…how well they can spell.

I was checking out FutureWorks, the top agency in the US for social media, digital and public relations integration led by Brian Solis, and I watched the entire, actually entirely too long, entrance video. (Screen shot of website above).

I spent more time on the first page than I normally do, and as I did my eyes wandered down to the copy blocks and I began to absorb what top public relations practitioners say about themselves:

“FutureWorks is an award-winning digital and social media agency founded and led by author, speaker and thought-leader Brian Solis. FutureWorks fuses “best of breed” social media, new media, digital influence and work of mouth marketing. (Boldface and italics mine, screenshot below).”

From this description, namely the reference to ‘work’ of mouth, it is clear they must also specialize in dentistry.

I know advertising people. Some advertising people are my best friends. Some may say I might be one. And yes, there’s some heavy drilling that goes on when marketing people attack the world to influence us with their version of information, and here is the EXCITING news FutureWorks is ahead of their time.

FutureWorks may have found the shortcut to the hours spent on research to understand the target demographic, the shortcut to gathering intelligence from focus groups, the steep investment to hire top creative managers and renowned web designers. Certainly, they have discovered how to eliminate the hours upon online hours drowning in understanding and participating in social media. Potentially, they may have found the way to avoid all the small marketing testing and near misses, and to immediately deploy on large scale.

It’s clear FutureWorks has decided to get in our heads through our mouth.

I’m thinking a good tooth yanking would definitely make me buy ANYTHING.

Or, perhaps FutureWorks should learn to spell.

P.S. It’s ‘word’ of mouth marketing.

Carry on.

I downloaded a new app to my smart phone and prior to engaging it the application required me to read the End-User License Agreement.

Most of the time I click the box that means, yeah, I “read” it.

Pay attention non-readers, not every boring End-User License Agreement is boring. In fact, these manufacturers believe that * I * am anything but boring, too!

Mostly, they’re right.

But to make sure we were on the same page, the End-User License Agreement detailed what was intended by high risk activities I should avoid conducting while using their product, and I quote:

HIGH RISK ACTIVITIES: The software is not fault-tolerant and is not designed, manufactured or intended for use in hazardous environment requiring fail-safe performance, such as the operation of:

• Nuclear facilities
• Aircraft navigation
• Air traffic control
• Implantable human medical devices
• External human life-support machines
• Explosives control devices
• Submaries
• Weapons systems
• Or in controlling the operation of moving motor vehicles in which the failure of the Software could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physicial or environmental damage.

Let’s be clear. I agree. The above bullet points are high risk activities. I also think if you are intelligent enough to engage in the above activities, you are smart enough not to conduct the stated activity while using your cell phone.

But maybe not.

So, let’s be clear about you. I believe you are smart. You read my blog, follow me on Twitter and make comments on such, and due to your high use of good judgment it must also be stated that you are bright enough not to perform those activities while operating a phone (yours or mine), yelling at at kid (yours or mine) or entering into any life changing event such as getting married (while reading my blog).

In case you’re not that bright, this blog is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including, but not limited to anything I have said, might say or may never say and any of the preceding that may or may not appear in writing under my byline.

If you have any questions about the above, please leave a comment below. I will review your comments with my attorney and will craft a reply that will not place you in further danger of End-User Agreements.

If you do not place a comment, you proceed into life and future End-User Agreements at your own risk.

Cheers!

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I opened a box and peeled back the pages of my life. Nestled between official documents and immunization records was a little poem. It was scrawled in my handwriting and twice as long but edited to be succinct. It read . . .

Have you always been standing next to me,
Or was it just yesterday we became a family?
Wherever we go, whatever we do,
I’ll always be mommy and I’ll love you.

This time of year there is a birthday and a moment when we share what it means to be a family. It’s the moment we pause under the rays of a warm sun, take a moment to hug and say, ‘I love you,’ and realize how very lucky we are.

Happy birthday, baby.

Love you lots,

Mom

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Today’s post is by a unique guest, author and teacher Carolyn J. Rose. 

Rose shares her thoughts on growing up in the Catskill Mountains and how those memories can create a strong setting. Rose earned an honored position on the list of Celebrities Who’ve met ME! when I took both her Novel Writing Boot Camp classes. From that experience blossomed a loyal critique group that has produced two Pacific Northwest Writers Association winners–attesting to her  skill as a writing coach.

Carolyn’ J. Rose is the author of several books, most recently Hemlock Lake available in hardback or Kindle.  Here’s Carolyn . . .

In Washington, where I live now, the term I hear is “forest.” But when I grew up in the Catskill Mountains, the leafy realm that began at a dozen yards from our house was always called “the woods.

Trees dug in their toes at the edge of a scabby lawn sprouting through
rocky soil scraped into a semblance of level by a tractor blade. This was no spongy, springy, emerald green lawn. This was a pale lawn of ruggedly individualistic blades of grass, roots corkscrewed in among pebbles and stones, clinging to scant, glacier-scoured soil.

Each spring we reclaimed the edges of it from an advancing army of sumac, oak, and birch, from hemlock, pine, and cedar. We hacked away at brush and vines, lugging what we dropped to piles that would be set alight in the dark of winter.

The summer woods seemed impenetrable, the winter woods empty, bleak, and barren.

As a child, one of the biggest treats was a Sunday afternoon walk with my father. It was a pursuit of adventure, of wildness—it was piquant sauce for the predictability of the Sunday dinner of ham or roast, that Sunday sense of waiting for things to begin again with Monday’s dawn.

My father would identify tracks and droppings—deer, bear, raccoon, skunk. He’d name trees and point out nests aloft.

I’d try to walk silently, but winter winds had scattered twigs and branches that snapped beneath my shoes and slabs of shale slid underfoot when we climbed the ridges.

I became fearful when we left the landmarks I knew and could identify, worried we wouldn’t find our way back to the dinner simmering in that cast-iron kettle. But I was always confident that if I stayed by his side, we would return safely. After all, these were the woods he had roamed in childhood and if he’d found his way home as a child, he could surely do the same as an adult.

And this was no dense green-black forest of Douglas fir—no wall of forest, shadows, and night. This was a woods where sun spangled through the leaves of the hardwoods. This was a woods of saplings and bright autumn tints, of long, stark shadows cast by a weak winter sun. This was a woods where stone walls intersected like lines of longitude and latitude. Even humped under winter’s snow they provided a means of navigation.

Looking back, I realize how “tame” and “civilized” those woods were. And yet, they were mysterious, filled with unanswered questions: Who had left that sickle blade hanging in the crotch of a sapling and when had the tree grown around it? Who had left an ax leaning against a spur of stone wall and when had the handle rotted away? Whose initials were those scraped into lichen-scarred stone, carved into the puckered bark of a tree? Where had these people gone and when and why?

As I wrote Hemlock Lake, I often imagined myself back in the Catskill Mountains, back in those woods and I created mysteries of my own—a man who roamed the ridges seeking his lost self, ghosts, a man bent on vengeance, a killer. Hemlock Lake deals with universal themes—betrayal, revenge, love, loss, and redemption—but my memories of those woods make the story unique.

Editor: Thank you Carolyn for continuing to share yourself with your writing students and the reading community.

Listen to an interview of Carolyn J. Rose as she speaks about writing Hemlock Lake on The Author Show.

Purchase Hemlock Lake on Kindle here.

  
Read an interview of Carolyn J. Rose. It can be read in three parts:

• Carolyn J. Rose interview: Creative Process of Writing a Novel I
• Carolyn J. Rose interview: Creative Process of Writing a Novel II
• Carolyn J. Rose interview: Creative Process of Writing a Novel III

Carolyn J. Rose also founded the Vancouver Writers Mixer with Mel Sanders of Cover to Cover Books.

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Family trips evoke horror ridden memories or gut wrenching cackles. During the trip to the homestead in Idaho a suitcase got left on the top of the car. The wind blew it off. We stopped to pick it up. Inside was a clock which, packed by my overly cautious uncle, suffered nary a scratch. He’d bought it during the trip and was flying home and had packed it to withstand airport handling.

The clock survived the flight off the car and the flight home.

My daughter’s memories include seeing all the license plates, falling asleep listening to a book on tape and not minding missing any of it as the nap made the travel time pass quickly. My dad’s vacation memories center around history and being in the middle of something exciting, for example, where fur traders traversed from Taos, Mexico to Yellowstone, or having sensory overload at places like Cabella’s.

My vacation memories usually center on leaving work with a clean desk—should someone need to find something in my absence the possibilities increase with each item I file or discard. Then there’s the thrill of finally being on the road and maybe driving fast with a radar detector.

Other family members might complain our hunger clocks are not in the same time zone, of restrooms too low or too tiny, of missing the correct turn-off, and keeping expenses straight so everyone pays their part.

I gaze out the car window and admire green velvet fields. I watch the breath of the wind blow across them and change their hue. I take in green and tan corn stalks stretching behind wood post fences, farmhouses, silos, irrigation wing spans, the rare red-roof barn, a gentle border of trees signaling a creek, a white steeple church, wind turbines, mile long trains that parallel us, blue sky sparsely peppered with dark clouds or glowing with white billows.

We drive.

We cross state boundaries and face personal ones. These borders of our soul help define who we are, what we are for or against, and what we want and do not want. And sometimes we find ourselves not strapped on, wheeling precariously across the roof of the car, the next bump and we disappear. We may pray someone notices, or we may pray they drive on without us.

If family neglect left you on top of the car, did you fly off and survive, or crack with a hurt too big to repair?

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End there.

I closed the front door and started my walk. I needed fresh air and a stretch to clear my thoughts. I believed I walked alone. I was mistaken.

I arrived at the National Historic Reserve and discovered a young girl paced with me. Her emotions flared and she fought for control. She had adopted a steady, proud pace and walked boldly into her future, into a family she didn’t know, toward a man she didn’t love.

Her travel companions had tried to slow her pace and had said, “We don’t need to go fast, we need to go far.” Was it that they could not keep up, or something else that made them want to linger in the trail? I paused, sent my questions out and waited with my dream catcher.

Images flickered, focused and spun away.

I allowed my eyes to wander over the reserve. I saw an Indian tribe watch the young girl come down the path to their village. Tools dropped as the men watched her approach, women halted and stared, small children ran circles around her, tugged on her clothes and made fun of her dress. It was foreign and trail worn. She stopped and let them tug. When their teasing brought no response from her they disappeared.

She had fortitude, smarts and survival skills.

As I walked I heard her inner thoughts, her need to grasp what she believed belonged to her and the scheme she crafted to cheat the person who had cheated her father.

Then a brother cheated a cousin, and a man who doesn’t love her, but wants her because she is smart, rejects the woman he was destined to marry. It rips the family apart.

And that is how a book starts.

It is already there. It exists and waits for writers to peel away the pieces and work to get the broken shards to make sense. The difficulty for this story is that it occurred in the past. Only the writer’s pen exists today. The context, the scenes, the music must be drawn from history and I struggle.

In order to move my stymied efforts forward, I took another trail that led to the Cathlapotle Plankhouse in Ridgefield, Washington. I spoke with two Chinook men. They had no context to understand my plight or need to ask question after question in search of seeing the house of this young girl with clarity, or of sharing the voices of the family.

The Chinook have had visitors before. Television shows that take enough footage and cut and cut and redraw until what they produce is so romanticized it is unrecognizable as a representation of their tribe.

Who am I to tell this story?

I am not sure. But the pen has been passed and a Native American family waits to be heard.

Whose story is waiting for you?

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