Charlotte’s Babblings

I really like the post Get Out of the Zone from James Brausch today.  It makes me smile. I feel all warm and fuzzy. My whole week is made. It flows in the vein of his practical and somewhat iconoclastic philosophy of the 2%.  The title  has a mildly cute twist on a psychobabble clichè.  But that’s not the only reason I should feel this way about that article. It makes clear to me what my true passion is….writing! And well it should.  I wrote it.  An then there’s the article on Weight Loss Dude about how your keyboard makes you fat.  I really like that one too, for the same reason.

 Unfortunately, I’m only batting 666 (how appropriate is that!) as I didn’t make the Costa Rica HQ blog. No surprise there–those articles had no actual connection to my experience.  I must not have used enough imagination. No excuses though. I can write about alien planets, but nobody will ever follow my characters footsteps and prove me wrong. I take that back–I’ve read Podkayne of Mars, who dies on Venus in a plantation explosion…they didn’t know about Venus back in the 50s, so the story was based on what they did know, and now that story is just a fantasy.   I don’t know beans about Costa Rica, except for what I read online, and so much of what I read is real estate and vacation hype.  I just didn’t do enough research.

 I’m one of hundreds (about 4 hundreds if I’ve read correctly) of Brausch’s minions (okay, he calls us interns), and the writing was work for hire–not the first ghostwriting gig I ever had, nor the best-paying one. But what a nice surprise to find it today on my late trek through the afternoon–even better than the monetary award in my paypal account, which was also much appreciated.  Many of the posts on his blogs are written by interns, some closer to his style and voice, others not so much. I feel very good that some other minion thought the articles were good enough to post. I could live for the feeling of someone else publishing my work.

What I learned from that task was that I could write a heck of a lot more than what I am doing–at least if I didn’t do so many other things like intern tasks–and it does not matter that I didn’t know much of anything about the topics. I can research them and come up with something that will work. I can see that it does make a difference if I can relate the topic to my own experience, and I do know how to do that from writing fiction. Time to get out of the blog zone and into my writing.

Usually snow days put me in the dumps. For one thing, I work by the hour, and my college is always closed when it snows–no make-up snowdays for part-timers.   In South Carolina, it doesn’t snow very often, but snow that Yankees would not even notice shuts down everything here.  I did not pay much attention to the rumored weather predictions, but when I woke up at 4 am and could see clearly from the street light outside my house, I knew the white stuff had landed. 

Even though I knew it wouldn’t get much lighter during the day, I got up at 6 and started catching up on some tasks that I would have saved for the weekend.  I watched as the snow began to fall off the trees and the roads melted from slush to wet.  I had to admit that it was pretty and peaceful.

 I posted a list of resources for Christian writers on my Wise Author blog, and set out to find some ezines for article submissions. I took a few pix outside because it’s a law here that you have to document snow. I had an enlightening conversation with my friend about why the poverty-conscious rednecks we know are so hateful towards those who have some money, especially since the “haves” generally worked for it, possibly with some more knowledge, education, or skill that the “have nots” haven’t. 

Her family had much more money than mine did as we werer growing up, which we discussed, but she does not judge others by their income. On the other hand, her sensitive spot is her education, since she for various reasons, did not go to college.  What we came up with for an answer was that people who don’t know what to do may project their own feelings of worthlessness as anger towards those who do know what to do.  Since she and I are in a MLM business, part of the discussion was on how to teach someone what to do, so that they would feel confident enough to do even without skill, and to be willing to get past that irrational resentment. 

It is a lot easier to be angry and resentful, than it is to face uncertainty and possible failure.  It’s much easier to watch TV or play cards or do any number of distrating things and complain about how unfair life is than it is to take a step in a new direction with focus and determination. It is also hard to look back and see that one hasn’t done nearly what could have been done, but water that’s already flowed under the bridge is very hard to swallow (grin).

This conversation gave me a lot of insights to how much my perspectives have changed on so many topics. For example, I don’t complain about my job, wish it was Friday on Monday afternoon, or check the clock constantly for going-home time.  I am glad to be employed at the moment. I am working towards the day when I can work three hours a day on the computer instead of ten to twelve or sixteen, but where I am now is good, much better than in times past.

In studying about how to earn money on the internet, I have felt stuck by the feeling that I did n’t ahve anything to make into a product, nothing that I could sell to anyone. But that’s just that old redneck whining, which I gave up when I went back to grad school.  I don’t know everything I need to know to be sucessful, but I now that learning comes from doing, evaluating, doing, evaluating, and then doing again. Not Trying. Doing.

Then this afternoon, my copy of James Brausch’s Earn a Living by Creating Your Own DVD arrived! I’m going to be learning by doing this afternoon. I’m still looking for a subject for my product. Anybody have any ideas?

James Brausch’s new book came in today, The Voice Said “Obey.”  It is a fictionalized account of what he would do if he woke up one day having lost everything, based on his real life experience.  As the title suggests, his awakening was a personal experience of the Divine, edited to illustrate his business model and his personal life model. All the events are true, according to him, merely rearranged and time-compressed to make his point that there is no reason not to make your life happen the way you want it, starting now, no matter what.

I’ll be proofreading the book tonight, which won’t take long, as it is only 193 pages in a 4.25 x 6.75 format from lulu.com. I’m familiar with his writing voice, and his idiosyncrasies with sentence structure and punctuation. The book design is clean and readable, with the exception of the tiny print on the back of comments from the blog, some angry and critical, and others thoughtful and supportive.

I’ve read the blog posts already, and I am very interested in how the galley draft will be different from what I have already read.  He has also posted about how easy it is to write a book, and I can see that taking real events and revising them to make a point could be simpler than making it up from whole cloth. However the real secret is that this is at least the third draft of this work, the original having been posted to the web as it happened.  Writing is still re-writing, but as Dickens learned, it’s best to recycle as many times as possible. A review will be posted tomorrow.

I heard this expression at a meeting last night, and I’m sure it will be a buzz word soon, so I want to use it while I still can. It’s backformed from Go-Getter, which he also is.  A go-getter is one who goes out and gets what it is he wants. A go-giver is one who already has what he wants, but wants to give back to the community and help other people get what they want. It’s a great concept.

If you want to learn how to market your stuff on the internet, you need James Brausch. Go to his place now, sign up for his announcement email for his blog. You’ll be glad you did. I AM.

I have read James D Braush’s Internet Business Book Vol. 1 and 2. I’ll be reviewing them this week and putting those thoughts into action.

I am working at building some new projects at home based on his products. You’ll be seeing some of them soon.  Thanks, James.

“A word after a word after a word is power,” according to Margaret Atwood, and she ought to know.

A new learning for me is that writing about why I am stuck is still writing, and I like it better when I write on the blog rather than scribbling in some notebook that I likely can’t read next week. I like seeing what I am thinking, and that opens up ideas that I would not have considered otherwise.  It allows nearly forgotten memories, thoughts and beliefs bubble to the top where they can be exploited.

So, despite a rather drippy episode with my sinuses (TMI, sorry!)  I sat down BIC-HOK (Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard) and tapped out one word after another between draining my nose.  I didn’t feel good. I didn’t feel like writing.  I had no inspiration except for the image of the scene I didn’t want to write. But I wrote anyway. That is the secret, and apparently it is one I will have to learn over and over.  

I couldn’t see how a person would survive being strangled if she were dead to the world in deep sleep, so I woke her up enough to realize that something was not right, hearing her antag banging around in the dark, looking for the wand that they both need to get away from their current location. Then I was free to write the fight scene with my protag having something of a fighting chance.

Two insights into writing on the same day. What a relief! After getting the first 600 words out, another 1000 came right along behind, and I discovered that a third character has information that the protag Maven and the readers will need to tie in another thread  concering some other clients of hers–dwarves. Maven has her own thoughts on dwarves

As James Braush is fond of saying, take action. So, having gotten through one scene, I cranked into another, leaving me a good starting place for today.  As icing on the cake, another writer left me a comment with some insights to her own process.  Take a look at Mystery Shrink’s ideas on writing and learning from the movies.

Since coming back from our last residency at Pacifica, I’ve been working through the backlog of unfinished projects and neglected chores here at home. I mistakenly thought that I would have a lot of free time because I was no longer in school, and I had no teaching projects. It is a truism that any work expands to take up all the time available for it.

Now is the time for me to start using the information that I have been gathering–and to stop spending so much time “Gathering”. But I could not decide how to get started or what to do first.

Then I found James Brausch’s Info Product Creation Videos, which shows how to create information videos using Camtasia, and then how to create a website to promote those videos. I realized I already had all the tools–including a cheap version of Camtasia, a web hosting package and a microphone. While watching the videos and making notes on 5-minute market research, I began thinking of ideas for such a product–how to do APA formatting, for example, or even some of the nicer points of grammar that so many students have problems understanding like parallelism or misplaced modifiers. Then I found an Easter Egg! I won’t tell you what it is, but I was very happy to see it, and it will help me to promote the ideas that came to me as I was learning.

So today, I will start my brainstorming and freewriting to write down and orgaznize my more esoteric knowledge on these subjects and see what kind of product I can dream up. My school could use some fo these short info videos for showing people how to register online and showing instructors how to get their virtual paperwork done. I think this is going to be a lot of fun.

What should I do with existing websites that have been around for a while, but that are a mix of sales and information? http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=827

What kinds of  information products might one develop to support the sales of a fiction book (ebook or paper),  bringing in money for writing time and/or creating sales for the book itself as a product?  http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=827