Wisdom for writers
From a recent newsletter from the always inspiring Daphne Gray-Grant: “From time to time, I make the mistake of letting myself feel discouraged by the inadequacy of my writing. At other times, I make the equally pointless error of wallowing in self-satisfaction...Spending time at the pub
After last week’s concentrated efforts to spin straw into gold (writing like a woman possessed), I surfaced to finally check my feeds. Boy, was I behind! Chris Brogan, bless his prolific blogging self, had 33 posts I had not yet seen. I particularly liked his...
Email wrangling; it helps to turn off the wi-fi
Do you ever feel like you’re drowning in emails? My friend, podcaster and fellow writer Donna Papacosta has great tips for dealing with the growing volume of mail in “Taming the email beast.” My favourite: Use the telephone. Not only can it save...Yeah, you can keep that kimono closed
Does anyone else find this a somewhat odd thing to say? “A successful blog kind of opens the kimono and from a brand point of view lets people know who you are.” This is a quote from Rob Frankel, a Los Angeles-based branding consultant, from an article called Business...A night at the Bee
The other night, a friend and I attended a showing of the Tony Award-winning musical comedy that just arrived in Toronto from off-Broadway: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. The play tells the story of six students fiercely competing to be the champion...KISS for e-mails
One of the best reminders I’ve seen lately related to keeping e-mails brief and to the point comes from Matthew Stibbe’s “Ten laws for better email copy”: “Imagine…that you were paying by the word.”
Read on! Good reason to promote reading
January 27 was Family Literacy Day, “a national initiative that promotes the importance of reading and learning together as a family.” I celebrated by reading while Son #2 studied for exams today. I’m a big reader so it’s especially important to me that our two sons...You knew this: Interruptions lower performance
Those who spend large amounts of time online will totally understand when T.J. Larkin, in a weekly Larkin Pages research summary, says that we’re the ones responsible for half of our own interruptions. Think of all those blogs you follow, keeping up your own...