In a time when growing old is often equated with giving up, Amy Gorman has proved that life can be fun and enjoyable even into our very late years. Gorman’s book, Aging Artfully explores the lives and art of 12 elderly women. These women are painters, musicians, dancers, storytellers and sculptors who have who have lived fascinating lives. I read this book in 2 days, mesmerized with each woman’s story.
As a former geriatric caseworker, I wish I had read this book long ago. So often we hear about sick and frail elderly, but we need to remember that there are plenty of people out there living a full life as they approach (and sometimes surpass) the triple-digit mark. Aging Artfully is truly an inspiring book.
I highly recommended this book for anyone interested in the arts, biographies, aging studies, and related non-fiction.
Katie Baird over at Loose Ends has opened a can of worms. That’s okay with me. After all, that’s what blogs are for, right? To encourage healthy discussion.
Her post claims that some clients are getting fed up with VAs because some have taken on more clients than they can effectively handle, or have exceeded “carrying capacity”.
If you read her post, you’ll see my comment there. A client (or potential client) has commented that it’s a real problem among her and her colleagues. As long as I’ve been a VA, this is the first I’ve heard about it. Since this is coming from a client’s viewpoint, we shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand. How widespread is this problem? What, as VA’s, can we do to fix this problem, or perceived problem? If you’re a client of a VA, what do you think VAs could do to fix this problem? Are you more likely to find a competent VA if they’re affiliated with an organization like IVAA? How about if they’re a graduate of a specific training program? Let’s explore some possible answers to improve everyone’s experience with the VA community.
Comments are turned on and ready.
I have Vonage for my business line. I can have a phone line, unlimited long distance, a toll-free number, and a fax number all for about $50/month. If I did the same thing through my phone company, it would easily cost me twice as much, at least.
For my purposes, my phone through Vonage is acceptable. Most of my clients are writer-types and prefer email. I can go days without the phone ringing, and that’s fine with me. I think I’ve only had dropped calls about twice with Vonage in the year and a half since I’ve had it. Now faxing, on the other hand, is awful.
I had to fax two things this week (again, I can go months without faxing). I tried faxing a one-sheet document to a number four different times and none of them went through. Never did go through. I did fax to an alternate number and that worked on the first try. It took me 3 or 4 attempts to fax some stuff to Candy and I tried faxing something else to her 3 times without success. It’s ridiculous and unacceptable. Receiving faxes seems to work fine. For sending them, I might need to connect my fax machine to my normal home phone line and just pay the long distance charge. I fax stuff so rarely, that it’s not worth spending the money for a dedicated fax line.
So, while I think Vonage and its competitors will give the old Ma Bell a run for her money in the long run, they definitely need to figure out how to deliver a more reliable service to small businesses if they want to stay in the game.
I had something like 3,0000+ comments awaiting moderation in my blog. 99.95% were spam. I think a couple were “good” but when I was bulk moderating them, I might have lost some of them. My apologies if I deleted anyone’s legitimate post. My tech support guy installed Spam Karma 2 on my blog, so hopefully it will be a lot less frustrating for me to manage comments. I’ll keep you posted.
“Your favorite novel or history or memoir is just someone’s last revision”- Patricia T. O’Conner.
When I was visiting my parents a few weeks ago, my dad gave me a book out of his collection he thought I’d enjoy…Woe Is I by Patricia T. O’Conner. I looked it up on Amazon to see how the reviews were (they’re good) and then I looked at other books by her and came across this one: Words Fail Me: What Everyone Who Writes Should Know about Writing. I think I’m going to order a copy. It looks quite good. One of the reviewers put in her quote above, and that just really hit home for me.
I often tell people to strive for excellence, not perfection in writing. If you wait until your piece is perfect, you’ll never get it done. I know. I’ll read books I’ve written later and say to myself, “Ugh, I should have said it this way instead.” There are a million different ways to write the same thing. First you need to make it understandable and clear, then you need to give it some personality.
Her quote is the truth. Anything you read is just someone’s last revision. When you’re writing, keep that in mind. I’m not saying to forget about the editing process. Remember, if you spend 10 hours writing something, you need to spend at least 5 hours editing it yourself. You need to let your writing sit, go over it again, and get a neutral party’s feedback. Once you are confident it reads well and there are no errors, let it go.
I’ve heard this expression before, but never has it been popping up more often for me than in the last few days. I read an article in John Kremer’s newsletters about a self-published author’s search for an agent and the author referred to that statement, which I passed on to a former client who is also looking for an agent. He, too, is looking for an agent and starting to get discouraged. His book is awesome, (I know because I was his editor) and his query letter was good too (I wrote it), and I know that he just needs to find the “right” agent (or publisher) for his specific book.
Then, I was at a CPAFE meeting yesterday where Casey Sheehe was speaking, and boy was she a great guest. She is a sales expert and had some great advice. The “numbers game” expression popped up there too. To be a successful business owner, you need to get used to rejection. She used to work in timeshare sales and said that, as a sales rep, you’re only expected to get 2 sales out of every 10 people you pitch to. Think about that a moment. That’s getting a no, yes, no, no, no, no, yes, no, no. That’s a lot of nos. Despite that, if you can got a 20% sales rate, you made a 6-figure income. Not bad, huh?
The third instance of this phrase has come up doing my article proposal tracking and response for a magazine publisher I work for. There were 75 articles in the queue when I got answers from the editor in chief about whether he was interested. The authors that submitted multiple proposals usually had at least one accepted, where authors that only submitted one were simply facing a one-time “yes” or “no” response.
Back to my own turn at playing the numbers game.
I like to read ProBlogger. Today I was reading an interview with Lee Dodd, who started a place called Earnersforum.com, a site dedicated to learning to monetize more on the web. Lee is 27 years old and recently earned over 222,000 in a 3-month period. Yes, for those of you doing the math at home, that’s a yearly income of almost $900,000. Wow. Most of the income comes from advertising revenue from his sites.
Now for those of you who get real excited about this, good, you should. It’s harder than you would think. First you need to find a great, unsaturated niche, develop great content, create a diehard fan base, a “sticky” site that draws in repeat visitors, and pick a good advertising program. Then wait with your fingers crossed. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme.
It’s free to register. My user name is Lauren Hidden. Hope to see you there!
I was checking out bloglines tonight and came across this interesting post over at Successful Blog and left a comment (mine is number 21). It got me thinking about how different writing is from speaking. I just edited a phenomenal book by a great professional speaker. To listen to the audio recording, it was dynamic, informative, and powerful, to read the transcript, it lost a lot of it’s power. Why?
In the written word you need way more structure and perfection than you do when speaking. I’m not saying public or motivational speaking is easy, I’d rather write than speak anyday. But you lose voice inflections, gestures, the ability to have a “false start” where you say the first few words of your sentence, stop and start over with a new one. You can’t skip around with your topics when writing. You need to finish one before moving to the next.
I used to do transcription for the SpeakerNetNews teleseminars and it would take me about 4 hours to do the transcription and another hour or hour and a half just to edit it into complete sentences and clean up grammar. The difference between the spoken and printed word is way bigger than most people realize.
So for now, I’ll continue telling speakers that, no, you can’t transcribe a speech and turn it into a book without editing it!
I spent almost all day yesterday editing and proofreading a book. Because the project was a rush job, I utilized the talents of an independent proofreader, who does phenomenal work. We sent files back and forth using Track Changes and one of the issues that came up was a sentence very similar to this: “One of the people wants to go to the seminar”. Now, the question that arose is whether the word should be “want” or “wants”. The dreaded spellcheck kept marking wants as wrong, but in this case, you need to break down the sentence to determine whether to use the single or plural form of the word. One (the subject) of the people (prepositional phrase) wants (verb)…. The subject and verb need to agree, so wants is correct, not want.
This scenario is just another reason not to automatically hit the “change” key every time spellcheck alerts you to a problem. It also supports the fact that handing off your work to a friend (or colleague) is a great idea when you’re proofreading. This is also Step Four in my co-authored book, “Write It Right: The Ground Rules for Self-Editing Like the Pros”.
Wednesdays are my weekly day off, to celebrate summer and spend some QT with my kids. I made some awesome cinnamon sugar muffins and was washing up the mixing bowl when I was struck with this thought: Editing is a lot like washing dishes. Think that’s a stretch? Really, it isn’t.
Think of your first draft as a mixing bowl that’s covered with muffin batter slime. Sure, it’s still a metal mixing bowl, but it’s far from useful. You wouldn’t mix anything else in it when it’s still that dirty. It’s the same principle with the first draft of your written material, whether it’s a book, a press release, an article, or a blog post.
So back to the mixing bowl analogy: You fill up your sink with tons of soapy bubbles and let it soak, you scrub away the grime and your bubbles disappear. It’s much cleaner, but not clean enough to use again. That’s your second draft.
Then, you drain that water and fill it up with fresh soapy water and lightly scrub it again. It doesn’t take you as long this time, and it doesn’t look vastly different from your first wash (or edit), but when you’re done, your mixing bowl is sparkling.
Think of your writing as that mixing bowl. Don’t ever be satisfied with a first draft. You need to scrub it hard (edit), drain the water (let it sit), and wash it again (do a final proofread). It’s not redundant effort, you need to self edit your writing. If you don’t know how, your writing will give the same impression to your prospects and clients that a mixing bowl that still has gobs of batter on the side. It’s a turn-off.
If you need help self-editing your writing, consider my book, Write It Right: The Ground Rules for Self-Editing Like the Pros. It takes you through an easy 10-step formula to improving your writing.