Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Faraway Places...

I am working almost 12 hours a day right now, so I am reposting an essay from simpler times when I had more time to write.

When I look back at the beautiful places I have been privileged to visit, I realize that my memories of these trips have been distilled over time to a few bright images, not all of which have been caught with a camera. ^{Click on image to enlarge}

I treasure the moments of breathtaking beauty from our visits to Kauai, Maui, Oahu, and Hawaii which were enhanced by the warm welcome we received from tourist-savvy natives.

Sometimes the single lasting memory is of a happy moment spent with a loved one. Some of these moments were captured by helpful passing strangers, like this shot of Gretchen and me on a beautiful and isolated north coast road on the Island of Maui.

The glass is neither half-empty nor half-full

The obvious usefulness of the half-empty/half-full metaphor obscures the deeper truth that lies behind it.

We are able to judge someone's ability to contribute to a project, a business, or our lives by simply observing whether they consider situations as declining or growing.

"Half-empty' people view the world around them with dismay and take the position that the best in life is over and all that remains are the dregs. No matter what anyone does, their attention is firmly fixed on the past and its supposedly better days. As a result, their ability to exert a positive influence on anything around them is negligible.

We may consider such people as losers. The truth in their eyes is infinitely worse. they consider that they have already lost and they are resignedly staving off their inevitable descent into oblivion. These people live with the specter of imminent failure every day. The wonder is not that they are depressed, the wonder is that they are able to continue living at all.

The mere fact that they are able to continue working and living, while whining and grumbling as they do, hints that under it all they secretly hope that there is some slight chance of rescue.

And there is.

Life sweeps onward through time and space, even for those who are hiding under rocks like a hellgrammite. There is no inevitability that things will "improve" or "decline". There is only change and your own potential to exert control over some part of that change.

At at given moment, you can bring about a dramatic change in your own future by deciding to confront what it is that you are doing and how it is related to your own chances of personal survival. It is this incredibly powerful, yet subtle action of facing something and taking responsibility for some part of it that starts you an the road to taking control of your destiny.

Without getting into the broader issues of looking out for oneself versus looking out for self, others and for humanity, it is sufficient to say that the road to personal and community survival starts with taking responsibility for your own condition in life and acting to change it for the better.

This is true, even if you have struggled and lost every time you tried to change things before. All that happened was that you didn't observe what part you played in your demise. You could have been lacking information, because all the will-power and determination in the world will not help you if you are being wrong-headed about who is to blame for your present condition.

I say this, not from some lofty height of divinely inspired enlightenment, but from having been guided by others to improve my ability to confront my actions over time until I was able to see that I exert control over life only to the extent that I can confront it.

If you would like to see things get better instead or worse, I suggest that you might want to learn how to observe what is happening and take responsibility for some small part of it. It could be enlightening. Results may vary...

The glass of life is continually being refilled. Make sure you are prepared to drink deeply of it.

Growing wiser instead of just growing older

LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE

As we age, we have experiences that range from incredibly good to disastrous. If we survive these experiences, we have a chance to learn from them and go on to further adventures. If we get stuck in these experiences, we merely get older.

I'd like to suggest that charging into the barricades of life with guns blazing and a total determination to succeed is a winning strategy, as long as you keep track of the odds against you. If the odds against you keep rising, you have made a tactical error and need to fall back to a point of safety and regroup.

There is nothing wrong in making a few mistakes. It's making the same mistake over and over that reveals your level of insanity. You are led into making mistakes when you have insufficient or incorrect information. Learning from mistakes allows for continuous improvement. There are some professions like design engineering and programming which are simply organized methods for learning from earlier mistakes.

If you learn from your experiences instead of repressing them or fixating on them, you will surely achieve a measure of wisdom over time. I think that is a happier course of action than avoiding life or regretting life. You become smarter over time, because your experience has turned into knowledge.

BEING STUCK IN THE PAST

Let's look at the other end of the spectrum, the people who seem to be getting older but not wiser. You will find that their attention is stuck in the past, either on their failures or more surprisingly, their successes.

Too many times, the high school football star, the Homecoming Queen, and those fortunate children who are in the right place to become real celebrities on the stage or screen, are unable to move on and duplicate that success elsewhere.

This can even happen at work. A salesperson can have an incredible season which catapults his or her company into a new operating range. If the company promotes them to a managerial position, they may never again achieve the success they once had. If they cannot change and move on, they remain a perpetual has-been in their own minds although they have as much ability as they ever did.

Lets looks at the more usual case, the disaster which changes your life. If you have really failed hard at something, whether a career, a marriage, or a business of your own, you know how hard it is to pick up the pieces and move on. Death of a loved one falls into the same category. The only thing I can tell you from my own experiences is that all of these are surmountable and you will go on to happier days with renewed love of life if you persevere.

THE BOTTOM LINE

It is almost impossible to create a future while looking backwards

Get counseling, if you can, but do not allow yourself to pine over past glories or past defeats. The beautiful sadness of regret may look good in tragic novels, but it doesn't do much for real life. Appreciate the fact that you are still alive and contimue to create your own tomorrows.

Set a goal, any goal, and work toward it by using all of the experience you have gained. You will get wiser as you get older and you may enjoy life a lot more.

This book is not for everyone. Should you read it?

If you are one of the fortunate few who are happy in your job and don't wish to rock the boat, by all means don't read Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day.

On the other hand, if your work is not going well, you should buy and read this book. It will help you analyze what is actually going on and will provide workable solutions you can actually implement.

Here are a few ways this book can help you:

1. It should help you extricate yourself with dignity from almost any adverse situation you find yourself in.

2. It will provide you with guiding principles for improving almost any employment situation where there is still room to negotiate.

3. It can guide you out of a dead-end job.

4. It can rekindle your ability to create a job for yourself, where you do something you are passionate about.

5. It will give you renewed certainty of your actual worth to a company and show you how to play the game as an employee in the 21st century.

If you are truly enjoying your job, you are very fortunate. Buy this book for your friends who aren't doing as well as you are. They will thank you.

You don't need permission to create - part 4

Rejection is not good for your state of mind or your creativity.

I consider that rejection is what occurs when you don't set your expectations properly.  When you have unrealistic expectations, you will set yourself up for rejection constantly. Your jobs won't work out, your career plans won't work out, and your books won't get published.

Almost all of us remember exploring the dating scene at one time or other and getting rejections that shattered our self-esteem. Usually we discovered that we were trying to establish a relationship without taking the first steps of getting in communication with the other person.

People new to sales run into the same kind of rejection, because they try to close without really having a conversation with the customer. Salespeople who care about their customers rarely experience rejection.

Authors invite rejection by sending material to publishers who have no interest in their type of story. Even self-published authors can fall into this trap by trying to mass-market their book without finding out where their audience is and what that audience wants.

Dan Poynter and John Harnish make a good case for marketing your book before you write it. If you have done enough market research, informal or not, you will have a good idea what people need and are willing to pay for. This seems to work in the case of romance novels, but your book may just be a clone of a thousand other novels. That's not my idea of writing. It feels too much like work!

Try this instead:

1. Find something YOU want to write about.
2. Learn all you can about the subject, the size of the audience, where the books can be sold, and how many books have been written recently on the subject.
3.  Find out who wants and needs your book and what they are willing to pay for it. This takes work, but every bit of information you acquire puts you in a stronger position when it comes to getting your book published.

By the time you are finished, you will have a good idea of your chances of making money publishing this book. At this point you will be ready to decide whether to go POD, self-publish, or go the traditional route through Cousin Andrew who is a senior editor at Harper.

If you understand the odds against success as a new author and choose to seek out an agent who will get you published, you might be fully prepared for the length of time it will take you to get published. If you have set your expectations properly, you will probably hang in there long enough to get published, even if it takes many years.

It doesn't matter which route you choose, the important thing is to proceed logically so your expectations stay realistic all through the process.

This is where you should read Dan Poynter's Self Publishing Manual again and again, because he does a marvelous job of advising you without crushing your spirit. The same applies to John F. Harnish and his book on POD.

I want you to write and be published. The way to do this is to proceed at your own pace and avoid situations where you will face unnecessary rejection. We know that there is no shortage of shelf space on the Internet or at Amazon.com, so your first barrier to overcome is to get your book published. I think you will be able to do that.

All you require after that is a killer marketing campaign, which you may not have money for, or an understanding of viral marketing and how you can use it to get your book into the hands of as many readers as possible.

I can't give you expert advice on that yet, but I can share some interesting experiences with Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day. I'll cover them in a future post.

You don't need permission to create - part 3

Do not tolerate needless barriers.

Let's say that you have gotten to the point that you can consistently write material that others want to read. Now it's time to clear away any barriers between your work and a wider audience.

Notice I said audience, not customers. We do best when we take one step at a time. You have a work in progress or even complete, but it isn't a product until it is in a form that can be exchanged for money.

You need to determine your audience, and it isn't everyone. If you intend to be a published writer, you need to establish a dialog with your target audience so that you know what they want to read and what they will pay for it.

One of the easiest and cheapest ways to develop a conversation with a potential audience is for you to have a weblog. Your audience can be defined as those people who come back again and again to comment on your posts or who send you emails asking how the book is coming, even when there isn't one yet. After a relatively short time, perhaps a few months, you should know who is really interested in your book and will buy it if the price is right.

If you are a writer and don't have a weblog, you are handicapping yourself needlessly. Your only hope to get published is through the traditional publishing structure. If you enjoy being invalidated, ignored, and being put down as a nuisance, traditional publishing has lots of that for you. You will be in good hands.

On the other hand, if you value your sanity you will not let yourself be put in a position where you wait helplessly to be selected out of thousands of applicants for a marginally remunerative opportunity. When there are tens of thousands of new writers striving to be selected by struggling publishers, you are looking at a bottleneck of enormous magnitude. This is a HUGE barrier between you and your prospective buyers!

Lets get back to basics. The only barrier that will stop you is the one which makes you lose hope. Lack of money, time, or sleep will not do that unless you are also suffering from the REAL barrier which is invalidation (ridicule, humiliation, criticism) by someone whose opinion is important to you.

Some advice here: If you are doing your best to excel as a writer and are working steadily to improve yourself, and you are being invalidated for trying to be a writer, you need a reality check. You are trying to live normally in the presence of a toxic individual. You might as well try staying healthy while swigging poison. You need a change of scenery.

Take a cold, hard look at what you are trying to create. You want to write and publish a book and presumably develop a career as a writer. You don't have time to develop a bulletproof personality, so the sane way to proceed is to choose a path that does not automatically set you up for a loss.

You should expect to work hard, very hard to get your book published, but you shouldn't allow yourself to be put down because you are an unknown writer. That truly is the way to madness. Don't do it.

Self-publishing or POD publishing puts YOU in control of the process. There is no shortage of competent POD companies or short-run printers. There is no shortage of competent designers of all types who can take your manuscript and package it for printing. All you need to supply is talent and money.

You may say, "I knew there was a catch!"

You need to wake up and smell the coffee. Someone always has to supply talent and money!

If a publisher is supplying the money, he will go for the most readily salable talent he can get. Is that you? Not without a track record! You are way back in line behind the writers who have already demonstrated that they can sell books. Traditional publishing is a zero-sum game. If Grisham is available, there are no production slots open for your book.

You need an opportunity to publish your book at a price you can afford. POD publishing will allow you to do that. Once you have demonstrated that your books will sell, other opportunities will open up for you.

The next thing we need to consider is how will you sell your books when you can't stand more rejection. I will address that in a future post. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, keep writing.

You don't need permission to create - part 2

If you have what it takes to become a writer, this simple process will kick start your writing ability.

First of all, stop worrying about what people will think of your writing. There is plenty of time for that when you try to make money selling your work.

If you want to be a writer, the first and foremost thing you MUST do is to uncork the creative bottle and let the genie out. You must get yourself to the point where you can sit down and easily write 500 or 1000 words about anything that interests you.

You get this ability very simply. You write for an hour or until you reach 500 words every day and you continue this until you find that you want to write 1000 or 2000 words every day.

The same thing applies to drawing, painting, and any sort of designing. Until you have done drawings, paintings or designs every day, you will still be struggling with the mechanics of the matter instead of capturing ideas for posterity.

When I say write, I mean write, not polish and finagle the language around until it reads like one of William Gibson's novels. You write by keyboarding your ideas, one after another until you gain the ability to write easily and without effort.

Let us say you have never done dialog, for example. Have you ever considered that you could learn to write through the following process:

1. Start by simply writing snatches of dialog for an hour or so, using your memory as a guide.

2. Concentrate on capturing the essence of the exchange, rather than worrying about the paragraph format and the punctuation. If you get stuck during this first attempt, find a novel and read enough dialog until you get an idea how it appears on the page. Then write for an hour or until you have a big win doing it.

3. When you are finished, put your work away until tomorrow and get on with your life. During the time you are not writing, listen to conversations and think how you would describe them in print.

You will probably find yourself looking in books to see how other writers do dialog. Don't spend too much time on this yet, just get the idea how interesting dialog is written.

4. Go back to your writing the next day and see what changes you might make to make the dialog more real or more believable. Now this is really important - Don't make changes in what you have written!

Spend your time writing NEW dialog that  incorporates what you have already learned. Do not spend much time rewriting or polishing. The product you want is pages and pages of NEW dialog.

End off when you have written 500 words or so or an hour has passed, whichever comes first. Put away your work and don't mess with it. Go out and live life.

5. Listen to conversations with a sharper ear this time and look at some pages of dialog in books to see what else you could do to make your writing more realistic. Repeat step #4.

If you continue this process for about a week, you will accumulate a ton of experience on writing dialog. You may not be fluent yet, but you should be able to recognize great dialog as opposed to mediocre dialog.

At this point, you might want to look at some articles and books about writing dialog. They will make sense now and you may be able to incorporate this data into your writing.

On the other hand, you may decide that a book or article doesn't make sense because it espouses a style that doesn't fit what you need. That's OK too, because when you actually start writing, your powers of observation are sharpened. You will begin to exercise judgment as to what is useful to you.

There is lots more to be learned, but by following this process of doing, refining, repeat until enlightened, you will smoothly and certainly achieve the ability to write passable dialog. Once you are there, you can tackle another skill while continuing to move your dialog writing to a professional level.

Little by little, you can become a writer who can actually write. Then it is time to decide what you could write that people would want to read. I will cover that in a future post.

You can see that this process of learning by doing is quite different from the usual regime which typically goes like this:

1. study examples of great writing,
2. write an exercise,
3. spend lots of time discussing the exercise
4. Repeat 1-3 until the course is over.
5. write final exercise.
6. discuss

If you have tried the usual regimes and are not writing prolifically, you might want to give my suggestion a whirl. This approach was first espoused in the book, Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande.

I read her book and followed one of her recommended exercises until I looked forward to writing every day. At that point, I had written 60,000 words of a loosely connected series of fictional incidents which may eventually become a Sci-Fi novel. I had not written fiction since the third grade, so this process obviously worked.

I did not do this exercise to produce a novel, I did it to acquire the ability to crank out interesting copy on demand. Once I achieved the ability, I found opportunities to use it. You can do the same.

You don't need permission to create - part 1

Formal education has its downside...

Many kids in my generation grew up with the image of a college education as the only sure ticket out of a life of genteel poverty or manual labor. As an Engineering graduate, that was certainly true for me. On the other hand, I've seen many talented people earning college degrees that did not prepare them for life in the twentieth century, or the twenty-first.

Education is an absolute necessity, but the most able people I know are mainly self-taught. They went through the educational system, but they didn't drink the KoolAid. By that, I mean that they somehow managed to think for themselves at an early age and didn't automatically think of the instructors as Ultimate Sources of Knowledge.

They probably discovered, as I did, that you have to find your own voice, no matter what field you are in. You cannot expect someone else to give you one. Fortunately, there are some professors who do everything they can to encourage you to strike out on your own. Sometimes it works.

You don't need permission to live, and you don't need permission to create.

In fact, you will almost never get permission to create something original, because you are always breaking some rule when you do so.

When you experience the kind of formal education that requires you to sit, listen, make notes, and regurgitate for credit, your success tends to make you wary of striking out on your own. After all, you have achieved high marks by being an efficient sponge and spitting back what the instructor wanted to hear. You may even find that independent research gets you into trouble because your sources conflict with the instructor's opinions or political leanings.

Even if you have a top-notch education from the very "best" of schools, you are being given a carefully selected subset of the total knowledge available, because there isn't time to cover or even discuss data that won't be on the "exams".

You are also exposed to the viewpoint that there are hundreds of important people in your field who are writing books and papers that you must read in order to keep up. If you listen to this advice, and many do, you are dooming yourself to be a follower, a wannabe, a perpetual student.

Let's take the subject of creative writing. There is an infinite amount that can be learned about dialogue, tempo, voice, mood, plot, conflict, characterization, viewpoint, etc. and so forth. Let us look at the real purpose of taking courses in this subject. Are we going to become experts on creative writing as a subject, or are we going to write creatively and entertain readers?

I see too many talented people taking course after course in subjects like creative writing. They spend years preparing instead of years writing. On the other hand, I see people publishing story after story with all sorts of flaws, but they seem to be getting those stories out and are improving as they write.

The bottom line is this: If you elect to follow experts and do not wish to create on your own until you are expert, you have little chance to ever excel. You will be too old to hold a brush or use a keyboard!

Here's a radical suggestion: If you want to write, write every day for a few hours until you are good at it. You will know when that happens, because people will start asking you how you do it or wanting you to write books.

Sure, you should take courses, but as an ADJUNCT to your writing, not as a PREREQUISITE. If you are already writing, you will be in a much better frame of mind to evaluate advice and instruction. Furthermore, you must keep writing, or designing new work all of the time, not polishing and re-polishing some precious little work until it meets with an instructor's approval.

Turn out as much work as you can. You will learn so much more than by grinding over and over on the same thing.

Writing, designing, composing anything is a craft. Editing, reviewing, criticising are entirely different and non-creative analytical activities. Don't try to do both at one time. Your work will suffer.

This post was inspired by a visit to the site of one of my favorite creative people. She is just one of many who should already be in print.

Enough badgering and she will be. :)

Integrity 101

I hear a lot about lack of integrity on the part of individuals and organizations, so I thought I would throw in my two cents worth to make this integrity concept more easily understood.

These classic definitions of integrity appear at dictionary.com:

1. Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code.
2. The state of being unimpaired; soundness.
3. The quality or condition of being whole or undivided;

A more action-oriented definition appeared on the marketing weblog wantrepreneur.

A great definition of integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is looking.

Read the entire post, it's worth your while.

It's decision time again...

It's 4:00 am and the house is quiet. I am sitting here deciding whether to launch myself into the future or down memory lane. I am at the keyboard in this predawn hour because a realization about life woke me up, then kicked off other realizations which finally banished any chance of sleeping until I wrote something down.

I had this expanding perception of how our decisions drive us through life. Basically, each decision creates a new future which we step into all unsuspecting. Here are some examples: