Three Tools to Get Where You're Going

Get busy building your dream, right? Isn’t that what I said a couple of weeks ago?

The real question is how?

I’m a process person as I’ve explained before here and here. I’m also into pirates and so from my pirate vocabulary I’d like to offer these essential tools for building one’s personal process for success.

The Map

The map is a tool that shows the way, it provides direction but it also provides the “big picture.”

In business a map is referred to as a plan. That is probably because a plan can be fallible but a map implies finite dimensions like latitude and longitude. Plans are preparation and maps are drawn after achievement, a proven path.

I call my plan a map because, despite the likelihood it will need revisions, I am not inventing this path. I’m following the advice of others who’ve done this before me.

How to Stalk an Editor

Every now and then we writers get bold, adventurous, and desperate. Today's guest post from Lauri Meyers of Your Imagination is the Limit suggests desperation has a process.

Puma courtesy fPat on Flickr

Having a literary agent would be sweet.   They boil my manuscript down to its two sentence essence, target the right editor at the right publisher, and sell my book.  Voila!  Way better than my process:  spend a million hours (approximately) researching publishers, try to write something cute about the editor in the query letter, remember I don't actually know anything about the editor, cry. 

My $10 writing budget didn’t allow for a conference to meet editors in person so I could at least say "we met once."   Nor did it allow for driving into the city, hanging out in swanky wine bars, and buying anyone a drink who said the word "editor."  Learning 1: I needed to find information without turning into the creep at the bar.

Living the Dream

When DTC called us, we said yes. YES! We will go. WE WILL GO! This was the opportunity we had been waiting for. The one Charlie has been working for.

New Discount Tire Store in Columbia, S.C

Discount Tire talks about “the dream.” It is at the heart of what all of the guys that work for DTC know to be true: work hard enough and you can accomplish anything. On Saturday the store on Clemson Road opened. My lovable tire guy, Charlie, is working on his dream.

When DTC offered the dream to Charlie, our family moved to Columbia, S.C. Leaving friends and family behind was hard but leaving my old “job” was not a tough choice. Despite the friends and experience I had gained there, it was never my dream.

Links, Not Golf, Not Sausage, Still Fun and Delicious

Let's generate some BUZZ by visiting some of the older posts. Cheap, shameless self promotion? Or a good platform-awareness-strategy? Eh. Who knows.

Per Darren Rowse at ProBlogger and Stanford Smith at Pushing Social, a 7 Link Challenge.

1. Your first post – The Rookie’s First Post which explains the reigning philosophy for 2012: Land the Plane. I have traditionally been someone who was “all over the place” as my sister would say. I hope to focus in 2012. It’s now mid-way through the year and I’m more focused, but still not exactly on target.
2. A post you enjoyed writing the most – Collector, Storyteller, or Hoarder because it describes the things HB carries with her. If you look closely, you might see some patterns that are similar to a great short story called The Things They Carried. Or I might be thinking too much of my own prose ability.
3. A post which had a great discussion – Notes on a Senseless Tragedy was about the murder of a musician in Florence, S.C. The discussion mostly took place on Facebook where the reporter covering the story and the musician’s fiancé posted links to the blog. A lot of hits and I’m not sure it made a difference. But I was hoping to help them heal.

Right as the Mail

I’ve decided to be a joiner here in my first few months in Columbia and I thought I’d join the book club at the Sandhills Library. In May they read The Postmistress. I didn’t finish it in time, so I skipped the book club. (I made it in June, funny story, maybe next Monday’s post ;-)

Anyway, The Postmistress completes my tour of World War II that began in 2010 with Lisa See’s Shanghai Sisters. Then I read The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons about WW2 in Leningrad. Then Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford about San Francisco and On Folly Beach about the southern coast of South Carolina. Then Gilgamesh and Sarah’s Key about an Australian woman in Armenia and an American woman in Paris, respectively. Then The Piano Teacher about Hong Kong.

That’s World War II in Shanghai, Leningrad, San Francisco, Charleston, Australia, Armenia, Paris, and Hong Kong. I was missing England. The Postmistress delivered.

A visit with S. Chris Edmonds

Chris Edmonds is a speaker, author, and senior consultant with the Ken Blanchard Companies, a leadership consultancy firm. He has authored two “Tweet Books” which seemed like a challenging medium to me. So I sent him an email and asked him if he’d answer some questions about his work. He agreed! Here are my questions and his answers.

What made you adopt the tweet medium for your latest book, #POSITIVITY AT WORK? Are there some limitations to the brevity required by tweeting?

 

My first tweet book, #CORPORATE CULTURE tweet, was released in April '11. I've been learning a bunch about social media over the past two years and had begun seeing a real community develop around my culture insights delivered daily in tweet form.

She's Four on Her Birthday

At a Clemson football tailgate last fall the gal who parked next to us drew a hopscotch on the asphalt for her three-year-old daughter and HB to play on. The other little girl, Ellie, went first: “one, two, four, five, six,” she said.

Then HB, “one, two, three, four, five.”

Ellie again, “one, two, four, five, six.”

Then HB, now a little concerned she was not getting all the way to six, “one, two, three, four, five,” took an extra hop, “six!”

Ellie again, seeing the extra hop, “one, two, four, five, six, seven!”

HB, hands on hips, looked at Ellie and looked at me and said, “hey, what’s going on here?”

How does a mom explain that the other little girl keeps missing “three” and that my own precious daughter is doing just fine?

And I'm her mom

Though I have a good friend who likes to respond to things I say with, “you’re such a mom,” I don’t ever feel that way. I feel like things are different, maybe a little harder sometimes, maybe a little easier sometimes.

I don’t spend much time thinking of myself as a mom. But four years ago today I became one. There’s a little person in my house who was three-and-four-on-her-birthday and today’s her birthday.

“Goodnight, HB,” I said to her last night, “my three-year-old-sweet-girl.”

She grinned and snuggled deeper into Guh-Gus, her elephant pillow. (He’s prone to unprovoked attacks which elicit peals of laughter from HB, more on that some other time.)

I’m partial to birthdays and to birthday posts. I think they are an excellent reason to think about one’s own life, what has been accomplished thus far and where one might want to be this time next year. They’re sort of a New Year’s do-over.