Episode 8 is up: how to build client relationships. My take? They're just like regular old relationships. So you'll get double the useful info this time...
xxx
c
the communicatrix elsewhere: LAcasting.com
For those of you who have been on tenterhooks, waiting for Part II of my how-to series on auditioning (from that a**hole who ate lunch during your tape), it's up now on LAcasting.
For those of you who missed Part I and hate reading things out of order, go here first.
xxx c
the communicatrix elsewhere: talky mctalk-talk
If you've never been to a Toastmasters meeting and have always been curious, I'll be representing the Del Rey club in the Area A1 level of the Humorous Speech Contest tomorrow night.
My topic? The One Thing Worse Than Public Speaking. I've already given it once to some acclaim at my local meeting, a couple of weeks ago. But I've lived the subject matter for some time. (Don't you hate it when I get all Woman Of Mystery on you?)
And while I plan to release all of my speeches as MP3s eventually, this one will probably be a live-only experience. Unless, of course, I get shitcanned tomorrow night, in which case I might just release it first, out of pique.
DETAILS:
Saturday, Sept. 30 Santa Monica Place Mall, Colorado & 4th Street, Community Room Registration: 5:30 (I have no idea what this means, but I've been told to be there by then) Call to Order: 6pm (if you have no idea what this means, see Robert's Rules of Order') Contest: 6-8pm
Admission is $9. There is some dinner included in that, probably from one of the food court establisments. You pays yer money, you takes yer chances.
There's parking for $3 in the mall, but I've been warned to get there EARLY (yes, in all caps) so as to make it on time.
The Toastmasters, unlike me, are very big on starting promptly...
xxx c
the communicatrix elsewhere: bonus GBSBS
There's a new bonus episode of the Great Big Small Business Podcast up featuring yours truly on online resources.
Only I'm calling it a bonehead episode, since a major reason it happened is because I (drumroll, please) emailed my original MP3 contribution to myself.
Clearly, I have no business advising anyone else about business. Other than that, it's all good...
xxx c
The dreaded dread, redux
Just when I thought it had been forever vanquished, I felt a bout of the Dreaded Dread coming on again. You know the drill:
- I can't open this bill.
- I can't bring up how I want to change the blog: I'll get fired.
- I know I'm going to get screwed by this online vendor.
- Sweet baby Jeebus, not a rollerskating party.
- I'll never get rid of this damned cold.
Whatever the reason, age, experience, a super-clean apartment, I felt the dread and did it anyway. And lo, a series of amazing results:
- The bill was high...but not as bad as the dread.
- I brought it up...and was thanked for doing so.
- I emailed (politely) anyway...and got a full credit.
- It was horrible; it was magical.
- I'm still sick.
Well, four out of five ain't bad.
Hell, the fifth ain't that bad, either.
Hell's-bells-Little-Nell! Maybe it was the cold that brought on this can-do, Calvinist/Pollyanna attitude.
Nah. It's the clean apartment...
xxx c
If anyone knows who took the awesome photo above and (I think) posted it to Flickr, please let me know so I can give credit. I somehow forgot to the first time, too. Groan...dread...groan...
New design/portfolio site up!
Well, a mere five months later, we have launch!
With the able coding assistance of master (or is that 'meister'?) programmer, Michael Grosch, my new friend from Germany (by way of Austin, TX and SXSW), I've finally got the communicatrix | designs site up and running.
It's brand new, so there may be a missing link or two, but overall, I couldn't be happier with the results. Please do drop by and take a peek...and if you would, drop back here and let me know what you think.
Next up? The communicatrix | presents site, along with a complete overhaul (or at least, a serious retooling) of my presentation design portfolio. Four days at Son of NerdFest (a.k.a. PowerPoint Live 2006) and the underwhelmed reaction of one of the rockstars in the presentation design business made it painfully clear that I've gotten waaaaay too lazy about keeping my output updated.
But that's an electronic story for another day...
xxx c
LINK: communicatrix | designs
New GBSBS up!
Once again, yours truly has contributed to the riotous tips-fest that is Chris Brogan and Becky McCray's Great Big Small Business Show.
This week's topic? Organization. Now you might think that since I have been so public about my inability to become sufficiently organized that I would have bupkus to talk about, but you would be wrong wrong wrong. After all, who better to understand the pitfalls of clutter than someone who lives in perpetual fear of being subsumed by it?
The full line-up:
Ted Demopoulos Benjamin Yoskovitz Becky McCray Chris Brogan Heidi Miller Steve Rucinski Colleen Wainwright
All those other people? They have much better tips than I do. But hey, someone has to be the comic relief...
xxx c
Cleaning My Damned Apartment, Day 21: The sprint that winded me
You would think it would be easier to clean your damned apartment than to adjust your mood. Yet this second of my 21-day salutes was way, way harder, and not just because I'm a slob.
Making the first meditation about something as obvious as focusing on the happy made the process of writing about it much more straightforward. I either had an obvious blessing conk me on the head or I was tasked with taking something, anything, and finding the good in it. Either way, a relatively easy writing process.
To write about cleaning? Harder. Much, much harder. I know that there are people who make a nice living writing about cleaning (more so, probably, than the people who actually clean), but I wasn't interested in "just" writing about cleaning. (Although I was happy to give people a few pointers...Neil.)
This whole here blog thing is about process. Specifically, about taking the parts of my process that I can share and doing so, in the hope that some lucky soul will either enjoy the telling of it or learn from my foibles and foible not themselves. Both, if we're lucky.
It's my process, too, of course. But what I was doing wasn't so easy to clarify until yesterday, on Day 20 of this maddening cleaning thing, when I was on the phone with Lily and she casually brought up how she was enjoying the blog lately because I seemed to have found a way "to externalize my process."
Which just goes to show you: wisdom is like the perfect stiletto heel, you'll never find it when you're out there looking. You just have to sit back, relax and trust that eventually, when the time is right, it'll find its way to you...
xxx c
Photo by Esther17 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
Cleaning My Damned Apartment, Day 19: Clearing time clutter
Yesterday, I made it formal: I talked to my agent about saying bye-bye to acting.
Now, it's not like this has been a banner year for me, acting-wise; it's been my worst year since the commercial strike. I'm hitting a weird time, age-wise, and the business has changed a lot, too. Auditions were down anyway, to the point where the few people with whom I discussed my potential move wondered why I would actively take myself out of the game. Why not just go to whatever auditions were left and pursue what I wanted in my down time.
But I was starting to notice two things about auditioning. Either I was mainly happy being there to see all the friends I've made over the years or I resented being there at all for the time it was stealing from things I wanted to be doing more. Not good, either of them.
And there is a great, great power in working clean, admitting out loud, to yourself and the universe, that this is what you want. This.
So I'm out. Or on hiatus, as my lovely agent said we should put it.
But really, no matter how you slice it, there are big changes afoot.
And I wouldn't have it any other way...
xxx c
Photo by Tartanna via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license
Cleaning My Damned Apartment, Day 18: Staying Afloat
If you've been keeping up (and if you haven't, why not?!), you know that I timed this particular 21-day 'salute' a little poorly, forgetting that I had a three-day conference that would fall squarely in the middle.
The point of these 'salutes', for me, anyway, because I can't speak for you, dear reader, is to replace an old habit with a new one: in this case, letting things get wildly out of control rather than taking care of things day by day, bit by bit, and tackling the bigger things as time allows.
So far, I'm pleased to say, it's been working. Especially given the presence of an additional, trash-generating human being on the premises for the last week, things stayed remarkably under control. Committing to a few daily tasks helped enormously; knowing the bed was made, the dishes done each night, the trash emptied went a long way towards both peace of mind and general crap level.
I picked up some bug in the desert, so I doubt I'll get much major cleaning done in the home stretch. But the habit seems to be in place, so I also doubt I'll be left with a trash heap to sort through when I'm finally feeling 100% again. I'm not pushing too hard; I'm doing what I feel up to, mainly the dishes, the bed and some minor clutter-clearing.
And I'm asking for help when I need it. The BF was working on some pretty tight deadlines yesterday, but was still gracious to step up and use one of his 10-minute breaks to do the dishes when I asked. He even took the trash downstairs completely unprompted, thereby making himself even smoking-hotter in my eyes than he was before.
So that's my takeaway thus far from this little experiment: (a), slow and steady wins the race.
And (b), you will get laid better and more often if you learn to take out the trash on your own steam...
xxx c
Image by chrysophylax via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license
May it never be a holiday for selling mattresses and end-of-season merchandise
Illustration by former fellow New Yorker, Hugh MacLeod, used under a Creative Commons license.
The Lost Weekend
I'm back from a three-day spree in the desert. Usually, these trips involve prodigious amounts of whooping it up; this time, it was me and 200 of my new-best nerd friends, hanging out, talking shop about...talking.
I might get around to talking about talking (or speaking, as they call it) more at a later date. In fact, I'm doing a debrief of TalkFest 2006 over at The Marketing Mix tomorrow, in case you want to hear about me and the nerds (and I say that with the greatest affection: me LOVE nerds).
The short of it is two things: the more I do, the more I realize I am the only one who can do it. (I might also be the only one interested in me doing it, but that's another story.) Only me, only you, that whole Martha Graham/quickening thing.
And the more I do, the more I get excited about doing more. More transactions. More ideas put out into the marketplace. More love, more fun, more craziness, more risks, albeit more of the kind that will put me somewhere interesting, not in the hospital.
Anyway. For what it's worth.
Oh, and one more thing: the more time I spend with him, the more I am blown away by the unparallelled awesomeness of The BF. He went above and beyond the call this weekend, was delightful to all, helped me enormously by contributing his time and prodigious skillz for nothing and added a thousandfold to my enjoyment of the proceedings.
A lucky, lucky way to kick off Birthday Week...
xxx c
P.S. No I haven't forgotten Cleaning My Damned Apartment. And in case I had, the dirt decided to throw a party and invite the extended family. Oy. Happy Birthday Week to me...
Image by The BF, who takes one nice picture no matter which side of the camera he's on
the communicatrix elsewhere: The Marketing Mix!
Today marks the launch of a new, collaborative venture I'm really excited about. It's called The Marketing Mix, and it's the official blog of Ilise Benun & Peleg Top's amazing coaching and consulting business, Marketing Mentor.
Full disclosure: I am not just the webmistress for the Marketing Mentor blog; I'm also a client.
I was turned on to Peleg's famous Pricing & Marketing Workshop for designers via uber-networker and class-A unsophisticated bastard, Spencer Cross; it was such a transfomative day that I signed on as a coaching client with his partner, Ilise, almost immediately after that, despite an almost overwhelming skepticism towards coaching as a viable concept.
Color me converted.
In case you haven't noticed from reading communicatrix-dot-com, in the four months since Ilise and I started working together, I...: did (blogging) standup; got my logo and business cards finished; went to 10 networking events and one conference; picked up two new clients; designed a line of Famous Angeleo "trading cards" for blogging.la, got hired to write a monthly column for actual cash money; did a slot on a brand new podcast (with a business topic, no less) and did all my regular-usual work at the same time.
What's next? Who knows. A long, long nap is in order, that's for sure. Then again, I still don't have the websites up.
And Michael Blowhard has been after me to start a video podcast...
xxx c
Cleaning My Damned Apartment, Day 16: Eyesore repair
Today I: washed the dishes; did the laundry; scrubbed out the toilet, the bathroom vanity and the kitchen sink; threw away the rotted old flowers from last week; and am on my way out with the garbage AND the recycling.
I am charwoman, hear me roar...
xxx c
Photo by bulent_yusef via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
Cleaning My Damned Apartment, Day 15: Don't forget your shower shoes!
Not, like the past two weeks, because of what you might catch in the scum-centric ecosystem that was my tub floor, but because it is newly smooth as a freshly-Zamboni'd ice rink and you might land on your ass.
Now if only I could find time for a soak with my new roomie...
xxx c
Photo by O Caritas via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license
the communicatrix elsewhere: LAcasting.com
I'm bad! I'm nationwide!
Well, not really, but thanks to my good friend, Matt North, I'm the newest columnist at LACasting.com (a division of Casting Networks, Inc., and the main actor submission service used for commercial auditioners), where the first installment of my monthly column on All Things Acting is up for anyone who wants to see it.
September's topic? "Client-Proof Tape" (or, "How not to be a complete jackass at your audition").
Enjoy!
xxx c
the communicatrix elsewhere: The Great Big Small Business Show
For those of you who are dying to know what the communicatrix's semi-lisp-tinged, full-on Chicago accented voice sounds like, you can catch me on Episode 4 of The Great Big Small Business Show yakking about networking.
Hint: I'm the one who sounds the least businesslike...
xxx c
P.S. Thanks to Chris Brogan and Becky McCray for having me, and to the connectrix herself, Ms. Heidi Miller, for being the center from which we all radiate outwards...
Cleaning My Damned Apartment, Day 14: Cleaning The BF's Damned House
Yes, the fleas that started it all have worked their evil magic on The BF as well. He's on a cleaning/organizing/fumigating tear lately: we spent the day moving stuff up to the attic in preparation for the floor refinisher's arrival at My Country House on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, we've lugged a whole bunch of The BF's stuff to my teeny outpost here on the edge of K-Town so that he has a place to live/work/breathe while the floors are curing there.
I guess we'll see how well I clean when there's hardly any space in which to do it...
xxx c
Photo by lahrwolf2006 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license
Cleaning My Damned Apartment, Day 11: The Whore's Bath, Domecile Edition
We're having a little impromptu craigslist gathering chez communicatrix right now, and since I sure as hell wouldn't buy anything from a place that looked as dumpy as mine, I thought maybe I ought to shove the bags of books I (still) haven't taken to the used book store in a corner and run the Dirt Devil over the more egregious areas of upholstery and carpeting.
Et voila! Half an hour later, The BF is $100 richer, the place looks great (if you don't look too closely) AND I got that damned gigundo A/C out of here.
Yes, it'll be crapped up again tomorrow, but until then, we lounge in semi-clean splendor*.
Maybe I'll go wash out the bathtub to celebrate...
xxx c
*Even better, The BF is taking me out to dinner! Woo-hoo!**
**I'll wash out that bathtub tomorrow...
The photo, of a bain-marie, not a whore's bath, is by gwen via Flickr, and used under a Creative Commons license. Yes, it makes rather less sense than most of the photos I use to illustrate posts, but I was so elated that something actually came up when I typed "whore's bath" into the Flickr search engine, I had to run with it. Besides, it looks hot, n'est-ce pas?
Cleaning My Damned Apartment, Day 9: De-skank my ride!
10 car washes = 1 free car wash
No car washes in 6 months = 1 free car wash + $10 tip
xxx c
(Just three more years and I'll have another "free" car wash.)
Photo by Eric Rice via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license