel has also worked to further her career in the “above-ground.” In 1998, she headed up the education section for Oxygen.com’s parenting pages. She spent hours online creating categories of education-related content for other people to write about. In 1999, Ariel was a technical editor for Microsoft. She edited a help manual for a Window’s NT product. She commuted an hour each way to her Microsoft job then edited Lotus late into the night at home. In 2000, she began working for Amazon.com, reviewing products for lawn and patio, consumer electronics and kitchen departments. She’s reviewed everything from label makers to lawn gnomes. Her favorite? An ear- and nose-hair trimmer.

She says she’s getting to the point where she’s considering focusing more on her other jobs “because I feel I have more to learn from them.” She knows she will move on from Lotus at some point, if for no other reason than to enliven it. “To keep the magazine contemporary, current, and filled with passion, it needs to be constantly infused with fresh breath,” she says.

Naomi Sheiken believes Ariel could have a brilliant future in publishing. “If she did continue in magazine work, I could see her in charge of a nationally-acclaimed magazine,” Naomi says. “She probably could’ve turned Lotus into something bigger than it is now. There have been offers to sell the magazine and to make a profit, but she didn’t want to sell out like that.”