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Don’t Let Your Subconscious Hit You on Its Way Out
It is amazing what a person’s subconscious can whack them with. I was talking with one of my coaches trying to work out why I was having such a hard time writing up the sections of my book based on outside contributors. Then I started wondering why I was holding back on delivering the sections…
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What is Journalism?
As you may have heard, I’m writing a book. One of the writers that agreed to contribute said that his specialty was journalism – the problem is that he didn’t answer my questions with information I would think of as being from a journalist. So, I thought maybe I wasn’t defining the word properly. So,…
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Get Inspired, Damn It!
That’s helpful, isn’t it? Writing for other people has a decent amount of inspiration built in – they provide the topic, I write about it. While some of those topics are harder (more boring) than others, at least I know what I’m writing about. And, for me, the topic is the hardest part. The quality…
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Am I Shouting? (Balancing Marketing and Annoying)
My business coach said something recently that put my brain in a bit of a bind. She said that we need to educate people about our businesses without shouting about our businesses. The problem is that, in this case, people’s definition of shouting tends to vary. For me, shouting includes: Someone I’ve never met handing…
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Nail Down Your Message! (Mixed Messages Kill Your Brand)
I was in Kaua’i and saw a sign for the Immaculate Conception Cemetery. For reasons that seem obvious – and yet indescribable – that struck me as just wrong. With one exception (my Buddhist aunt), everyone I tell about this sign agrees that something is off. Then it occurred to me, it is a mixed…
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Victory Lap
You know how it can be so easy to start berating yourself? Well, now is NOT that time. I thought about it and decided that I’d rather share some of my recent accomplishments rather than the drudgery of what I have yet to do. After all, we all have things to do and none of us…
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It Takes More than Just Words – What’s Really Involved when Writing
When people say, “I’m going to write a <fill in the blank>,” it is amazing how little they know about writing a <fill in the blank>. Most people think that all they need to do is sit down and write! OK, maybe it is not that bad. A large portion of the population understands that…
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Why Writing Needs Editing
OK, the obvious does apply here. Typos, misspellings, and bad grammar are the easy answers for why anything written needs editing. However, most spell/grammar checks will alert a writer to the worst of those. And going back over what you write can also catch a huge number of errors. And if that was my only…
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How to Be a Writer without Writing a Book
I once wrote a blog about irony. Although I made several interesting and insightful observations, the general point is that I’m one of those people that can’t define the word, but do know when it hits me over the head with a brick. (I am, however, likely to miss the more subtle examples.) For a…
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Client v Customer: What are You, Who do You Want?
Many people would say that a client and a customer are the same thing. On the surface, those people are not totally wrong – in fact, the third definition of client on dictionary.com is “a customer.” But, the third definition is not the first, so while similar, the two are different. (There I go, splitting…