This is the part where I look like an asshole.

That novel? Didn’t happen. Not over Thanksgiving, not in 30 days—not not not. I don’t see it happening in the near future, either, and not because it’s hard to see what’s coming down the pike through all this egg on my face.

I had a long talk about the novel during my last Seattle trip with my Hillbilly-Jewish Cousin. We talked about fear (did I have any around writing this book) and love (did I love the idea of writing this book).

Fear? No.

I’m not afraid of writing a book, and I’m certainly not afraid about being upfront with the gnarly details of living with Crohn’s disease. I love the idea of a book that potentially adds to the greater good (and is hilarious) rather than a book (even if it is hilarious) that adds to the coffers of me and some publishing house and, down the road—if we’re lucky, and the stars align—a movie studio.

Not that I have anything against money! (More—much, much more—on that later this month.) Money is awesome! It lets you do stuff. It gives you choices. At its best, it’s magical, time-shifted energy: an ingenious, asynchronous exchange of me for you. And you know what? After many years of misanthropy and almost as many of self-loathing, I really like both of us: we’re awesome, just like money! In fact, we are money, as the man said when he was still young, slim and unafflicted by the burden of too much energy-as-money and no good way to channel it into something meaningful.

But love? Ah. Love is a different story.

I have love in my heart for this fictional girl and her story, and for all real girls still in the process of writing their own real stories. Last week, I spent some more time with a group of women who totally get that: Keren Taylor and the amazing volunteers and mentors at WriteGirl, who work with girls from at-risk situations and turn them into fire-breathing powerhouses of take-no-prisoners fabulosity.

Well, actually, they use writing as a way to help the girls strengthen their voices and understand what it’s like to feel empowered, as well as doing tangible stuff like getting them into print and into college. If you’re looking for a great place to dump some of your extra time or money, you could do a lot worse than forking it over to Keren and WriteGirl. More on that and other great places to rid yourself of that pesky extra money (Vince Vaughan, are you listening?) later this month, as well.

What the hell was I doing, then, in this month off from writing publicly? A whole lot of thinking. And hashing out. And bouncing stuff off of various trusted resources. I laid out my fears and hopes and baby dreams, my ideas and tentative to-do list, my wildly burdensome sackful of unfulfilled obligations and bad karmic debts.

Here’s what I found: I am only interested in what I am interested in. And I cannot be interested in spending one second of the 40-some-odd years I have left (if I’m lucky) doing something that compromises my own voice.

I get that for as many champions as I had at the publishing house for those first few sample chapters filled with poop and laughs, I had an equal amount of detractors, and I get why: it was filled with at least as much poop as it was laughs, and that is starkly terrifying for some people. The truth, and certainly my truth (which, in fairness to me, is what I’d been asked to share), but no less terrifying for being so.

It is scary to sign on for the truth; it can be imprudent. Risk is always, um, risky. That’s why it’s called “risk,” right? Risk can seem especially risky in uncertain economic times. Unfortunately, there is no real living without risk. No growth, no change and certainly, no love.

So for now, I am going to be That Asshole who is not following up on the incredibly unusual, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to float a novel out there at the request of an Actual Publisher. I have a plan, though, for a lot of other cool, growth-oriented, change-promoting, fabulosity-increasing stuff. A BIG plan, which will start to unfold in posts on this very site over the course of December and through the next year.

• I’m going to start sharing more excellent resources here, like I do in my beloved (by me and a growing number of readers) newsletters.
• I’m going to lighten the fuck up a little, like I used to do, because sweet baby jesus on a bouncing kangaroo, if ever we needed more lightness, we need it now.
• I’m going to post more plain, old useful tutorials here—about communications tools and how to feel the opposite of useless and maybe even ways of attracting a little more plain, old-fashioned love into your life. Because the more of us who are making meaningful contact and changing the world with our unique gifts and yes, goddammit, getting laid, the better off we’re going to be.

I’m also going to be dramatically shifting the direction of my work-for-hire life. And making it public, and maybe even soliciting your help in getting the word out. Because (say it with me) MONEY IS AWESOME! and while my now almost-year-long almost-sabbatical has been awesome in its own way, it’s time to get down with the facts that: (a) I can’t do everything for free forever; and (b) if I can support myself in a modest way that also allows for the flexibility of a great deal more travel, I can get out there in the real world like I did in October and November, and meet more of you in person, Southwest be damned!

In the meantime, since you’re a loyal reader of the blog (or one of the few lost souls who has found his way here looking for something of an entirely different nature—and so you know, that last link is 100% not safe for work), I’m going to share with you a work-in-progress preview of my formal “Hire Colleen!” page:

Colleen’s Super-Secret, Hire-the-Communicatrix Page

I will still be available for design work in 2009, but only for a select few projects and only after we’ve gone through an initial consulting thingamajiggy. I’m a fair-to-middling designer—good, even, when inspired. Thing is, I’ve been inspired less and less to use my design skills and more and more to do what I truly love: to help provide marketing focus to overwhelmed, go-getting, world-changing rockstars, particularly by showing you how to manage the increasingly complex (but brilliantly cheap and flexible) social media space.

Again, as with so much of this, more on that later. But really, for the first time in well over a year, I’m really clear on what I want to be doing, and thus really, REALLY excited about doing it.

With a vengeance.

With bells on.

With all the excitement and fervor and, let’s face it, sense of urgency that starting a major phase of work life at age 47 entails.

I thank you for the amazing support I’ve received so far. I hope to take it less for granted moving forward, and to do more stuff that is more fun and more useful for you and the rest of the world (a.k.a. those people who don’t know about us yet).

Finally, if you have any thoughts, ideas or questions—tutorials you’d like me to write, issues you’d like me to address—please do leave them in the comments, or if they’re of a very personal nature, you can email them to me via the gmail.

I cannot WAIT for all of this to start. And fortunately, I don’t have to. Because it just did…

xxx
c

Image by Carolyn Coles via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: announcements, change, communicatrix, goals.

Mary Ellen called it in the comments of the last post: I have my life set up, like it or not, around accountability.

I make appointments and agreements out loud and publicly to keep myself on track and actually producing, rather than just musing about it. It’s why I started this blog four years ago today—to externalize my process, in the hope of getting clear on my own inner workings. And to (hopefully) be helpful by sharing some of this knowledge I gained so, so late in the goddamned game. (No prodigy, I.)

I also did it to become a better writer, by which I mean a writer who is particularly good at it in her own, particular way, and also a writer who actually writes. Because a writer who doesn’t write is just another schmuck who ought to go do something of actual utility, like raising responsible citizens who engage in critical thinking, or scrubbing toilets at a 99-seat theater, or raising money for starving people in ravaged parts of the world.

I’m kind of stuck being a writer—or a communicator, or the communicatrix, rather—because I’m not that all-fire great at being anything else. I’m a decent designer and an okay actress, but the amount of energy I need to expend to do those things at any level of excellence makes them a lousy ROI for me and, I’m feeling more and more, the world. We’ve all of us got to figure out what we’re the very, very best at, and what we’re here to do to make the world a better place, and just do the hell out of that thing. Did I wish I was a genius designer? Oh, yes. Did I hope to change the world from a slightly raised proscenium? Damned straight.

Alas, those were not to be my platforms. They were great training grounds for picking up necessary skills, but they’re not the Big Show.

This is the big show. This—this. For better or for worse, externalizing my process. And, with a little continued good fortune in the right direction, helping other people to discover and disseminate their own fabulosity*.

So in the same way that I use Arno J. to help me in my practice of morning reflection, my shrink to help me in my practice of emotional honesty and my marketing coach to help me in my practice of business, I have decided to engage a little external help to kickstart my writing practice. That’s right, those of you who clicked that last link: I’ve joined the ranks of the NaNoWriMo-heads, and am going to slam out a shitty first draft of a novel I was asked to write over a year ago.

Asked to write. By a major publishing house. On a theme wildly dear to my heart. Over a year ago.

Sometimes, I have to pause to reflect on how truly asinine I can be. Because really, it’s spectacular, albeit in a horrifying way.

I actually turned in sample chapters at the beginning of this year, which were, to my surprise and delight, much beloved by the editorial team. But the people who would actually have had to sell the book? Let’s just say I got a big “yes” on the voice, and a not-so-much on the execution.

I’ve put it off long enough. Now I either do it or dump it off the “to-do” list for the foreseeable future, and move on. And, as Marketing Coach sez, that’s asinine. No one gets asked to write a novel. No one who’s never written a proven one, anyway.

So I will sign off for now, as I have a great deal of writing to do. I will not sign off for a month, though if I write less of substance here, perhaps you will be understanding and forgiving.

I will, of course, continue observing my current writing obligations, including the monthly newsletter (next issue out this Wednesday—subscribe here) and the monthly acting column.

Wish me luck. Stay in touch. Keep on living your life out loud.

xxx
c

Image of a geranium, the fourth-anniversary flower, by Swami Stream via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

*That’s also very much writing-related, but also involves moving increasingly into speaking and consulting. Which I’m doing, but which is not the particular focus of this piece. If you’re interested in either of those things:

• me, coming to speak to your group about how to use marketing and social media to get your message to the Peoples or…
• me, working with you in a consulting-type fashion, to help you sort out what message you’re trying to put out to the world and how to make sure it’s elegant, accessible, “you” and focused like a motherfucking laser beam…

…you should email me. Seriously. All these crazy skillz I picked up during my travels through advertising, performing and graphic-designing are proving extraordinarily useful at helping people sort out their shit in a non-painful, actually-fun sort of way.

TOPICS: change, goals, writing.

I’ll admit it flat-out: I’m a bit chagrined by last year’s goal-post title.

To be fair, it wasn’t a total wash. Out of ten goals I set for myself last January, I fulfilled seven. Fairly good, percentage-wise. Especially since much of the year, I wasn’t consciously trying. Such is the truly awesome power of just writing things down (not to mention making them public!).

Still, there’s no question that one of last year’s gifts was in leaving room for improvement this year. I do like the Best Year Yet method, since it walks me through all the steps I might otherwise skip in my fresh-year enthusiasm. A fair amount of time gets devoted just to examining where the previous year went well and where it went off the rails, the idea being you’ll get the best sense of what lessons will prove most useful to you by examining where the hell you went so very, very wrong.

I’m happy to say that mine boiled down to two things:

1. an unrealistic sense of what I can reasonably (or even unreasonably) expect to accomplish in a given chunk of time
2. an almost pathological inability to ask for help.

Why happy? Because if I’m honest with myself, these twin terrors have probably kept me from more successes than any other things. “Inability to face up to stuff,” for example, is not on the list. Took a few years to get it off, but it is gonzo, brother. So is “depressed,” “unmotivated,” “refusal to look on the bright side,” and a host of other ills. As demons go, these two ain’t bad.

To help with my time issues, this year is going to be a lot about scheduling. Yes, I’ve scheduled in the scheduling.

I’m also putting a heavy emphasis on Asking For Help. My mantra for 2008 is “Help Is Everywhere,” both because I’m starting to see that it really and truly is everywhere, and because once you get it in your head to see yellow Volkswagens, that’s pretty much what you’re going to see.

2008? It’s the Year of The Yellow Volkswagen.

xxx
c

Image by slimmer jimmer via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: Best Year Yet, change, goals, resolutions.

I’ve alluded before to Best Year Yet on this here bloggy, but for those of you who missed class and/or are too f**king lazy to click the links or Google it, Best Year Yet is a values-based goal-setting system which I discovered via Heidi Miller’s podcast long ago, and which could just as rightly be called “The Nerdiest Goal-Setting System Yet” except that it’d be redundant.

My friend, Kathy (zen-shiatsu mistress supreme) and I spent four—count ‘em, four—hours today going over our plans. We’d both done all of our (nerd) homework and I’ve been implementing mine since the second week of January, but Kathy’s a single mom and, as I understand it, time bends in funny ways when you’re situated thusly.

Anyway, I buffed out the scratches in my Best Year Yet plan and, because one of the things that tripped me up the first time I tried doing it was a lack of concrete examples of workable plans, I decided to make mine public.

Via Backpack. Because that’s how I roll, baby.

Feel free to check it out (link here), and contact me with any questions or comments. You can do it via email or the comments section of this post. I’d like to keep the process as transparent as possible, to help the most people; so if you email me, I may use your question to work up an FAQ somewhere here on the site, but if I do, I promise to keep your identity a total, double-secret-probation-level secret, should you so desire.

Bottom line: if you’re already doing BYY, I encourage you to post somewhere and share a link. If you’re not, consider doing something similar with your goals and post a link.

Accountability ain’t everything, but it helps.

Later, nerds…

xxx
c

SEE THE COMMUNICATRIX’S BEST YEAR YET 2007 PLAN HERE

UPDATE: I got an email from my pal, Neil, asking why the monthly and weekly goals were missing. They’re not: they just get a little too personal, so they’re not displayed for public consumption. But rest assured, I have them and am doing them. And it’s working!!!

Image by occipital lobe via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license

TOPICS: 21 day salutes, communicatrix, goals, Nerd Love™, productivity, resolutions, Tools of Goodness.

I’ve spoken before about how resolutions blow big, stinky chunks, but only hinted at how goal-setting can really work.

If you are over 40 or a realist (I am in the former camp, but hardly the latter), you doubtless understand too well that there is no one book or system or piece of software that will change you life for you, only tools and hacks that help facilitate the growth you are ready to embrace.

I know: I spent 40+ years accumulating tools, and while I made incremental progress on my own, I didn’t get Big Mama Change until the universe saw fit to sit me down and teach me a hard lesson. Fortunately, I was ready for it. Because really, the universe’s next move was, like, non-operative cancer or some shit, and while the morphine and pot-smoking part of hellish pain sounds good, I question how well I would do with the rest of it.

So if you are change-ready (or change-curious) and want a new tool to play with, I humbly suggest you check out my latest column for LAcasting.com on effecting real change. Included are three steps I’ve found work well for me, as well as one really excellent book/system which I’ve hinted at here called Your Best Year Yet, by Ginny Ditzler. I did write the column for actors, but it’s not totally acting-centric, and besides, it’s always fun to read stuff about actors: ask the publishers of US and People and every other fucking consumer magazine aimed at women 18 - 54 in the U.S.

Also, I’m trying to add to my own body of knowledge on this stuff, so if you’ve found tactics or tools that work for you, please let me know either in the comments or via email (communicatrix at gmail dotterooski com). I first heard of Best Year Yet via Heidi Miller’s excellent small biz marketing podcast, and I totally stole that theme thing from Jenny, for example (she was very gracious about it) and would be happy to steal equally good ideas from you, too.

With attribution, of course…

xxx
c

HELPFUL LINKS:

The Best Year Yet website
The cult around BYY isn’t as geek-centric as GTD, so there’s less online documentation. Hopefully, that will change at some point. In the meantime, my suggestion is to scan the BYY site, get the book, and see for yourself if it floats your boat.

Heidi Miller’s podcast about Best Year Yet on Diary of a Shameless Self-Promoter
If you’re the listening type, download this episode of Heidi’s podcast. She outlines the 10 questions that form the backbone of the BYY system.

“What to do with that Big, Shiny New Year of Yours” in The Networker

Image by carf via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: BYY, communicatrix, goals, resolutions, self-development, Shameless plugs, Tools of Goodness.