Canberra blogger Michelle Mitchell releases memoir, Girl Got Game

It's a welcoming, albeit unusual, first line of a debut novel, and an introduction to the permission Mitchell gives to the busy women to take a moment for themselves and continue flipping through the pages.

The blogger, podcaster and now author of Girl Got Game, speaks to those who tend to underestimate and undersell their own needs. The women, and often mothers, who, as Mitchell writes, probably thought, "Time spent on my self isn't important. This would be selfish of me, to spend time reading for myself", before picking up the book.

She gets it, she says, because she's been there.

It wasn't all that long ago Mitchell herself needed permission to write a book and consider herself a writer.

Mind you, this was after she had spent years writing and producing the blog Glamor Hippie - a lifestyle blog detailing Mitchell's organic and chemical-free life. It's a blog that Mitchell has always been in the fortunate positioning of viewing as a passion project. She's never needed to make a full-time wage from it.

"When my son was going to school, people would ask me for recipes, people would ask me for how I was doing things. I never went into it to make money," she says.

But she did get other things out of it.

Firstly, losing her job as a construction engineer when she became a mum of two in two years gave her some sort of work-life balance back. But it also gave her thousands and thousands of written words; her friend and author Zoya Patel eventually encouraged her to write a book.

While Mitchell was finding her readers were wanting to know more about the woman behind the blog posts, Patel convinced her that the intimate story the audience wanted was worth more than just a blog post.

"I told her I wasn't a writer and [Patel] smacked me over the back of my head and said, 'You are a writer. You go back and look at all of your blog posts and count how many words you've written in the past five years. You are a writer. You have to just admit to yourself that you are a writer'," Mitchell says.

"So I sent her a chapter and she kindly read it for me, because I needed permission. And she was my permission.

"When I got to the point where I wrote the book, I was just going to self publish it and she said 'Don't you dare. You can self publish, once you've sent it to every single publisher in the world, and you haven't got a response'."

Not only did she get a response from Pegasus Publishers, who went on to publish Girl Got Game, but two other publishing houses were also interested.

"I didn't believe in myself and it took three publishers to go hang on, this is good," Mitchell says.

This theme of seeking permission when it comes to the creation of Mitchell's book is interesting, because it doesn't seem evident elsewhere in her life or career. And Mitchell herself says she's an open book, both in person and in the many mediums she uses to communicates.

Girl Got Game is just one example, and there just may be some Canberrans out there dying to know if they have been written about in what is part-memoir, part self-help book.

And some are sure to find themselves - unnamed - in the book's pages. But the thing is, Mitchell also doesn't care what they think.

"People feel that they have a right to you. They feel like once you've opened yourself up, they have a right to have an opinion," she says.

"I've been trolled about my weight. People have commented what's in my shopping trolley. People feel a familiarity with you, and they feel they have a right to talk to you about things or make comments about what you're wearing.

"But I think if you're standing in your truth and you're being authentic, and you're doing it for a reason, then you just have to find that strength from within that.

"And I also found along my journey, I've found like-minded women who are there with you."

The effects of sharing your life in the public eye have only increased in the past six months for Mitchell.

Along with the release of Girl Got Game, she began a podcast with fellow Canberra mum and personal stylist Franki Droulias.

Just like a lot of partnerships in the post-social media world, it came about because Mitchell slid into Droulias' direct messages, asking if they wanted to meet for coffee and chat about collaborating on a project.

Franki and Michelle is the show that - as the tagline says - came about when Droulias wanted to cancel on coffee with Mitchell because she thought she was a "rich bitch".

"She's 40, a mum of three kids, she seemed genuine. She spoke about body image online and I thought OK, I kind of resonate with her," Mitchell says.

"I'm all about personal branding online and a lot of my clients aren't confident enough to put themselves online based on their clothes and what they're wearing and I thought we could do something together.

"We both get a lot of online direct messages. People want something from us. And even if it's a collaboration, it's quite often not worth our time. We're busy mums.

"And she thought I just wanted something from her and she saw some Louis Vuitton on my social media and went, 'I'm out' and she was going to cancel."

As it happens, it didn't take long for the pair to click. The result is a podcast that focuses not only on the pair's individual expertise - styling and online branding - but also things that pop up in everyday life as 40-year-old women and working mothers.

But the unusual thing about the duo is that their first meeting turned out to be one of the only times the pair has communicated in person outside of the studio.

They live different lives, in different circles, and they connect in the studio, where they chat unscripted, recording what Mitchell describes as an organic interest in each others' lives.

"Creating the podcast was just a gut instinct. I think quite often, at a younger age, you don't follow that gut instinct. Knowing at 40 that we don't give this a crack now, it's never gonna happen," she says.

"We didn't tell our husbands exactly what we're going to be talking about either, or our kids.

"Sometimes I'm sure we've shocked quite a few people. But who cares?"

Girl Got Game, by Michelle Mitchell. Pegasus Publishers. $12.99.