Writer lemonade

This post is #17 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

A few years ago, I was invited to do a reading at a friend's series called "In the Flesh."

Because I am a gigantic thrill-seeking hambone who lives for the high-wire of small theater, I jump at every opportunity to perform live, including this one. It wasn't until later that the full impact of what I'd agreed to sunk in.

You see, "In the Flesh" stood not only for the act of reading live and in-person, but doing a reading of sexy material. About sex. A subject which, despite all of my cursing and bravado and forthrightness, I have never felt comfortable writing about.

Did I know this when I agreed to the gig? I did. Perhaps you do not hail from an alcoholic family and therefore lack my experience in advanced denial and holding two completely conflicting notions in your head at once. It's magical, I tell you! You would not imagine the nutty, sitcom-like situations you can find yourself in!

Anyway, there I was, a couple of days before the show. Too late to back out, too chickenshit to talk about sex with the class. So I did the only logical thing: I decided to sing about it.

For years now, I'd been noting the more unusual search terms that had brought people to my blog, and posting them every now and then in a semi-regular, semi-comic way. What I'd kept in reserve were the questionable, the adult, the outright perverse ones. I pulled them up from the text file where they'd languished, weird and dirty-like. And suddenly, they spoke to me, in rhythm. Then melody. I sang pieces of it over and over, rearranging them here and there, until they magically came together into what I dubbed "The Dirty Keywords Search Song." I enlisted the help of a friend who played guitar and owed me a favor, he met me at the venue (on his way home from a flight, adding a rockstar, cosmopolitan touch), and if memory and the video documentation serve, we brought down the house. Even after a top-flight lineup of very talented, very funny writers. Including Nina Hartley, who gave me a big hug afterward and said, "You funny."

I bring this up now for two reasons.

First, I'm trying to raise money. A LOT of  money, $50,000, in case you hadn't heard. And one of the ways I'm doing that is by offering incentives, to make it fun for people to give and participate, and to show my commitment to this thing. The entry-level incentive is a pack of MP3s, and, well, I thought it was high time that "The Dirty Keywords Search Song" got the full-on treatment. So I went back and re-recorded it the way I did that very first time, three years ago, to give as a practice track to my guitarist friend. I enlisted the help of Pace & Kyeli to add some nifty backing vocals because I was completely enchanted with their doo-wop skills when I saw them displayed in service of the World-Changing Writing Workshop.

And then, because you've gotta have a video to sell stuff, I made a video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGBeKebx00E&w=475&h=386]

(I have to use the old, Flash-style embed on this blog, so if you can't view it, you can click here to see it all modern and HTML5-style.)

Note: the MP3 will sound much nicer because I also got my good friend O-Lan to remix it for me all professionally and stuff. But the raw mix sort of works for the video, so I left it raw.

You can get this as an MP3, along with other assorted tracks, for a $5 donation. Or it comes bundled in a fabulous value pack with all this other stuff like wallpapers and a cross-stitch pattern of the Writer's Motto for a $25 donation.

But there's a second reason I made this video and am sharing it here: crazy shit happens. Things break, they don't go as planned, they don't come together. And if you are a little unsure of your skills or a control freak or both, it can be dispiriting. Your nice plan, all derailed by crazy shit!

The thing is, the very best stuff can come out of the derailment. The first draft that disappeared in a power outage almost always results in a better, tighter draft tossed off after all the long processing you had to slog your way through. The terrifying hospitalization yields a miraculous bloody epiphany which turns into a stage show and a talk and a whole new, happier life. There's a longstanding literary tradition of turning lemons into lemonade which I finally, FINALLY get because it takes conflict to have resolution, and we all need to make sense of something in a scary world gone mad.

Speaking of which, there's a third reason I needed to do this: because it scared me. And if you're not terrifying yourself on a semi-regular basis, I can almost guarantee you're not working hard enough.

xxx c

Edit, edit, edit

This post is #16 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

The reason you get tired of going online is not because there is not enough good stuff, there's plenty of it.

You just can't see it because there's too much bad stuff.

Too many people writing too much because they are desperately afraid that if they do not, they will disappear from view. (It's also why there are too many things on a page, too many things dropping down over what's on a page, and too many pages.)

It's okay to write less and to write better. I'm sorry if anything I've ever written (or said, or done) has led you to believe otherwise.

Do less with more, always. And walk away from people who don't.

Me included.

xxx c

The writer's motto

This post is #15 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

Joy is all well and good in its way, but there are plenty of days when life is just a piece of shit.

The client rejects your proposal. The hard drive crashes. The post you worked on for days languishes unnoticed.

The check bounces, the sentences won't come together, the dog rips out the neighbor's flower bed. The letter comes back unopened. The mammogram comes back with a shadow. The migraine comes back, period.

Or, you know, the bottom drops out of the economy. Again.

Here's the deal, as I see it: we are here to live our damned lives until we are not, with no idea of when "not" is coming. The bus that is 20 minutes late to get you to a job interview could be fifty years early for the cyclist who swerves to avoid hitting a pedestrian and ends up suddenly ending. So it is incumbent upon us to really and truly LIVE those damned days, every last one of them, even the shit ones.

This can be a tough slog. Some days, resignation is all I can muster. But most days, I choose also to laugh at something, even if I'm the only thing handy. I choose to let things be messy and imperfect. (HIGHLY reluctantly, but whatever.) I choose to surround myself with things that comfort and soothe and amuse and bolster.

You have to have a calendar; why not have one by an amazing artist, or three, for that matter, so that whenever you look up to find a date, you're reminded of the beauty in the world?

You have to have walls; why not have art hanging there that inspires you?

You have to have a motto, well, actually, you don't. But if you were casting about for a good one, and you had a slightly black and perverse sense of humor, you could do worse than "Push the cocksucking boulder up the motherfucking hill." It's catchy. It works in march-like, 2/4 time. It has swears.

Which is why, when I approached the legendary Bee Franck to ask whether she would kindly contribute a desktop wallpaper to the 50-for-50 Project to benefit WriteGirl, I suggested she illustrate this sturdy and useful motto. And I guess it must have resonated with her, because immediately, she offered not only to do that, but:

1. to create a cross-stitch pattern for the crafters (see illustration at the top of this post)
2. to stitch one up herself with her own two hands
3. to donate it, framed and shipped, to the cause!

Bee finished it this weekend and now one lucky bidder can be the owner of this magnificent work of inspirational art:

So. Let's recap. Need some personal bolstering in a world falling to pieces? You can...

• Contribute $10 and receive Bee Franck's custom "The Boulder" cross-stitch pattern, to make your own
• Contribute $15 and receive Bee Franck's "The Boulder" digital wallpaper, along with similar (yet completely different!) works of digital desktop art by some of my favorite artists and designers
• Bid on the ONE-OF-A-KIND original, lovingly stitched and framed by Bee herself

(And of course, you can sing along with the song anytime you want for FREE!)

Remember, as bad as the world you're dealing with is right now, the one we're handing off to the next generation is probably going to be worse. Just sayin'! WriteGirl is helping turn amazing high school girls into the strong, confident, awesome women leaders we're all going to need tomorrow. Give what you can to help them and we'll all be better off for it.

Excelsior!

xxx c

Writing trite

This post is #14 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

I was a fairly highly-paid copywriter for some some big brand names, but it wasn't until I started horsing around on the Internet that I actually got good at writing the evanescent stuff.

Blurbs. Bios. Short "about" squibs. And above all, comments and tweets and emails.

When people throw out that rhetorical question of how I manage to get so much done, they usually do it on the heels of some stupid little throwaway bit of nothing that quietly appeared somewhere. I get that, when I've been moved to make a remark like that, it's usually been in the context of something small built upon a whole lot of other somethings small. Many, many pieces of small that together have made up a mountain I can not only see but that I can trust. Seth Godin reputedly responds to every single email he receives. I was startled (not to mention delighted) by the first reply I got, but it was the steady-and-sureness of the replies that led me to know, like, and truly trust him.

Yes, big things are dazzling. But so are many, many small things: the thank-yous and comments and @-replies; the thoughtfully-written FAQs; descriptions, captions, and something beyond a snap of the "like" button. The mundane touches that no one else sees, that arrive sans fanfare, assure us that someone is there, that someone sees us, that we're not out there alone, whistling Dixie.

Bonus-extra? The more you do them, the better you get at doing all of it.

xxx c

Portrait of the blogger as a young adhole by her brilliant and very patient first art director, Kate O'Hair.

Telling envy where to get off

This post is #13 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

One of the fledgling writer's least favorite and most persistent sidekicks is envy.

Oh, hell, forget "fledgling"; try "living".

I'd like to think it's a necessary artistic tool to keep me humble or even to spur me onward to greater heights, but the reality is that for most of my productive life, envy did neither, it just hung around like a stale funk, stinking up the joint.

Which is why I first met the worldview of one Bonnie Gillespie, a prolific and excellent writer (who, in my opinion, is nowhere near as well-recognized as she should be), with more than a little skepticism. How could you write so much and so well and for so long and for not nearly enough and not hate someone's guts?

But she doesn't. Trust me, I've tested and prodded and snuck up on her from all kinds of angles. Ladyfriend may have her other demons, but she is seriously, genuinely envy-free. As is her husband. Who is an actor.

Here are Bonnie's words on the subject, which sometimes accompany her delightful, helpful emails courtesy of a magical rotating signature:

Any time I see someone succeed I am happy, for it affirms my belief that I live in a world where success is possible.

How great is that? Pretty great! So great that it resides in my permanent quote file. And now, thanks to Bonnie and my friend Dave Seah, who came out of illustration retirement to render it as a desktop wallpaper, it also resides on my desktop. Just adjacent to my other, smaller desktop, which holds Tsilli Pines' gorgeous rendering of my personal-mantra quote by Beverly Sills.

You can own them both, along with this by Austin Kleon (and more to come!) for a modest donation to the 50-for-50 Project of just $15. Only until September 13th, 2011. After which you will have to deal with your envy and your impatience and all of your other demons on your own.

xxx c

Image inside the frame by Dave Seah, illustrating a quote by Bonnie Gillespie. You can get it in a luxurious, desktop-sized image of inspiration with a $15 contribution to the 50-for-50 project on IndieGoGo, through September 13, 2011.

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #63: 50-for-50 edition

This post is #12 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

All of this week's entries in the Frrrrriday Rrrrround-up were written in response to and support of the 50-for-50 project. I thank you, fellow writers!

I ain't gonna bury the lede: we made it onto Oprah(.com)!

Some fellow would-be-do-gooders found our 50-for-50 campaign while trolling the web on behalf of their own fundraising project. So what did they do? They promoted ours, on their blog! Talk about good fellowship!

A lovely supporter and contributor, Jamie Wallace, aka @suddenlyjamie to you 140-and-under folk, wrote a beautiful piece about the campaign, including a brief lament that there was no WriteGirl back when we were coming up. What might have been, indeed. #Amen, @suddenlyjamie!

Oh, I can't remember when the tshirts went live, but the tshirts went live. All you people who are all the time bugging me about where I got the "Old." shirt, buy now, or forever hold your peace. Seriously, do you want to be the only person at the 1-year reunion not wearing a shirt?

Last but most definitely not least, I had a rollicking good time talking to Tea Silvestre, the Word Chef, on her bloggy-radio show. She asked all the good questions to draw useful stuff out of me, then wrote it up neatly, in bullet points. Oh, I do love the bullet points (judiciously used, of course). You can read the summary of the convo and/or listen to it yourself, all right here.

Photo by Brenton Fletcher used under a Creative Commons license.

Poetry Thursday: Keep writing

This post is #11 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

When what you write makes you cry,
keep writing.

When the words are coming slowly,
or too quickly,
or not at all,
keep writing.

When the stories won't tell themselves
the way they showed up in your head,
dammit,
keep writing.

When you are tired
or bored
or sad
or angry

when you are freshly dumped
when you are floating on air

when you are wicked
when you are good
when you are stuffed
when you are starving
when you are sure
there is not one more thing in the world to say,
keep writing.

You are not here to be significant
or meaningful
or even great—
you are here because the pen
cannot do it without you.

So pick it up
and park your ass
and write
and write
and write.

xxx
c

Writing small

This post is #10 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

I am as guilty as anyone when it comes to thinking that writing has to be big or important or perfect.

Or just long. I mean, seriously, have you read this blog?

But if there is one thing that Twitter has re-taught me, it's that small can be good: in fact, I consciously used it to retrain myself to fashion pithier sentences, and while I use it less now, it certainly helped. Gretchen Rubin keeps a one-sentence daily journal; she finds it a simple way to stay in touch with the things in her life that would otherwise fly away, never to be thought of again.

My grandmother, who would never in a million years have called herself a writer, wrote some of my favorite things. Usually, they were little add-ons to my grandfather's lengthy letters, he had no problem calling himself a writer. Just a sentence or two, often about something mundane, but always full of love and her own goofy, gentle character. Of the many artifacts they left behind, one of my all-time favorites is this fascinating travel journal she kept during the last years of their heavy, international travel, in the 1950s and early 1960s. My grampa used to needle her about recording the crazy minutiae she captured, prices and times and "steak dinners." But I love them because they are real, and in her hand, and as they occurred to her in those moments. These are the things she wanted to record and keep.

If you call yourself a writer, it is always wise to carry a little notebook around in which to, well, note things. I favor Field Notes these days. (Not a paid advertisement! Just a fangirl "howdy!")

But even if you do not, it might not be a bad idea to carry something around to note things which occur to you, or to record things that are happening, like steak dinners, and where you took them, and that you rested, bathed and dressed just beforehand. You of the Future might be fascinated by the very details You of Right Now take for granted.

xxx c

Stories everywhere

This post is #9 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

One of the things that learning to write teaches you is to find the stories everywhere.

The stories around you. The stories you are living. The stories that involve you, and the stories that involve other people.

And when you really dig in, you start developing a strange ability to see the world through different lenses: the lens of nostalgia, the lens of need, the lens of want. A photo of a group of people on a roof becomes more than a time-capsule display of a skyline or a series of funny hats; it's now a doorway into any world you want, a vehicle to start talking about love, about fear, about heat, about anticipation. About togetherness, aloneness, boredom, sorrow. About men and women, about black and white, about rich and poor, about summer and winter, about work and play.

Once you know where to look, everything is a story. And every story is a beginning.

xxx c

It's a long, long way to 50

This post is #8 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

The first thing I thought when I shut down this shindig for that first night, almost a week ago, was, "WOW. If we can raise almost five thousand dollars in one day, what can't we do?"

The second thing I thought was, "SHIT. We've still got over 45 thousand left to raise. What the hell was I thinking?!"

So you see, I have some work to do in more than one area.

* * * * *

Boy, do I wish there were shortcuts. My dirty little secret is that I wanted to wake up last Monday, the very first day of the campaign, and see that we'd done it. That somehow, in the middle of the night before we'd even officially started, some mysterious Generous Benefactor had stumbled on this little project and found it in her rich little heart to kick in the full $50K.¹

In other words, some 25-odd years later, I'm still a sucker for fairy tales, for lottery tickets, for the urban working-girl myth of the Unidentified Limo Encounter. (Well, okay, maybe not the lottery tickets.)

But it is not true. There is no limo. There is no mysterious, wealthy deus ex machina who will come to rescue us. This is both the good news and the bad, naturally: we may find ourselves mired in whatever, but we have the wherewithal to dig ourselves out. Even if someone else did the miring, we can dig ourselves out. If you don't believe me, I'll see your skepticism and raise you one WWII vet who did a looong stretch in a Japanese POW camp. After he floated across the Pacific in a raft, fighting off sharks.

Besides, if there is one thing I have learned in my almost-50 years, especially those 11 days of it back in 2002, in the IBD ward of the Cedars Sinai Hilton, it is to never, ever wish away time. If you dread that exam on Thursday, remember: dreading is your privilege. There are a few people somewhere who are grabbing at their last breaths, just wishing they had some horrible Organic Chem exam to dread. They'd give that Jell-O on the tray, there, and the butterscotch pudding next to it, for the privilege of worrying about your Organic Chem exam for just a few hours.

* * * * *

In selecting the "perks" for the 50-for-50 campaign, I had to make some hard choices. The fundraising platform for this project only allows for 12 levels of giveaways. Which is widly frustrating. I can come up with 12 giveaways between the moka pot and the toilet.²

I finally decided that while it would be incredible to have a few Deus Ex Moneybags come out of the highly-polished, burled woodwork to give me and my churning bowels a rest with some gigantic pledges, it would be even more incredible if we raised this money by ones and twos. For the coffers to fill up with requests for $5 MP3 packs and $10 cross-stitchery and $15 wallpapers made by all of my wonderful friends, like the Tsilli Pines creation illustrating my favorite quote (by Beverly Sills!) you see just above these messy, heartfelt words.

Which is why there is a small and finite number of high-end perks and a pretty much infinite number of low-end ones. The gift we give to WriteGirl will be huge; $50,000 is a not-insignificant chunk of their annual operating budget. But the gift we can give to the world is infinite by comparison. That $50,000 will be gone well before the end of the year, but showing those girls that they mean something will not. Leaving one more example of "nobodys" making a difference will not. Demonstrating how community bands together to pull the next ones up will not.

This will not work without widespread sharing. Even if it works, i.e., we manage to raise the whole $50K (which I happen to believe we will), the project doesn't really do its job unless the most people possible feel like they can make the most awesome things happen, too.

There's a lot of room in the world for this kind of hope right now. Let's get to work, shall we?

xxx c

¹Other things I wished for over that first weekend, in no particular order: for the humidity to dry up; for the liquid that bubbled up into my aunt's ground-floor rec room to be just water; for AT&T's sucktastic network to let up long enough to allow me to send and receive a text within 50 yards of the place I was staying; for my ride to the wedding to show up NOW, please; for French fries, oddly enough; and for the bride and groom to truly live happily ever after.

²BTW, if you're interested in helping out with the 50-for-50 Project by offering your own giveaway, we have a workaround: you can "sell" whatever it is on your own, via your website, email, etc., and then contribute the proceeds to the IndieGoGo campaign site on or before September 13. We'll help you promote everywhere else we can. To inquire about doing this, please contact me: colleen AT communicatrix (and so on).

Image © 2011 Tsilli Pines. Available in motivational desktop wallpaper size along with a gift-pack of other designer desktops for a mere $15 donation to the 50-for-50 project.

Soaking in writing

This post is #7 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

A common thread runs through the backstories of superstars, no matter what their fields of accomplishment: growing up, they spent a lot of time soaking in x.

Musicians grow up hearing a lot of music. Artists are raised amidst art. Men and women of science began as boys and girls of science, talking about something besides the weather or America's Most Wanted around the dinner table.

I grew up around writers.

My father and grandfather were writers, and they hung out around other men, and yes, they were all men back then, who were writers. On Saturdays, they gathered at a little coffee shop on the corner of Rush and Bellevue in Chicago's Near North Side to kibbitz and, in my writerly imagination, enjoy hamburger sandwiches and coffee, old-school style. And yes, to smoke, of course. Everyone smoked back then.

My memories of Dad and Gramps don't all have to do with writing, but a surprising number of the most pungent ones do. Most mental images of my dad have him looking down, either at a yellow, letter-sized "legal" pad (his paper since I first understood these things) or at some piece of reading material, the former on the floor, leaned back against the couch in the den that served as his bedroom during Divorced Dad Weekends, the latter in the tub. (As a side note, this may account for my fascination with the film noir Laura, whose writer-character we first meet in the tub, typing on a machine perched atop a board serving as a makeshift desk.)

I rarely saw my grandfather writing; I was an only grandchild until age 5, and he spent whatever time he and Gram were allotted with me fully engaged in some kind of merrymaking, talking, or (bless his heart) shopping. Often for books. But Gramps always had the study of my dreams: Mid-Century Awesome, with a massive and elegant custom wall unit of interlocking shelves, nooks, and whatnot for his books, magazines, files, and, of course, his typewriter return, which sat just to the left of his writer-writing desk at a perpendicular angle.

The ubiquitous accommodation of and proximity to writing made writing seem like the most natural activity in the world. It was not a matter of being easy or hard; it just was. One did it, and a lot of it, just as one did a lot of eating and sleeping and walking.

This might be the greatest gift WriteGirl gives: to let a young writer soak in it. The girls are given their own journals to write in. Then they meet with their mentors once weekly, at a coffee shop, quite often, to write, to do the exercises, but also to talk about writing, and all the work that goes into and around writing to support the writing.

The coffee shops are not O'Connell's but the ritual is the same: we are writers; let us spend time together, telling each other our stories.

xxx c

• Here's a Google maps picture of the old O'Connell's site on the corner of Bellevue & Rush
• Here's the wikipedia entry for T.R. Baskin, a film set in Chicago that shot some scenes at O'Connell's 

Room.

This post is #6 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

For most of my youth, I enjoyed the unbelievable luxury of having not only my own room, but my own bathroom.

On top of all that physical space, for the first five and a half years of my life, I was an only child, adding an extra buffer of psychic and emotional space around me.

I understand that a writer writes, period, sitting or standing, in peace or amidst chaos, by brilliant natural light or candlelight. Whatever it takes.

I also know that were it not for the unbelievable luxury of all that room, I would probably not have grown up to become a writer. Writers need room of some kind, either the kind they are given or the kind they stake out for themselves, and preferably both, and plenty of it. (And yes, I'm all for the actual, delineated-by-a-door-that-closes kind of room, too; after much futzing and fudging that line in various partnerships during my adult life, I've finally added it, in ink, to the list of non-negotiables.)

Yes, stimulation and input are important. Of course, it's important to read anything you can get your hands on, and to be taught to know the good from the bad. Please, accept that you're a person, fellow introverts, and learn to co-exist in space with others. Preferably sometime before I got the hang of it, in my 40s.

But nothing grows without room. Not ideas, not flowers, not love, and definitely not writing.

xxx c

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #62: 50-for-50 edition

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q6XecpOje0&w=476&h=301] This post is #5 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

All of this week's entries in the Frrrrriday Rrrrround-up were written in response to and support of the 50-for-50 project. I thank you, fellow writers!

Delia Lloyd reflects on how middle age seems to bring with it the joys of discovering philanthropy. I couldn't agree more.

Daniel Shannon weighs in with a lovely tribute to the two women teachers who made them the (glorious) writer he is today.

Jodi Womack extracts early lessons from the project that hadn't yet occurred to me. She's good like that, is Jodi.

A writer/marketer who also happens to be a mom goes into the importance of teaching all children a love of writing.

Finally, the adorable Alice Bradley writes way too many nice things about me and the project.

And in case you didn't know, we have interviews up on the 50-for-50 blog with the first five of my favorite inspirational women-who-write:

• Bonnie Gillespie, casting director and author
• Nina DiSesa, advertising genius and author
• Eden M. Kennedy, erudite blogger, yogini and author
• Alice Bradley, blogger, essayist, and author
• Valeria Maltoni, conversation agent

They're lively and wonderful interviews, thanks in no small part to my friend Marilyn Maciel who basically came up with the interview questions after I begged her. But I did beg politely!

Please, please, tell your friends, pass along useful information, use what you will, and most importantly, give what you can.

xxx c

Video largely by the unstoppable team of Heather Stobo & Lisa Casoni.

Music is "St. Louis Tickle," by The Heftone Banjo Orchestra, Brian Heffernan, Director

Poetry Thursday: Finding your voice

This post is #4 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

You begin by following the ones who went before.

Step by step you walk,
straining to find the right set of footprints,
for the trails lead everywhere,
everywhere.
Up mountains, through thickets,
into caves and crevasses,
clearly the work of those crazy, spelunking limericists,
marveling at the wonders the giants have left in their wake,
carved into trees
chipped into stones
blooming in rows
or artfully planted
to look random.

The maps, they never seem to work quite right.

Is this the lake? Was I supposed to turn there?
This road seems so much narrower
than the one in the picture,
than the one in the song,
than the one in my head.

I must be lost, you think.
I will wander this land for all eternity,
traveling in circles,
looping back on myself,
around and around.

I will never get There.

And then one day,
the light slants down at a particular angle
which you both notice
and do not
and the air feels familiar
but completely different
and there are no other footsteps but yours
and you are walking—no, you are walking,
blazing a trail for the next intrepid soul,
scattering your own seeds
and songs
and fairy messages
along the way.

xxx
c

Image inside the frame by Nikki McClure, one of a series of pieces from her beautiful yearly calendars. You can get it in a luxurious, desktop-sized image of inspiration with a $15 contribution to the 50-for-50 project on IndieGoGo, through September 13, 2011. After that, no dice, Bryce.

Award, schmaward

This post is #3 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

Believe it or not, I was sort of a nerd back in the day.

Not the very smartest nerd, of course. Just the almost-smartest nerd from a fairly shallow pool, and one whom the nuns felt would be the best all-around candidate for some award that some nice alumna had decided to gift the school with.

I'm not being coy about the name of the award; I truly do not remember it. While it seemed like the high point of my eight-grade year, my culminating season of a pretty winning eight (soon to be followed by a near-disastrous four, especially socially), I cannot for the life of me remember the name of that award, or what it purported to reward me for. I don't even remember if there was money involved, and I almost always remember money.

Here's what I do remember from my eighth-grade year at Sacred Heart Elementary School on Sheridan Road in Chicago, IL: Frances Kent.

Mrs. Kent was my eighth-grade English teacher, and the first teacher I remember who specifically, carefully, and generously urged me on to write. Perhaps she saw some promise there. Perhaps she felt herself to be something of a kindred spirit. In hindsight, it's clear that she was a Second Wave Hot Ladynerd, what with her fabulous legs kicking out from under her knee-length pleated skirts, and her freckled nose, and her little round nerd spectacles.

Whatever it was that made her forgo what was surely a better-paying job in pretty much any other field where writing and smarts were required, I'm eternally grateful to her for her service, and her name is forever engraved upon my heart as surely as her hand is visible in my work. As my friend Daniel says, "...without women writers, I wouldn't exist."

xxx c

The love you take

This post is #1 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

Almost four years ago to the day, I went to a lunch that changed my life.

The organizer, Bob McBarton, had been after me (gently) to attend one of his literary "salons" for some time. Every time I read the email announcements, I was tempted: he brought in some really fantastic people to talk books, politics, and culture, around a pretty sweet table.¹

But when I'd look at the accompanying attendee list, always lengthy Word attachments, to accommodate the weight of the bios, I'd chicken out. Never mind the guest speakers, even the attendees were luminaries in their various fields, each of them hugely accomplished, and in "real" endeavors, not this b.s. futzing around I'd done in advertising and acting and my silly little blog. They'd published books (multiple books, in some cases) tried significant cases, produced award-winning films, run cities. One of them had overcome physical obstacles that made my Crohn's onset look like a paper cut, and gone on to succeed in multiple high-profile positions in multiple incredibly tough-to-crack industries.

Finally, though, my curiosity got the better of me, and I went. I wound up seated between the mayor of a nearby town and a couple of nice, unassuming ladies in the general vicinity of my age. Of course, I was way too uninformed to talk about the homeless problem with hizzoner, so I turned my attention to the women, Keren Taylor and Allison Deegen, the executive and associate directors, respectively, of a local nonprofit called WriteGirl. They'd spent the better part of the past six years helping hundreds of teenage girls not only get through high school and into college, but become confident, well-read, joyous communicators.

I was talking about changing the world through writing; they were doing it.

One girl at a time.

* * * * *

There's a little test I use when I'm coming up with something, an essay, a song, a poem, a talk, and trying to get at a Truly True Truth: if it makes me either (1), laugh out loud; or (2), burst into tears, it's a keeper. Because as you well know if you've ever lived through a highly emotional time, an illness, a death, a natural disaster, a knock-down-drag-out with your honey, laughter and tears sit so close to each other, they might as well be making out in the balcony.

I have cried at every WriteGirl workshop I've been to. I've also rarely laughed so joyously as I have there, nor felt more hope for humanity. These are amazing girls, all of them. They vary in their levels of introversion and extraversion, boldness and shyness, just like the rest of us, but each of them has been 100% present and committed at every workshop I've been to. They throw themselves into the exercises, even when the exercises challenge them or feel a little weird at first. They show up, week after week, to work with their mentors in between the monthly group workshops. They engage, they ask questions, they play, and they write. Oh, boy do they write, and how. You want to laugh and cry, brother, you get yourself to a WriteGirl meeting.²

No less amazing are the women who volunteer their time to mentor the girls, to organize the workshops, to corral the bazillion details that go into running an organization like this. Need I tell you that money is always, always tight? It is. What Keren and her team manage to do on the money they receive is matched only by the astounding calm with which they manage the constant doubt of where the next buck is coming from.

For once, I want these wonderful women not to worry: I want them to know that $50,000 is coming, and in 50 days, and from you. From us.

* * * * *

Did you know that everyone and his brother's band is doing a Kickstarter-type campaign these days? It's true, look it up.

Well, I'm throwing my hat into the ring. And possibly what's directly beneath it.³

For my 50th birthday, I want to raise $50,000 for WriteGirl. In 50 days. So let's get cracking.

There's an IndieGoGo page you should go to right now. You'll see various giveaways for various contribution levels.

Some of it is new and fun and exceptionally affordable. I had a number of designer and artist friends whip up some custom desktop wallpapers. There are MP3s! Of some of your favorite songs, and some of mine, all from women artists!

Some of it is stuff you cannot get anywhere else. Most pointedly, I do not do any copywriting anymore, but for a price, you can hire me to write your bio. Or your own silly-but-effective anthem, or your own poem that will make you cry. (Or one of the girls will, your choice!)

Or, if you're really loaded and looking for a way to relieve yourself of $50,000 in a hurry, I will dedicate my first book to you. (Which would also mean I'd feel obligated to finally put one out there, so if you're one of the people who've been patiently waiting and you have a friend with 50,000 spare dollars, hit 'em up.)

You can also donate without taking a "gimme," if you're so inclined. Or buy something as a gift for someone else, their own personalized-by-me Field Notes book, for example. An anniversary or birthday song. A love poem. It would be very much in the whole giving-is-getting spirit of things.

Which brings me to my last point: this is not for me, but it is entirely for me.

* * * * *

This whole project has been a combination of long-term thinking and short-term scramble.

Amazingly, so far, things have been falling into place, but that's the angels' work, not mine. Because while I was not too scared to envision myself bald, or even to envision raising what is, and there's no other way to put this, a fuckton of money in an insanely short time, I was too scared until recently to ask for help.

When I finally did, the most amazing thing of all happened: people said "yes." My friend Mike Monteiro said, Yes, I'll make another run of the "Old" t-shirts for you, and we'll give all the money to the girls. (link coming soon!) My friend-turned-client Jean MacDonald said, Yes, you can give away copies of TextExpander, how many do you want? Jim Coudal said, Yes you can have a bunch of Field Notes, and by the way, you might want to customize them, and here's what we use.

My friends Lisa and Heather said, Yes, we'll make a video, and you can stay at our place while we shoot. My friend Jennifer offered up her house for the party, her HOUSE.

My friends Jason & Jodi and Peleg and Judy and Adam immediately pledged financial support, and in amounts that took my breath away. My friend Tim offered up his team to build the website and then, when I waited too long and missed my window, my other friend Gabriel stepped in to save me. Every friend I've approached, Danielle and Dyana, Alice and Eden, Pace & Kyeli, Michelle and Jill, Josh and Donna, plus dozens more I'm forgetting now and hundreds more who signed up for the early notification list said, Yes, we'll help you, and yes, we'll get that money for these girls.

As I've said about myself before, I'm a pretty loquacious motherfucker, but when it comes to describing how this outpouring of love and support have affected me, I am at a loss for actual words.⁴ They're inadequate, or at least, they are in this form and in this moment when I am, to put it mildly, somewhat knackered.

That I have such friends and in such quantities is remarkable. What is left now is for me to rise to the occasion, to try being just as remarkable.

For the next 50 days, I will be blogging and emailing and tweeting and calling. I will lay aside my fear of asking and ask. Oh, boy, will I ask!

And at the end of this road, whether I fail or succeed at raising every cent of this money, and don't kid yourself, failure is always an option, if I have given it my all, I will receive my gift: to have given my all in pursuit of something greater than me.

But DAMN, I want the money for those girls, too. So let's get crackin', shall we?

xxx c

Things you can do right now to support the "50 for 50" Project:

• Donate to the 50-for-50 project on IndieGoGo!
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¹Hey, food counts. Just sayin'.

²Of course, if you're actually a brother, you'll have to take my word for it. It's a dude-free zone, except for a few actors who volunteer to play the male roles in the presentation at the end of the screenwriting workshop.

³That's right: if we raise the whole $50K, I'm shaving my head at the culminating shindig. BALD, BABY. To the skin.

⁴Laughing and incoherent blubbering, however, I have been doing quite a bit. I can barely open up my email these days without bursting into tears of joy. This is a mighty fine thing, although it draws stares in coffee shops.

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #61

An end-of-weekly roundup collecting fffffive of the fffffoxiest things I fffffind stumbling around the web. More about the genesis here. Every dang Friday Round-Up here, you procrastinating slacker!

In a sort of meta-writing challenge, Scott Berkun deconstructed the process of writing a 1,000-word essay by writing, and screen-recording the process, in real-time, then narrating over it, a 1,000-word essay. Pretty interesting. [Stumbled, via Ilise Benun]

I'd say that what Paul Ford has accomplished here in one fell-egant swoop is "proof of concept." A must-read for folks interested in the upside of social media. [Facebook-ed, via Mat Honan]

Quality comes first. But assuming you have that in place, these are some pretty sweet tips about putting it out there. [delicious-ed]

Paul Gillin makes a good case for some top-down attention to social media within a bigger company. [Google Reader-ed]

xxx c

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

Why you're all invited to my birthday party

Since reaching my majority, birthdays have been fraught for me.

It's not so much because I've feared the rolling-over of the odometer to this or that number, but because I don't know what to do with birthdays. And something tells me they need to be noted somehow, if only to maintain a loose grip on time.¹

Now it's easy enough to default to a special dinner out, or to coerce some friends into sponsoring one in. Even a big trip isn't hard to wrangle, especially for the "zero" years. For my 36th, a rather theatrical friend even treated me to a novel celebration that included a one-on-one sharing of journal-style entries on my life, with a ritualistic ingestion of wine-soaked strawberries to punctuate each year.²

For my 43rd birthday, though, I finally took a real risk and threw myself a real party. I'd hosted one for my 38th, but it was strictly a small-potatoes, have-a-few-friends-up-to-the-new-pad sort of deal, the sort of affair where if only you, your boyfriend, and a few losers with nothing else to do of a Saturday night turn up, you can totally play it off as intentional.

This time, I went way out, for me, for then, on a limb. I approached some friends who owned a restaurant about taking it over for the night. I wore contacts and makeup and a, for me, even still, cute outfit. I bought a basket of disposable cameras³ for group documentation. Most critically, I invited my friends, all my friends, from all my various interests, rather than just the jocks or the burnouts or the West Siders or the East Siders or the nerds or the theater nerds or the other theater nerds. (I jest, but only slightly, the narcissism of minor differences is never so pronounced as it is when you get groups of performers together.) I invited guys I'd dated whom I was now friends with. In fact, I think the only people I didn't invite were two guys who'd dumped me, and I still invited our mutual friends.

There were reasons for this rather dramatic change of affairs, this freaky, new-found bravery.

You see, in 2001, just two days before my last Big Round Number Birthday, the world blew up.⁴ A year later, on my 41st birthday, I was hospitalized with my Crohn's onset: I got a colonoscopy and the nurses got my cake. Not exactly sweet times at the disco. (Although that bloody epiphany is still my all-time greatest birthday gift to date.) And the following year, I spent my birthday in Florida watching my 70-year-old father dying. Neither of which things, for the record, is any fun. At all.

Which is why, in 2003, 50 or so of my closest friends who'd never laid eyes on each other before found ourselves at an Argentinean restaurant in a Hollywood strip mall, eating SCD-legal food and drinking SCD-legal adult beverages at my "Breaking the Birthday Hex" party.

I was never so nervous before, never so happy during, never so gratified after any birthday thing I'd done, ever.

Not because my friends finally met in a gigantic DIY celebration of kumbaya spirit: after some perfunctory politenesses, people pretty much drifted off to whatever groups they self-selected for and I pretty much bounced from table to table for the balance of the evening. I was happy during and gratified after because I was nervous before, because in throwing this particular party in this particular way, I did something I was afraid of. It was absolutely the scariest and most wonderful gift I'd ever given myself.

From my perspective eight years further down the road, the Breaking the Birthday Hex celebration marked a huge step forward for me when it came to owning my life and integrating it into my life's work. My bloody epiphany may have woken me up and the autobiographical play (with music!) that I'd co-written, produced and performed earlier that year certainly gave me a huge surge of confidence, but this was mine, all mine. It was a decision I made, not one that was thrust upon me, and it was my name alone on the marquee. Friends contributed, of course, there would have been no party were it not for my restaurant-owning friends. But it would have been Colleen's Dud Party, not Colleen's Restaurant-Owning Friends' Débâcle, had things gone south.

I came out of that birthday feeling more like myself than I had since I was 10, and stronger than I had, ever. I think it's no coincidence that less than a month later, I took my first of what has turned out to be many solo road trips, or that less than two months later, I launched communicatrix-dot-com. I'd finally started to live out loud.

But never REALLY loud. Since Breaking the Birthday Hex, I've plugged away at things assiduously, but quietly, as quietly as one can plug, anyway, when one's plugging-away takes place principally via the internet. I have put my time and energies into building a body of work, this blog, then this newsletter, this column, this speaking (so called)-career.

Along the way, I've met a lot of people. A lot of very different people. Yes, we're all special snowflakes, but like snowflakes, we cluster. You will not find much overlap between the attendees at a typical Toastmasters meeting (if there's even one of those) and the people whose work populated the leaderboard of Dean Allen's late, lamented Favrd. Nor will you find many, if any, of either of those two clusters hanging out at a Biznik meetup or talking shop on kernspiracy or hanging out on the actor boards. If there even still are actor boards in 2011.

For my birthday this year, I need everyone at the same metaphorical table, or at least in the same metaphorical Argentinean restaurant. I am as nervous about doing that as I am that my Big Scary Birthday thing will be a whopping and highly public flop. Which you'll understand when you see what it is, next Monday. You'll either be all "Wow! That is big and scary and I'M IN!" or you won't. And if you're not, make no mistake: it will flop. Highly and publicly.

Make no mistake: I want to succeed. Both because it will be awesome for a whole lot of people if I can pull this off and because I am one of the most competitive motherfuckers on the planet.

But even if it flops, I will have tried. No one will die. (Well, not because of this, anyway.) It's almost guaranteed that a handful of people, young girls, whom I might argue are some of the most important people, period, will be better off. All of these are good things. Especially the part about people not dying. Almost always good when that doesn't happen.

So hold a good thought for me. Really, less a thought for me in particular than for anyone out there beholding the Scary while doing it anyway. I don't care who it is or how easy it looks from the outside, IT AIN'T. Even if you're looking up. Maybe especially then. The landmarks become familiar as you circle the mountain upward but the air gets thinner and the path, narrower. That can be hard on older bones.

Did I mention I'm turning 50?

xxx c

¹This goes double for someone living as I do: childless, in endlessly sunny Southern California. With neither height notches on the doorframe nor seasons to mark it, one runs the risk of discovering that time is not, in fact, infinite juuuust as it's about to run out. I've witnessed a few of those deathbed wakeup calls, brother, and they ain't pretty.

²It was not at all unpleasant; it was also not at all something I'd even think about trying past age 35. And even then, make sure you have cab fare home.

³Kids, ask your grandparents.

⁴By sheer chance, I'd had to reschedule my 40th birthday to take place a month earlier: a madcap, Manhattan weekend with my then-boyfriend and my dad. It was a lovely trip and celebration. For obvious reasons, the actual day was rather grim.

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #60

An end-of-weekly roundup collecting fffffive of the fffffoxiest things I fffffind stumbling around the web. More about the genesis here. Every dang Friday Round-Up here, you procrastinating slacker!

What would Don Draper do?  [Stumbled, via daring fireball]

Hard to believe I watched this every weekend without appreciation how off-the-charts funky it was. [Facebook-ed]

I don't know what disturbs me most: that I didn't know this, that the "M" doesn't stand for "mangled" or that there's a graduate-level university program in social media. Oh, wait, yes, I do. [delicious-ed]

Penn Jillette went through this hell in 2002? Good to know things have improved so much down at Airport Security Theater. [Stumbled, via @Eric_Carl]

xxx c

Image by dawnzy58 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.