Archive for June 2010

Paul & Meryl in Hawaii, July 1998

Blackjack years ago today, my husband and I said our I dos. We still very much do. He still makes me laugh and laughs at the right time when I try to say something funny. Does being married for 21 years make us officially legal as a couple? Yes, that was an oxymoron.  Wow, in 10 years of running this blog (as of June 1), I never shared the story of how Paul and I met. Would you believe I was embarrassed to tell the story until about ten years ago? I’ll let Paul tell you the story as he recently wrote this.

“The advent of home computer opened the world up for Meryl. In fact, you could call Meryl and I the original online daters. Back in the early days of home computing (pre-Internet), people joined bulletin board systems (BBSes). Meryl and I belonged to several of the same BBSes and we traded many messages back and forth.

“We finally met in person at a picnic that the SysOp (system operator who ran a BBS) held for his users. After meeting, we went back to posting back and forth and it wasn’t until months later that we actually started dating. (Two days before her 18th birthday… yes, I robbed the cradle.) Our first date was watching Tootsie in her room. It was one of the few movies at the time that were closed-captioned.”

For a long time, I told people we met at a picnic. (True! Since it was our first in-person meeting.) At the time, BBSes weren’t cool and I didn’t want to look nerdier than I already did.

The photo comes from our 10th anniversary celebration and one of the most amazing vacations we’ve ever taken together. Technically, it was our 9th anniversary. I was three months pregnant and we knew that we would prefer to stay home with the baby the following year. (That baby would be our recent 5th grade graduate.)

Brain food…

• One Week Down, A Bit of Hindsight: Allison Winn Scotch shares her experience one week after her book’s launch. Just received my copy of her latest, The One That I Want: A Novel. Now to find time to read it between club reading and business reading.
• Freelancing During an Illness: Who wants to think about such things and curse ourselves? Better to be prepared. Sometimes you can prepare when you know you’re having surgery like I did and provided 10 tasks to prepare for time off.
• 50 Fancy Words That Stump NY Times Readers: Here’s the list in PDF. Surprised to see “overhaul” and “hubris.”
• One-sentence Summary Critiques and Tips: You may think you wouldn’t do this — but sometimes we’re too close to the work.
• Sleep and Your Productivity: Count on me being asleep between 10 and 10:30pm CST every night. It’s a habit I’ve had since the first job. Oh, sure, I’ve stayed up past that and learn fast why I don’t do it often. Going to bed one hour later than normal can throw the whole next day upside down. I feel fatigued with strained eyes before I even look at the monitor. I take longer to finish tasks. The only downside is attending special nighttime events. As much fun as I’m having, it can be tough to make it past 11pm. When I threw a big family celebration in 2007, I could not function after everyone left. Thank goodness I had some wonderful family members used to staying up late who helped with cleanup while I played zombie.

And for fun because we’re allowed…

• 5 Unusual Stickers for Your iPad: Pac-man is my fave. [Link: Aaron Lee]
• 10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling: Love this from the Oatmeal. Almost enough to buy the poster, but hey I got young’uns in the house. Oatmeal’s How to Use an Apostrophe and What Your Email Address Says about Your Computer Skills also rock. [Link: Josh Hanagarne]
• Another 10 Far-Out Father’s Day Gifts: Father’s Day is next week… some ideas.
• The Most Magical Paper Craft Castle in the World: Breathtaking especially with the lighting.
• The 25 Most Unfortunate City and Town Names in the World: Gotta be a fascinating story behind most of ‘em. I’ve been to Hell in Grand Cayman and did the tourist thing sending a postcard home from Hell through its post office.

You do it. I do it. Everyone does it, even babies. Babies do it with a little help from their parents. We all follow processes. We do things step-by-step because it works.

Babies cry, mess their diapers, sleep, eat, repeat. Many parents create a schedule for them — whether on paper or in the brain — to ensure they fill up on fuel at set times of the day. My husband and I created and modified our interactions with the infants that helped them learn to sleep through the night within three to six weeks. We had to modify our process as the baby adapted.

We have processes for getting dressed. If you put your shoes on first, it makes it harder to put on your pants. We have processes for brushing our teeth. The toothpaste needs to go on before you use the toothbrush. We have processes for driving cars. Can’t change gears until we first start the car.

I know many folks roll their eyes at the whole process business. But they do help you do better work.

Why Should I Bother with Processes?

Freelancers and contractors — whether working alone or with others — can create processes. Why bother? A few reasons:

• Cuts mistakes. When you have a process, you ensure you do all the steps or else you could overlook a step.
• Finish faster. Following the same routine for a task helps you move in a straight line instead of take the long way. Of course, you may be able to speed up your process — that’s why we have “continuous process improvement.” Ugh, fancy words, but the right ones.
• Develop habits. For many of us, having a schedule or habit makes it easier to get the work done.
• Identify problems. When a client and I couldn’t figure out a problem, we walk through the steps. It often works.

I may be a one-person business, but I work with others. Some have formal processes and some informal. I have my own processes for managing invoicing, banking, social media time and more. So processes don’t always involve more than one person.

Keep Updating Those Processes

I’ve worked with Hank Stroll of InternetVIZ since 2001 when it was just three of us. The company publishes email newsletters. It still does, but it has added other elements as the industry matured and we offered more services. The company and team has grown a bit. The processes we had in place in 2001 look nothing like the ones we follow today. If we didn’t change, we wouldn’t succeed.

The processes help us stay on schedule, limit mistakes and take us through the steps beginning with article ideas and ending with going live.

If you can make it better, do it!

Documenting Processes

Should you document your processes? Well, it depends. If no one reads it, then there’s no point. OR, it could come in handy if you suddenly become ill. That way a family member or a back-up person knows what to do. You just need to make them aware of the document. If you get promoted or leave a job behind, the documented processes help the next person taking on the role.

I have been the webmaster chair for different non-profit organizations. I love the job, but it has one downside: The hand-off. Most non-profits only allow you to retain a position for two years. I created a living document that I updated as I did the job. It also contained information about the host, domain name, IDs and passwords. It worked and hand-off went smoother than expected.

Templates also come in handy especially for writers who do a lot of documentation. Templates ensure you include all the parts you need in the document. For example, I worked on a training team back in the days of my corporate career. We created training documents based on templates to keep it all consistent. On top of that, we had a process for writing, editing and submitting the documents. Of course, the process improved over the years as we found better ways of doing tasks.

I leave you with quote that I love from this blog:

Process won’t help you if you suck. It will just make you suck more repeatably.

What processes do you have in your business? If you don’t have processes, tell us about it.

Catch of the Week: Join an adventurous captain’s search for her lost love in this romantic hidden object game featuring tropical locations, cursed sailors and the power of true love. Sail the seas with the captain of the “Spirit of Wandering” to a variety of locations and search for hidden items that will free her cursed crew and point the way to her missing love. Decipher brain-bending riddles and use magical tools to discover precious items drifting between this world and the next. Can true love really conquer all? Find out in Spirit of Wandering: The Legend!

The following games will be discounted next week on Game du Jour, the first ‘one-deal-a-day’ website dedicated to indie and casual games:

Mon. June 7th: 65% off on Buried in Time

Tue. June 8th: 45% off on PuppetShow: Mystery of Joyville

Wed. June 9th: 45% off on Nick Chase and the Deadly Diamond

Thu. June 10th: 60% off on Luxor Adventures

Fri. June 11th: 50% off on Gold Rush – Treasure Hunt

Sat. June 12th: 50% off on Puzzle Quest

Sun. June 13th: 65% off on World Mosaics

5th grade graduate and wonderful teacher

I Be One Decade Old

Goodness gracious! This blog’s 10th birthday passed and I never noticed until today. My first blog post went up on June 1, 2000. This place is a decade old. What does that translate into Internet years? Anyway, thank you to every single pair of eyes for reading in the last seven years or so. (I don’t think anyone read my blah blahs in the first few years.)

I’m glad HAGS short for “Have a great summer” didn’t come along when my friends and I signed each other’s yearbook. Nowadays, I see my kid’s yearbooks riddled with “HAGS” and little else. OK, elementary school kids — I understand. (Yearbooks only came out for high schoolers during my school days. Now elementary and junior high are in the game.) But high school kids can add a little more thought to what they write.

5th Grade Graduations

School ended today. Second child graduated from elementary school last Tuesday — the photos turned out lousy. Thank goodness, a photographer took a picture of every kid with the teacher. That one turned out great. My husband thinks my digital camera doesn’t do a good job. Ohh… I don’t even want to start comparing cameras again. Anyone get a rec? I love small ones that can also do videos.

I had a graduation ceremony in 5th grade, which I can only recall walking in the auditorium and nothing more. I asked my mom what she remembers. She said she can only recall worrying about my busing to 6th grade. (She has great instincts because 6th grade was my worst year in my school career.)

Mom remembers my sister’s 5th grade graduation because they marched in to “Hey, Jude” and it went on forever. Wish I had kept a journal back then as a reminder of what I did, but being a typical kid — I’m sure the thought of doing it would’ve been a good laugh. At least, I captured my two kids’ 5th grade graduations in the journal that I’ve kept since 1989.

Fleeting Youth

The entire 5th grade year helps parents prepare for their child’s transition to middle school. The kids act confident, rule the school and show their readiness to move on to middle school (or junior high as some of you may call it). I could never imagine my youngest going to middle school. I’m not ready. But come 5th grade, I’ll get there. However, since he’d be my last in elementary school, I imagine it’ll be harder. We’ve been at this elementary school since 1999.

Over a decade has passed since I graduated college. For a long time, my time in school outlasted my adult years. Now the tide turns as adulthood surpasses the school career. Somehow, I wish we could package the insight that childhood makes up only a small part of your life that you need to enjoy it and not be in a hurry to grow up like my daughter is.

“Youth is wasted on the young.” — George Bernard Shaw

Brain food…

• 10 Great Short Stories and Essays About All Kinds of Things: Diverse selection! Gotta check some myself — short stuff always fast read.
• An Author’s Plan for Social Media Efforts: Worth bookmarking. Chris Brogan is worth reading regularly, especially this one for authors.
• How to Throw an Awesome Book Launch: First rule for authors: Always expect zero from your publisher. It’ll motivate you to step up your own promotion efforts.
• Yes, I have a policy for that. How about you? Freelance writers need to have policies. What for? How do you handle it when friends and family want to hire you? What if you suddenly become ill (Pth.. pthhh… knock on wood)? What happens to your work?
• Essential tips for running promotions and competitions within Facebook guidelines: Facebook keeps changing rules and policies that this could become outdated. Nonetheless, great information.
• 7 Ways to Deliver Killer (and useful) Blog Content: Lots of posts on this topic; this delivers.
• Social Media Perfectly Played: Tells the story of photographer Kate Noelle and how she blurs personal with professional in her blog. I need to try harder to tell more stories as I don’t mind mixing the two.

And for fun because we’re allowed…

• 25 New Nike Designs Including Twitter, Google & Michael Jackson: Wow. Love some of these, but not my kind of sport shoe anymore or my kind of price for said shoe.
• 12 Geekiest Cakes: Too creative to eat… nah… that’s what photos are for.
• The Lost Finale: Top 10 Most Anticipated TV Endings: Won’t fill Losties’ hearts, but take satisfaction Lost made list.
• Every painting in MoMA in two minutes: No traveling required. [Link: Mark Hurst]
• Verizon Advertising Fail: Silence speaks volumes. (Real original, Meryl.) Did you know that I, someone who happens to be profoundly deaf, worked for two telecommunications companies for a total of 10 years?

Writers tend to be  an insular lot. Let’s face it, we work on our own, stuck in our own headspace, most of the time. We sit in front of our computer, or if we’re particularly old school, typewriter, and venture nary a toe into the outside world. (Sometimes all day, sometimes all week!) As a result, we also tend to rank pretty high on the pasty scale (oh, sunshine, how we miss your warm embrace and supply of vitamin D).

Most of us choose to work from home because we think it will give us freedom to lunch with friends, go grocery shopping early, hit daytime classes at the gym and so on. But how many of us do these things? If you’re like me,that would be zero. I find that writing from home has only allowed me the freedom to shower (much) later than I used to. I now sit in front of my computer all day long, waiting for the next job to come in. I even got a laptop so I could work outdoors, but I never do. So what’s the problem?

Thou Shalt Be Creative… NOW

As writers, we are, by necessity, creative. In fact, we often need to be creative on command. This grows tough over time. After all, we don’t often inspire ourselves. The things that make us creative usually come from an outside source and if you’re stuck playing the me-and-my-computer game, you are going to hit the limits of your ingenuity. You may counter, as I have, that you can get all the outside help you need on the internet, but it’s not true. Writers need to get out of the house, not only to improve the quality of their work, but to improve the quality of their lives.

For one, you can only focus on a task for so long before you need to reboot your brain with a break. The brain suffers from energy drain just like a battery. Sitting in front of a computer for hours leads to work that is boring, repetitive and sloppy. I know, I’ve done it. And it’s usually followed by a request for a rewrite.  A simple grabbing coffee (or insert beverage of choice) with a friend or reading the paper in the park rejuvenates your mental facilities and ready to work again.

Humanity Demands Social Interactions

Besides that, we are social creatures. Even the most introspective people crave human contact and interaction, so don’t let yourself fall into a funk and neglect your social yearnings. Join a class or make ongoing dates to meet with friends, and do not cancel! Look at the time away as your reward for hard work and make every effort to enjoy it to the fullest. Freedom is the best reason to work from home, so take advantage of it. Do you know how many people would love to set their own schedule instead of feeling caged like a cubicle-monkey?

As a freelance writer, you have the flexibility to develop an active social life, so don’t let yourself become isolated. It not only affects your work, but also it has a negative impact on your mental and physical health (not to mention your relationships). Creativity demands a variety of sensory input, so leave the old ball and chain (and keyboard) at home and take a zumba class at the gym, meet your friends for lunch or go see that awful movie that you can’t get anyone to go see (et tu, MacGruber?).

Your work (and your well-being) depends on it!

About the guest author: Alexis Montgomery is a content writer for Online Colleges who gives advice on the pursuit of higher education and living a healthy life. In her free time she enjoys reading, writing, and spending time with her family and friends.

Catch of the Week: Help Nelly find and save her brother from a mysterious Romanian castle! Dive into the castle’s magical pictures and discover the secrets of the Philosophers’ Stone. Use your Hidden Object skills in Treasure Seekers: The Enchanted Canvases to break the spells on the castle and track down Tom. Find the wicked person responsible for imprisoning him and take home the ancient and priceless treasure!