Money, Commitment, Sacrifice, Starbucks

I’ve been sorting out what money means to me and the answer is this:

mostly, not much.

This might explain why I’m not rolling in filthy lucre.

I’ve written about it before: money isn’t really my currency.

When I think about the money part of my business, I get bored.

When I think about the things I ought to do with my money – buy a house, buy a better car, save for vacations and retirement (ha! as if I’ll retire from writing!) – I get even more bored.

Because I’m disenchanted with those conventional ends, the means (money) don’t mean much.

But when I started thinking about what having more money means  I can do for other people, or how I could use money to serve Life As A Grand Adventure rather than a mortgage (french: mort = death), I realize,

Money is commitment.

(thunderclap! lightning bolt! gregorian chants!)

There’s a reason we say “put your money where your mouth is.” Where we put our resources – time, love, cash – on a daily basis creates, demonstrates and confirms our commitments.

I put most of my money into providing a stable, suburban infrastructure for my children. Because I’m unwaveringly committed to them.

(And legally and morally obliged. But mostly because I love them and so I don’t mind giving them all my money. It’s a privilege.)

(And by this measure, my next most committed relationship is with Starbucks.)

But committed, and commitment, is not the same thing as sacrifice – although lots of relationship experts, money gurus and spiritual leaders tell us otherwise.

We’re often encouraged to “sacrifice” for the long game, the portfolio of riches, or to get to heaven.

Sacrifice spending now so that you can save for later. Sacrifice dating and independence for marriage. Sacrifice TV time for blogging. Sacrifice a tidy house for a generative creative life. Sacrifice freedom for a day job. Sacrifice a day job to be an entrepreneur. Sacrifice your time to run errands for a lover who’s swamped.

And all of these things are valuable and necessary to accomplish your goals and support your loved ones.

But they aren’t sacrifice.

Sacrifice is when you trade something dearly attractive for something unattractive.

Get under your desk. The world is upside down. I’m about to quote Ayn Rand.

“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. “Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. “Sacrifice” is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.

If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor’s child and let your own die, it is.

If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort…if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself—that is…sacrifice in full.

…A sacrifice is the surrender of a value.

So, then, according to Rand (seriously, I cannot believe I’m doing this!), sacrifice is the surrender of value, and specifically of a higher value to a lower one.

  • When we forgo going out at night to work on a project for school or work, we’re not sacrificing.
  • When, instead of buying hot and unnecessary new shoes for ourselves we buy our children new coats and rainboots, we’re not sacrificing.
  • When we do not put that trip on the credit card and instead take a debt-free tour of a national park, we’re not sacrificing.
  • When we decide to ignore the crumbs on the floor so we can knock out an extraordinary essay/painting/consultation, we’re not sacrificing.

We’re delaying gratification.

We’re trading the things that are low in value for things that are high in value.

We’re INVESTING – in ourselves, our loved ones, our dreams, our reality.

And that’s commitment.

Commitment is not sacrifice.

Commitment is trading the things that don’t mean much for the things that do.

Commitment is putting your money where your heart is.

———–

Challenge:

think about money ‘n commitment, and tell us in the comments:

what does the way you spend your money say about your commitments?

does the way you earn your money line up with your commitments?


Offerings. Coins in the Bowl. Doing Rich.

F told me a story.

I upstairs doing laundry or folding laundry or having a shower or something.

Sophie and Lola were talking Money.

Sophie announced that she was rich.

Apparently, Lola is rich too and she owned it, loudly.

So Sophie showed Lola (and F) her bowl o’ money.

Lola said that she was still richer than Sophie.

Sophie was offended. Deeply. If she had a book of grievous injuries, this slight would have been recorded.

Lola, when you say you’re richer than me, you hurt my feelings!

Lola ran upstairs…and returned with two quarters.

She put one quarter in Sophie’s bowl o’ money.

She stood in front of Sophie with downturned eyes and “I’m sorry” written right through her body.

Sophie wrapped her arms around Lola and said, “I know you’re sorry for hurting my feelings. I know you didn’t mean it.”

And Lola said, “Thank you for forgiving me, Sophie.”

—————
Money is love, or maybe we conflate the two.

We offer our coins to the bowl of forgiveness.

Women – even “independent” women – sometimes surrender their finances to their men, because that feels like “being taken care of.”

Men adorn their exoskeletons with lures of green and silver to hook lovers and partners. (So do women. Don’t ask me how I know.)

We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t know.

We spend to feel rich.

And rich is a beautiful thing, but feeling rich is a high.

Being rich, on the other hand,  cannot be bought. It is an investment. It must be lived and shared.

When I share my gifts and invest in others and myself – with time, with money, with opportunity – I’m doing rich. I am rich.

Opportunities can be purchased. Access to information, experience, and even inspiration can be purchased (just ask any ass-kicking coach or consultant or firestarter, or better yet, listen to their delighted, living-big clients who rave “life-changing!”).

But true learning and knowledge and action all comes from you. From doing it. Living it.

You’re rich when you give yourself the things you need to succeed…and then go make love to the world with them.

—————
Two announcements:

1. From now on, on Tuesdays, I write about money.
2. As of Friday, June 18, Dave Doolin and I are raising the prices for our League of Extraordinary Bloggers Sessions to $300.

(So yes, if you book and pay before then, we’ll honour the $150 offer.)

We know that $300 is still a screaming good value, because every single one of our clients so far has told us that we are wildly undercharging. ($500 is the figure that gets bandied about.)

And even at $300 we know we’re undercharging – and we’re pretty cool with that – because we’re irrationally committed to perfection. I won’t even tell you how much research we do on our clients and their sites because you would sigh and shake your head. (Unless you’re a client, in which case you’ll love us with an unholy passion.)

Basically, we care, passionately, about our people – and between the two of us, we Know Some Serious Shit about blogging.

(Even though we both have The Issues with the word blogging.)

We want you to have the best blog and business you can (umm, and so do you, right?), so we look at every single aspect of your work and your niche and tell you how to position yourself to get better and to win. Every day. Day in and day out.

and pssssst…we tell you our secrets. And we’re not even charging extra for profanity (any more).

Red Shoe Blogger: A Manifesta

http://longawaypix.com/blog/

Let’s mash up reality and assume that Dorothy wrote The Wizard of Oz and it is a memoir told through the lens of pharmaceuticals and it is to be published next year.

Dorothy has written a great book: part trippy fantasy, part freudian/jungian/wonky archetypical therapy, part love letter to friendship, and a prefeminist, feminist, post-feminist meditation on the nature and power of femininity wrapped in a trendy, little-dog-carrying, hot-shoe-wearing package.

It is Sex and the City meets Eat Love Pray meets Little Red Riding Hood, on acid. It is a journey. It is a great book. It must be read.

Dorothy knows this. She feels it right from her soul to the soles of her ruby red shoes. She can see the future: a movie. Musicals. The talk show circuit. Oprah. Much money, much love, much conversation, and a place in popular imagination.

It can be all of these things, not because she promotes the flying monkeys out of it – which she will, and absolutely should do – but because it offers a watery answer to our thirsty, questioning souls: you are the author of your own affair.

(Plus there are weird scary creatures who learn to love each other and grow as twisted, maturing moral entities and we all know that stuff sells. I hear a little book called Twilight is doing quite well these days.)

So this book should sell. It needs to sell. Dorothy wants it to sell.

Even more than that, Dorothy wants it to be read, to land, to take root, to grow, to inhabit, fertilize and animate our popular imagination.

If I was Dorothy – and I am – I would start a blog before I even started writing the book. I’d go all Seth Godin and build a tribe on Twitter. I’d find my people. I’d give them somewhere to find me. I’d get on the cluetrain. I’d Oprah. I’d firestart. I’d listen to Leo Babauta when he says he doesn’t believe in SEO. I’d make friends. I’d work the aich-ee-double-hockey-sticks out of ProBlogger and spend serious time with Outspoken Media. I’d figure out the lessons learned by our pantehon of blog gods and best-selling writers. I’d figure out the mechanics of demand and distribution and audience and I’d build it and they would come. And if they didn’t come, I’d go get them and then hug and pet and feed them because that is the purpose of promotional tricks and lassos and rodeo ponies and hoopla.

But I would only do that if, like Dorothy, I had something wizardly to offer: the journey. The passion. The learning. The love. The living. The lessons. The magic. The really, really great content. Please.

And this is what exasperates me about the ‘blogging and social media for money’ superhighway. So many times I follow the yellow brick road laid by an enterprising blogger who’s working the system – rocking the comments, manufacturing controversy, guest posting, paper-training SEO, tweeting – and when I get there and pull back the curtain…nothing. No wizard. No magic. No message. Just a lot of mechanics and whirling buttons and a robotic, soulless special effects machine.

Honestly, that’s what a lot of problogging and blogs and social media enterprises are looking like these days. It is turn-key blogging. It is execution unsparked by ideas. It is a waste of time and tweets and it won’t make you money.

Straight up: I LOVE money. I want money. I make money and you should, too. I want you and Dorothy and every other problogger out there to have as many tiny dogs – more! – as you and your minions can carry.

I just want you to make that money from selling wisdom, truth, experience, art or sparkly scarlet maryjanes (and if you are, I’m ALWAYS in the market for red shoes, so please put me on your mailing list).

I want you to make an offering. I want you to have something to offer. I want you to be a Red Shoe Blogger. I just made that up.

A Red Shoe Blogger is not blogging exclusively for money.

A Red Shoe Blogger has a mission and is animated by passion and all the tips and tricks and hacks and tools and tweets are harnessed in service of that divine, cosmic, helpful, genuine, meaningful objective.

That mission is Home.

So this is what I want from all the Red Shoe Bloggers out there: I want you to buck the system, or work the system, but know that the system is not a slot machine that will pay off if only you keep pulling that arm and never ever run out of nickels or take a pee-break.

Success is not only about the systems.

The home address of success is passion, talent (let’s be honest), creation, contribution, collaboration, conversation, and community.That is where hot sweaty abundance and cold hard cash reside (FYI, they’re totally a couple) and I wish more bloggers lived there too.

Because, after all, there’s no place like home.

___________________

Red Shoe Blogger was my first guest post for ProBlogger in October 2009 – and, as I tried to say yesterday, it is my manifesta and my mission.

Is this your mission, too?

image credit: Jennifer Longaway


How to Get Unstuck, Part 1: There Is No Stuck

The first part of getting unstuck is acknowledging – and recognizing – what  Lianne Raymond and Marianne Elliott told me: there is no stuck.

Progress is not linear; progress is cyclical; and part of the process is rest and winter…and stuck is winter. Stuck is not stuck.

Stuck is not a barrier you need to overcome. Stuck is not a glitch. Stuck is not a detour. Stuck is not in your way. Stuck is part of the way.

Stuck is actually part of the creative process.

You cycle up, you create great stuff, you create more, and then you need to rest.

Rest. Recharge. Winter.

So that’s the first part of getting unstuck: realizing that stuck isn’t actually stuck.

Stuck is rest. Stuck is part of the process.

And then, emotionally speaking, stuck can be a whole number of things.

Stuck can be fear.

Stuck can be a warning that you’re going somewhere you don’t want to go.

Stuck can be your own resistance and I think we all know from the Bible Star Trek that resistance is futile. Your practicality might fight your heart but your heart wants what it wants. The heart is a predator – a lonely hunter, an organ of fire, a bucking bronco. Desire will make you do what you need to do, so your practicality best saddle up and ride.

Because there’s no use fighting what you want. It wants you back. You two should totally get together.

Really, only good things happen when you cuddle up on the couch together.

I’ve written about this before: it’s best to get comfy with your fears.

And one of those fears is stuck.

But, just like Fight Club (or at least the fight club in my head: there is no fight club) there is no stuck.

Help! I Need Advice About Guest Posting!

I get e-mails from people all the time about the finer points of guest posting, and blogging in general.

So I thought I’d create this page, where you can ask questions in the comments and I’ll answer them.

(Or, if you need anonymity, you can e-mail me. I’ll post your question without your blog url etc)

(I may get help from other bloggers to answer them, too.)

Today’s topic:

How to Write Guest Posts (and Get Them Accepted!)

Please tell me your questions:

What do you want to know about writing guest posts for other blogs?

_____________

How Good of A Writer Do I Need to Be to Guest Post?

How Do I Figure out to Which Blog(s) I Should Offer a Guest Post?

Pitching a Guest Post: Should I Submit a Completed Piece or an Idea for a Post?

Do I Need to Have A Self-Hosted Blog In Order To Guest Post?

How do you NOT abuse a relationship with a very popular blogger?

How do you deal with evil troll commenters on your guest posts?

How do you manage the workload of maintaining your posting schedule AND guest posting, too?

What if My Writing Style/Voice is Very Different than The Blog For Which I Want to Guest Post?

_____________


Question from Maria Brophy:

How Good of A Writer Do I Need to Be to Guest Post?

I hate asking this question – shows how wet behind the ears I am – but one reason I haven’t been doing guest posts (though I want to) is I question how GOOD of a writer I have to be??!!! I mean, do I have to write some knock-your-socks off guest post for it to be worthy? And am I capable? I guess we all ask that question…..

Maria, have you read some of the blogs out there? They consist of  words strung together in something resembling sentences but that’s the extent of the art of it. Very few of bloggers are writers.

There. I said it.

So let’s put that question aside for a minute.

What I think you’re really asking is:

Where do I get the confidence and the moxy to submit my work when rejection is my nemesis?

This was MY question, too, before I started guest posting.

The answer: you just try. And if someone says no, you won’t die. Promise.

This is what I did: I made friends with other bloggers, and talked to them ‘behind the scenes’ about wanting to guest post. I asked for advice.

And then I did nothing. Because I am a fragile flower, honey, and deeply afraid that someone would say: you think you can write? For ME? hahahahahahahahahaahahaha.

Or just reject my piece. Same dif.

Finally, Josh Hanagarne e-mailed me and demanded a guest post from me, for his blog.

I can be reasonably obedient at times – when the demand coincides with my own will – and so I sent him one. He used it, every one who commented was extraordinarily kind and full of praise, and then I was hooked.

My next submission?

To ProBlogger.

Darren Rowse accepted it right away and for that kind of encouragement, I am eternally grateful.

So here’s my advice, via Nike: just do it, honey.

You’ve got a blog. You’ve got thoughts in your head. You’ve got the ability to express them in writing. You’ve got everything you need to submit a guest post.

And guess what?

You’re doing the other blogger a favour.

You’re writing hot content for them, for free.

Don’t lose sight of that.

Guest posting provides mutual benefits. You’re contributing, too.

And it doesn’t have to be A Grand Work of Art. It simply has to be clearly written, useful and provide value to the audience.

Where to start:

  • Make a list of the blogs you want to guest post on
  • Look for their guest post guidelines, if they’ve got them
  • Read all the recent guest posts and look for a theme or similarities
  • Look for The Gap: what has not been covered, but needs to be?
  • Draft your idea into a pitch and send the blogger an e-mail explaining how your idea for a guest post would be useful to their audience…

and now you’re on you’re way.

Let me know how it goes, Maria. And thanks for your question.

Kelly

_________________

Question from Ryan G:

How Do I Figure out to Which Blog(s) I Should Offer a Guest Post?

My first question is how to determine a good target to guest-blog on. My blog doesn’t have a specific niche, but a lot of the blogs I read do. How can I pick out someone and convince them that my voice can be a benefit to them and their readers?

Ryan, I’d start with the blogs you read. What do you wish they’d cover? What post would you like to read, there?

Offer to write that piece – the one you wish you could read.

How to you convince them that you’ve got something useful to say?

  • Start by reading a lot of the recent posts and some of the archives. Figure out what that blog is offering to its audience, and how you can support that mission.
  • Read the comments: what questions are people asking? What needs to be covered?
  • And then, in your pitch, (quickly) walk the blogger through the process. How do you know this piece would be useful to her audience?

Well, you know because you researched it. You know people are asking for it. You know it fits with the mission of the blog, and it is helpful and/or entertaining.

Or…you know because you’re an expert in this field. If your offline credentials help your case, use them.

But the beginning of persuasion – and that’s what we’re talking about – starts with research. Identify The Gap, and fill it.

I’m curious to see where you go with this…please do let me know!

Thanks for your question,

Kelly
__________________

Question from Jonathan Wondrusch:

Should I pre-write a Guest Post or Pitch an Idea? Do I need to know the blogger to guest post?

Should you write the post before you send it to them? Is it kosher to solicit guest posting ops if you don’t have a relationship with the blogger in question?

Jonathan, the categorical, definitive answer to your first question is…

It depends.

I generally write the piece and then send it for consideration – but this is more about me, and the way I work than about The Rules of Blogging Engagement.

I know my blocks, and pressure-to-perform is one of them. (I’m so thankful I’m not a man.) For me it is considerably less stressful to pitch a completed piece than it is to pitch an idea and then try and write it to spec.

And if the blogger says no? I just rework it, or pitch the piece to someone else, or run it on my own site.

It takes the pressure to write-on-command off of me and allows me to just be creative. I write my best stuff in flurries of inspiration. As soon as I HAVE to do something, I’m stuck.

But that’s just me. I work to work around my weaknesses.

Some bloggers like this approach: they can see what you’ve written and decide if it is for them or not. No back and forth, waiting, angsting, and so on. Just yes, or no.

Other bloggers and editors however, want to be included in the brainstorming part. They know their site and their audience; they know what subjects need to be covered; and they’d often like to share that with you. (Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, for example, says that it increases the chances that he’ll accept your guest post if you pitch an idea rather than a completed piece.)

The categorical, definitive answer to your second question is…

It depends.

I didn’t have any existing relationship with ProBlogger (other than Queen of the Lurkers) when I submitted my first piece. So you don’t necessarily need a relationship. Sometimes the quality of your work will unlock doors for you.

And sometimes it won’t. Most of my other guest posts grew out of relationships – and these organic opportunities are so much less stressful than cold-calling or cold-pitching someone. I definitely recommend it.

Start commenting on the blog, e-mail the blogger, talk to him on twitter, and just generally engage with the community and the conversation.

Sometimes guest post opportunities will emerge out of a comment you leave. I wrote a long, unwieldy comment on Dave Doolin’s intensely useful all-about-wordpress blog, Website In A Weekend, and he promptly asked me to turn it into a guest post.

Having a genuine connection to – and investment in – the blogs for which you want to guest post is an invitation waiting to happen.

Thanks for the question, Jonathan. Please let me know how your first round of guest posts turns out!

Kelly

_________________


Question from Ami Kim:

Do I Need to Have A Self-Hosted Blog In Order To Guest Post?

Do I need to be a grown up (self-hosted) to guest post? I’m feeling a little shy about having a little kid’s (hosted) blog site.

NO!

Let’s take a look at one of the URL for one of the most popular blogs that I read on an almost-daily basis:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

Do you see that? TYPEPAD.

I mean, clearly Seth Godin is NOT a marketing/publishing/blogging genius after all. He uses a hosted blog.

WTF, Seth Godin?

SOMEONE TAKE HIS PURPLE COW AWAY.

So no, Ami, you don’t need a self-hosted blog to guest post. You just need to write a great guest post.

**That being said: if you’re worrying about it, and you want to have a grown-up site and not a little kids’ site

- and check out a REAL little kid’s site, Belli’s Blog of Fashion, while you’re at it. Isn’t this 11 year old fashion blogger something? Isn’t her site hot? Amanda Farough of Violet Minded created that super sassy site for her. Amanda created my site, too, so I might be a bit biased when I say that Amanda does GORGEOUS work -

then please, dahlink, get thee a self-hosted site, already. I promise it isn’t hard and in fact that it is intensely satisfying. I could write poems about the ways and intensity with which I love wordpress.

And they would be naughty.

And yes, it does – at least in my opinion – make you look more grown up and professional when you have a self-hosted site. (Don’t tell Seth Godin).

My only caveat: if you already have a lot of traffic and people linking to your pieces, you’ll need to strategize about how to carry forward/redirect all of your links from your hosted site to your new site. It can be done. It MUST be done.

And, Ami, if you’re serious about switching over to a wordpress, self-hosted blog, you can probably already guess where I’ll send you…to my friend Dave Doolin’s wildly useful, step-by-step, FREE online course in how to set up a website in a weekend using my beloved Wordpress.

(I know this is starting to look a little shrine-to-Dave-Doolin-ish but I had to do it. His Website in A Weekend is incredibly useful and thorough and I’m continually learning stuff that makes my blog more effective and sticky. In the good way.)

Thanks for the question, Ami. Hope the guest posting goes well…

oh, and if you DO launch a new, self-hosted wordpress blog, a great way to drive lots of instant traffic to it would be to…

guest post.

But I know you knew I’d say that.

Kelly

___________________

Questions from Jade Craven:

1. When you start posting on popular blogs, people start asking you to help connect them with the blogger. How do you tastefully deal with these enquiries?

2. You can’t bitchslap the trolls when you are a guest on someone elses blog. How do you deal with them?

3. As I got busier, I found it more difficult to write guest posts on blogs, despite their popularity. How do you maintain your blogging groove?

Jade, I’m swooning a little that you’re asking me these questions.

(My dearest darlingest readers, Jade Craven has written a TERRIFIC e-book on how-to-guest post, The Guest Posting Mini-Guide. I’ve read it. It is excellent. It is pink. It is comprehensive, and I recommend it. I’m an affiliate.)

(I’d also like to mention, too, that I’ll be coming out with how-to-guest post e-book, soon, and this column is my research. Jade doesn’t mind – there’s lots of room for everyone to do their own thing.)

And here are my answers to your three questions:

How do you NOT abuse a relationship with a very popular blogger?

Like you, Jade, I do get lots of e-mails asking me to hook them up with This Blogger or That Blogger.

Usually what I do is tell a little story of how I got a guest post featured on that site, or how I connected with that person. The idea is to gracefully give the person the tools they need to do the same thing, without abusing my relationship with another blogger.

Or, if I know, instantly, that these two people MUST KNOW EACH OTHER, then I do a little match-making. I send a DM or an e-mail asking The Blogger to connect with the potential Guest Poster.

BUT: this is rare, and usually only happens when I know both of these people really, really well and am sure that they should be collaborating with each other. And I ALWAYS ask permission before I start sharing personal contact details.

How do you deal with evil troll commenters on your guest posts?

Trolls. Ah, trolls.

Yesterday, as my daughters and I traversed a footbridge over a pond, my little one asked me what we should do about the trolls that may or may not be hiding under that bridge ready to scare us/eat us.

You know how trolls are. Even three year olds know how trolls are.

I told my daughters that “Don’t worry, there’s no such thing as trolls” while silently adding “except on the internet.”

Here’s how I handle trolls. I handle them by not handling them:

  • If they say something particularly egregious or offensive, I write “thank you” and trust that my saintly restraint speaks for itself.
  • Or I ignore it.
  • Or, if they’re simply mistaken about what I wrote, I gently re-frame My Message in a reply.
  • Or I content myself with a visit to their (comment-less) site and then compare their stats to mine on Alexa. Usually I win and I feel much better.
  • Or I send my friends distraught e-mails. Someone inevitably offers to kick the troll’s ass, and then I say, no, no I can handle this myself, it is no big deal, and in that moment realize: why, that’s TRUE. I must be a grown up, now.

How do you manage the workload of maintaining your posting schedule AND guest posting, too?

Actually, I don’t guest post a whole lot. I guest post at ProBlogger almost-weekly, and that’s pretty much it.

I’ll do one-offs here and there if someone I love asks me to, but I’m not muscling through a huge to-do list of guest posts owed.

I believe in The Power of The Guest Post, but I’ve been thinking really carefully about why I guest post and why people should guest post. Here are my conclusions:

  • When you’re first starting out and don’t have a lot of traffic, guest posting is your calling card. Guest posting is how you’re going to get attention and traffic and connect with new audiences. It has done WONDERS for my site. Cleavage owes its popularity to guest posting – no doubt about it.
  • But ‘traffic’ in and of itself isn’t really a goal for me. Traffic is a means to an end. I want to make a living from my writing, and having a popular blog helps me make that happen. But guest posting is a promotional activity, and now that I’ve got steady traffic, works best when I have something to promote. Right now, I don’t have any products for sale – so what am I doing with all this traffic? Why do I need more traffic? What I need is to develop some useful products and then, when I need to promote them, go chase traffic using guest posts.
  • Drilling down to managing the workload: I try to write in flurries. I like to settle in for a weekend and produce a whole bunch of pieces. That’s why I like submitting finished pieces instead of pitching ideas. Having pieces in reserve takes the pressure off and allows me to get through my daily tasks without having a nervous breakdown on a daily/weekly basis. (I’m down to a nervous breakdown every 3-4 weeks! Progress!)
  • The key to managing a demanding workload is really simple: work a lot. I do. I’m often at the computer at 6 am and still here at 11pm (or later). There’s no magic system, no cool tricks. It is just work, and lots of it.

These were really great questions, Jade. Thanks for asking them.

Kelly

___________

Question from LPC:

What if My Writing Style/Voice is Very Different than The Blog For Which I Want to Guest Post?

Kelly, this is a somewhat personal question, so I understand if you have any reluctance to answer in specific. Your writing style is quite different from Darren’s. Did you and he have any discussion in which he wanted you to sound “more like ProBlogger”? Or was he happy with your voice from the outset? In general, how do you feel about the advisability of changing one’s voice for guest posts? Thank you very much for your time.

LPC, this is a very interesting question – and it is one I asked myself, repeatedly, in December and January.

I asked my friends, too: My stuff is weird and wonderful. I rarely write lists, I purport to resist pretty much every blog rule, and most of the time I don’t even know what The Rules are. So what’s up?

So what you’re wondering – well, I was wondering too.

Let me tell you the story.

I submitted my first guest post to ProBlogger in October of 2009. Darren told me really liked the piece. I sent him another one. He liked that one too, and told me that he’d publish as many pieces as I had. I sent him three more. Then, in December, he offered me a weekly spot.

Since he offered me the gig, I assumed that he liked my wiggy, wiggly guest posts, just as they were.

Still, I’m conscious that I might be pushing the boundaries a little bit. A couple of times, I’ve sent him a quick note that says “piece is ready. It’s a bit out there…” just to tip him off that it might raise eyebrows.

But Darren’s never said anything to me about modifying my style or my voice – in fact, he’s always been really encouraging and I think that he likes that my pieces are a little wacky.

That, I suspect, is one of the great perks of having a multi-author blog like ProBlogger: you can have many different voices embroidering upon the same basic themes and experiences. It both widens and deepens the well of knowledge (and style!) to draw upon.

And maybe makes it fun, too.

And so my advice would be: let your own voice ring out.

Great question, LPC. So glad you asked it.

Kelly

How to Get a Book Deal. An Evolutionary, Biblical Approach. (This Is Why I am a Writer And Not a Scientist.)

You know the old saw, “if you want to learn something, teach it”?

I’ve got deep, dark nefarious plans to write a book.

But I don’t know a thing about the publishing industry. Agents, proposals, negotiating, and advances are a sexy mystery to me.

So I asked around. I asked

Gretchen RubinThe Happiness Project, Power Money Fame Sex, Forty Ways to Look At Winston Churchill, Forty Ways to Look at JFK, Profane Waste (with Dana Hoey)

Leo BabautaThe Power of Less

Danielle LaPorteStyle Statement

Erin DolandUnclutter Your Life in One Week

Josh Hanagarne - I’d tell you but I’d have to kill you…but watch him. A book is coming…ok I can’t keep a secret. Read the piece.

Chris Guillebeau – The Art of Non-Conformity (in stores Fall 2010)

I asked them: how’d you get a book deal, baby? (With variations on that theme.)

And they told me. And it was goooooood.

(You can read my interviews with Erin Doland and Chris Guillebeau, here. I’ll run the interview with Leo Babauta, tomorrow.)

The first two (of four) parts of this mammoth essay (3500+ words!) appeared at Write To Done, as

Here’s the piece, in its entirety.

____________________

How to Get a Book Deal. An Evolutionary, Biblical Approach. (This Is Why I am a Writer And Not a Scientist.)

Want a book deal? Think your magnetic, compelling, ninja talent for the written word is all it takes?

Think again.

Now, says author/blogger/truth-telling goddess Danielle LaPorte, “two-thirds of a publisher’s decision is based on your platform”.

In other words, your blog. How famous are you? How big does your audience and ‘platform’ need to be?

“Pretty fucking huge, apparently…” continues LaPorte, who was in New York last September pimping her latest book proposal to agents and publishers, “because I just got told I’m not famous enough.”

Publishing. It is Ancient History so Study the Scrolls.

Danielle LaPorte knows a lil’ something about the publishing racket.

In a former life, LaPorte was freelance book publicist for publishing houses like Simon and Schuster and Harper Collins. Now she has a juju personal development site called White Hot Truth, a rockin’ inspirational speaking career, and a new TV gig.  And that’s not all: four years ago, she and a co-author wrote Style Statement and sold it to the prestigious Little Brown and Company for a $150,000 advance.

Back then, she didn’t even have a blog.  True story.

Bestselling author Gretchen Rubin didn’t have a blog, either, when she pitched her Happiness Project book proposal to publishers. An established, best-selling author of four books, her read on the blog/book deal relationship is a little less go-blog-go.

In publishing circles, says Rubin, “there is some skepticism about bloggers. Books and blogs are very different mediums. Can a blogger write a book that hangs together as a narrative?”

Still, Rubin’s agent encouraged her to start a blog.

“She planted seeds,” says Rubin, “and I was resistant…” Eventually, though, she started her blog, The Happiness Project, to test her thesis that novelty (new medium, the blog) and consistency (maintaining the blog and writing new content daily) are essential components of happiness.

Now, Rubin has been told that “your blog is more important than your book. Never forget that.”

Those stories – legends of non-fiction book deals signed only three to four years ago and captured without carefully cultivated venus-blog-traps – might be ancient history.

Printasauras Rex? Meet Twitter. It Will Eat You Alive. Play Nice.

It was about a two-and-a-half year process from securing an agent to it [the book] coming off the presses. Painfully long. It is totally jurassic. The publishing industry is antiquated.

Publishers have not seen the future. There are a few who are admitting that things have to change and that they are Jurassic and that the future is social media. The future is multimedia expressions of all forms of literature. – Danielle LaPorte

The publishing industry might be prehistoric, Jurassic and slow-moving, but it will follow the scent of food. Or cash.

You’ve got a blog and an email list and an RSS feed of devoted readers to whom you can announce – and pre-sell – your book? Yes, please.

Gary Vaynerchuk knows this. He also knows his worth. Vaynerchuk worked 5 days a week for seventeen months to create his cult/platform and estimates the audience for Wine Library TV at 90,000 people per episode. He has 850,480 followers on Twitter. When he mentions a wine, it sells.

Craig Haseroty, the owner Sojourn Cellars, a small winery in California, told the New York Times that “nothing has put more people on our database and sold more wine than Wine Library TV.” Vaynerchuk mentioned their wine and their switchboard lit up. In 24 hours, Sojourn Cellars answered 500 phone calls and e-mails. They sold a lot of wine.

That’s the power of suggestion. Vaynerchuk’s followers are vayniacs.

Somewhere out there, Seth Godin and Chris Brogan are smiling, knowingly.

With this kind of clout, the wine-spitting social media maestro Vaynerchuk was not likely to say “book deal? Really, ME? Really REALLY? Oh THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.”

Legend has it that Harper Studio is publishing 2.0. They’ve heard of this little thing the kids call a ‘platform’ and are willing to share the profits – and also the pain and price of promotion – with authors.

And President Bob Miller apparently doesn’t pay a penny over $100K for an advance.

What is a Vaynerchuk with a legion of devoted, possibly tipsy vayniacs to do with a price ceiling?

Blow it up.

Vaynerchuk set up shop in the Harper office.  Tweeted about The 26th Story, the Harper Studio blog. Watched, in real time, as that blog suddenly drowned in traffic.

His point: my people like me. They like my suggestions. They WILL buy my book and make all of us rich and pfooey! I throw down my handkerchief in a faux snit and laugh at your measly $100K!

(This is not a direct quote.)

The result? Gary Vaynerchuk – who casually admits that he doesn’t read books – signed a seven figure (translation for the math challenged: at least a million dollars), ten book deal with Harper Studio. His first book, Crush It, debuted in September 2009, and yeah, it did make the New York Times’ bestseller list.

And he’s not even a writer.

I know. I just died a little, inside, too.

The moral of the story? (And, I argue, the moral is not just a story because it is based on a very comprehensive, validated sample of at least three published authors, which makes it a scientific fact.)

Get a blog, rock it out, and then go get yourself a book deal.

Need a Book Deal? Get Thee A Blog, and a Big One

Newbie authors and big deal bloggers Chris Guillebeau, Leo Babauta and Erin Doland accidentally and accidentally-on-purpose hacked their way through the publishing jungle with their brain children/addictions – Art of Non-Conformity, Zen Habits and The Unclutterer – firmly in tow.

If Chris Guillebeau was forced to identify his favourite child, he’d waffle: ”I really love them both.”

But I’m going to kill them both if you don’t choose.

“I guess if I had to choose, I’d choose the blog since it allows me to reach more people…”.

Even so, Guillebeau started his blog with a book deal in mind. “It was one of the primary goals of starting my blog,” he says, “I felt like I had a message to share and wanted to write a book.” He knew that it would be “hard to break into the publishing world without a strong online presence” and so along came ”the blog and everything else I did online for nearly a full year prior to getting the book deal.”

Guillebeau has now signed a deal worth more than a handful of m&ms but less than $100K, and “in terms of the time commitment, probably reflective of minimum wage.” What the hell, Chris? “That’s OK with me, though – I feel very grateful that I can do what I love to do”. Well, okay then. You’ve got a book deal and we don’t. Thanks for rubbing it in.

Guillebeau is probably writing that book right now – likely while sitting in a plane or an airport terminal, poor baby – and expects his book The Art of Non-Conformity to be in stores September 2010.

Like Chris Guillebeau, Leo Babauta also loves his first-born best. His blog “is my baby, and will always hold a special place deep within my heart” but publishing a book was “a fantasy come true,” thanks to his blog:

As my blog took off, publishers and agents approached me. My blog had 26,000 subscribers within the first year, so it was obvious my writing was connecting with a lot of people — people who responded enthusiastically…

It was essential that I built up my audience with my blog before I tried to sell the book. Publishers get a million requests per second (about the same as the number of Google searches done per second), and you need to stand out. If you have a successful blog that has shown your potential as a writer and marketer, you have a good shot at least. If you don’t, you’d better have an AMAZING proposal.

Leo Babauta knows what he’s talking about. He has to. He has six kids to feed which is why I’m so glad his publisher advanced him $80,000 for his 2008 book, The Power of Less.

I digress.

Unlike Guillebeau and Babauta, Erin Doland doesn’t talk about her blog and her book in parental terms, but that is because she has a problem. She is “obsessed with reading and writing books the way druggies pursue their next high.”

In fact, before Doland signed her book deal, she would lie in bed at night and “stare at the ceiling and feel like I had failed to achieve one of my purposes in life.” And then, during the day, she’d bitch about it. “I wasn’t quiet about this failure…Everyone I know was well aware of my feelings of inadequacy over not yet having written a book.”

Thank goodness for her wildly popular blog, The Unclutterer, because “if it weren’t for my posts on Unclutterer.com there wouldn’t be Unclutter Your Life in One Week. My agent and editor both were fans of my writing on the website, and they wouldn’t have had a clue whom I was if it weren’t for the site.”

But they did and they do and Unclutter Your Life in One Week came out November 3, 2009.  Bulging garages and strung-out attics everywhere are detoxing as we speak.

Get Thee an Agent

Josh Hanagarne has some serious blog juju.

World’s Strongest Librarian is less than a year old, but traffic doubles each month; writing furiously helps Hanagarne muscle through Tourette’s Syndrome; ‘his people’ are icky-sticky passionate; and oh yes Seth Godin e-mailed him to say thanks but no thanks to Hanagarne’s offer to guest post.

Why was Godin’s rejection magic?

Because in Godin’s humble, genius-marketing opinion, Hanagarne’s story should be a book, not a guest post, and so he should talk to Godin’s literary agent RIGHT NOW. Seth Godin hooked Josh Hanagarne up.

This is a blogger’s wet field-of-dream. If you write it (blog it!), they will come.

The magical baseball/blogging/cornfield of publishing dreams worked for Leo Babauta, Erin Doland and Josh Hanagarne. But what if your imaginary agent doesn’t hear your frantic law-of-attraction affirmations “I will get an agent and a book deal and a sick, sick advance, I will get an agent and a book deal and a sick, sick advance” and magically appear?

Simple: Go get yourself an agent.

“This is the hardest part”, says Gretchen Rubin, who kicked it old school and knocked on doors.

So did Chris Guillebeau. Yes, even social media savvy and internet famous Chris Guillebeau had to get out there and actively seek representation.

Before his blog waged war on Alexa, Guillebeau “approached everyone I could think of and more. I knocked on doors, posted on my blog that I was looking for an agent, and asked a couple of hundred people for referrals. Some people wrote back, some didn’t, but that’s just how it works.”

Now that Guillebeau’s campaign for world domination is firmly underway, “the tables have turned and I get approached all the time. I’ve been fortunate to receive a lot of good media coverage – New York Times, CNN, Business Week, etc. – and out of that experience, a number of other people have made contact to pitch me on things.”

Recruiting representation worked for Rubin, who oozes kind words about her agent, and it worked for Chris Guillebeau. Guillebeau is utterly, completely, passionately sold on his agent, David Fugate with LaunchBooks. “He’s fantastic,” says Guillebeau, “and the book would not have sold so quickly without his great work. He also spent a great deal of time refining the proposal to make it both more marketable (which I expected) and also much better in terms of content (which I didn’t expect but greatly appreciated)”.

Danielle LaPorte would approve. When choosing an agent, she advises writers to “hold out for the love,” because, after all, “it is a potentially life-changing relationship. Your agent will be your greatest advocate. They will want to get you the most money, because, you know, they’re getting 10-15% of it, so they will want to get you the exposure.”  Not only that, but “the right agent will actually work with you to craft that book. They could be hugely influential in the finished product. They will go to the mat to you in the end on everything from price point to pub date to cover design. It is really important.”

And the writer/agent chemistry doesn’t have to be interpersonal-clicky-butterflies love.

“It may sound contradictory,” admits LaPorte, “but you and your agent don’t need to see eye to eye on the material. You need to have free reign with your voice. An agent can be philosophical opposition and still go get you a good deal and help bolster your career.”

How did she find her agent for Style Statement?

The answer makes for a great story. Malcolm Gladwell (yes! Malcolm Gladwell! Poet-wooing, point-tipping, intellectual whodunit-spinning, best-selling, Malcolm Gladwell!) makes an appearance.

Like doorknockers Chris Guillebeau and Gretchen Rubin, Danielle LaPorte found an agent it an old-fashioned way. She read books.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell “profusely, adoringly thanked his agent” whom, he argued, should be the “next president of the United States or at the very least the CEO of Microsoft.” LaPorte thought, “she’ll do” and e-mailed Malcolm Gladwell.

(Duh! Who wouldn’t?)

LaPorte put on her charming pants and danced. She wrote, “I’m Canadian. You’re Canadian. You’re from Etobicoke. I know how to pronounce Eh-toe-bih-ko. You’re half-black. I have dreadlocks. Here’s my concept. Help me get to your agent.”

He replied within two days, writing, “You’re so charming. How could I refuse?”

To recap: kissing best-selling Godin/Gladwell ass can land you an agent. If that fails, your blog is your baseball/cornfield and if you build it they will come. If that fails, try calling around, knocking on doors, writing letters (and maybe even reading books!) and asking for one directly.

But by all means, by whatever means necessary, get an agent, and a good one, and one you like (even love), because a good agent will help you write and sell a great proposal.

And that’s what you sell, when you hawk a non-fiction book: a proposal. So the agent/author/proposal triangle is important.  Get all the angles right.

Write a Divine Book Proposal

Ah yes, the book proposal. If you’re writing non-fiction, you sell a proposal, not a finished manuscript.

What is a book proposal? It is a hook, a map of the book (the table of contents), your bio, market research (ie where does this fit? Who will read it?), marketing (how will you and the publisher sell the pants off it?) and oh yes, some sample chapters to show that you really can write more than a proposal.

And now, apparently, a book proposal needs to include the weight of your platform. Who are you? How big are you? Who is talking about you? How do you talk back? How much does Alexa and Google love you?

Need help licking the proposal beast? It is easily available online and in the bookstores. Leo Babauta “found a few examples of proposals on the web and picked out the parts I liked best, merging them into one kick-ass document.” Danielle LaPorte used a template created by Linda Severson and then “when it felt right to go out of the box, I did. I am not Times New Roman. I am not double-spaced”.

Even with all the resources easily available, every single author I spoke to (LaPorte, Rubin, Babauta, Doland, Guillebeau) said that when it came time to cook up a proposal, their agent was in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, apron strings tied, stirring the pot.  Agents are helpful critters. That’s why you should get a good one.

Josh Hanagarne found oodles of helpful proposal writing books. He would read how-to-write-a-proposal book, revise his proposal, read another book, revise the proposal, and did that, several times, until his agent said “I want you to stop reading those books.”

So, if you’re stuck, what about a proposal coach?

I put the question to our intrepid authors.

Q. Proposal Coach. Did you use or consider using one?

The answers could be characterized as follows:

A1. What is this mythical creature of which you speak?

Erin Doland: No. I didn’t even know there were such things as proposal coaches.

A2. That sounds like a scam.

Leo Babauta: I didn’t know they existed. If they do, they are probably scammers. The info you need to write a proposal is available free online. A proposal coach would make money on the insecurities of writers, which are notoriously large and numerous.

A3. Your agent is your proposal coach.

Chris Guillebeau: I thought that was the role of a good agent. The problem I see with a proposal coach is that they aren’t the ones who will pitch your project to publishers. I suppose if you’re having a hard time getting a concept together, then such a person could help, but realize that you’d likely end up doing it all over again with a good agent.

A4. Might not be a bad idea.

Gretchen Rubin: That might not be a bad idea.

So there you have it. It might not be a bad idea to get a proposal coach, if that’s your thing, but it is probably a better idea to just get a great agent who will help you write a killer proposal.

The Deal. Negotiating. You Need a Meat-Eater for This.

Back in the day, Oprah had a shark of an agent. Sort of. He’s actually an entertainment lawyer, has been called “the little-known power behind the media queen’s throne”, and Oprah herself says he’s “a piranha.”

Oprah’s piranha/entertainment lawyer is Jeff Jacobs and they met when she was looking for contract advice in 1984. Jacobs advised her to build a brand and create an empire rather selling herself as talent-for-hire. Then he helped her create Harpo.

That worked out fairly well for her.

If Oprah has a piranha, you need a shark. We’re talking about media now, not publishing, but the lesson holds.

The lesson is this: get the right agent. Then, when you’re approaching publishers, “Don’t go with your begging bowl”, cautions Danielle LaPorte, because “for an author, a book is a huge upfront investment”. (Penelope Trunk blogs that writing a book is a ‘time sink’.)

In other words: don’t be afraid to walk away.

And don’t lose sight of your art. That’s why you have an agent. Your job is the content. Do you want to write a book, or any book, or do you want to write your book?

Josh Hanagarne, for example, doesn’t want to write about Tourette’s. He wants to write a memoir of his abusive, dysfunctional relationship with Tourette’s. He wants to “write on a nerve”.

Danielle LaPorte wants to “go back hold my baby a little while longer”, and while she does that, she wonders, “if there were no agents, no publishers,” (heresy! blasphemer!) ”no twitter followers, is this the book you would want to write?”

Are Angels Singing and Monks Chanting? A little?

Is this the book you want to write? Is your agent the shiz? Did you rock out the proposal? Did the proposal-writing process make your manuscript into the book you didn’t even know you could write?  Did your publisher present your agent – who is of course the shiz and a negotiating shark (or piranha) of paleolithic proportions and origins – with a huge oversized cheque with your name written all over it? Or just an adequate cheque?  Adequate is fine. Cash may be king but books are divine.

The writers in this story may be online gurus and entrepreneurs and daily micro-publishers (what is a blog, after all?), but at heart they are bookies. As in book-lovers, not loan sharks.

Chris Guillebeau – straight up – admits that his goal, from the drop, was a book deal. Erin Doland suspects that her “friends are happier than I am now that I have a book under my belt simply because they no longer have to listen to me talk about it”.  Gretchen Rubin was already a best-selling author when she reluctantly started a blog that happily took over the world. Leo Babatua was so happy to get a book deal that he stopped and dropped it like it was hot. “I’m big on booty moves”, says the Zen Habits, simple-living guru, simply.

So there you have it. Want a book deal? Get a blog. A big one. And rock it out.

I know. The (snobbish, print-loving) writer in me just died a little, too. Again.

———-

Here’s a list of all the pieces in the accidentally epic how-to-get-a-book deal series (with from advice from published authors to a wannabe (that’s me):

The How To Get A Book Deal Interviews, with:

* I also did phone-interviews with Josh Hanagarne and Gretchen Rubin but get very, very sad when I think about doing more transcription

**My phone interview with Gretchen Rubin – in which she gave me some personal advice that really landed with me – inspired me to be a little nicer, online. Gretchen Rubin is my Jiminy Cricket.

Guest Posts at Write To Done (that triggered this whole series):

Guest Post at Write to Done: How to Get a Book Deal: Part 1 – Printasauraus Rex Vs. The Blog: Publishing 2.0

Get Thee A Blog, and A Big One: Guest Post At Write to Done

the answer in note(card) form

my friend, to me, on dating and (I think) life:

do you hide your light,
or cast pearls before swine?

My answer:

gift cards from White Hot Truth with Danielle LaPorte

always.

lovesexymoney

1.

touch me. touch my heart. poetry, baby cheeks, curls, smooth bald heads, ideals, principles, tears, pixie dust, deep women of experience, flowers, icy apple juice, smooching, John Cusack and a radio in the front garden. These things might me move. To the shepherd: this nymph would have said yes. I have said yes.

Books and babies and broads and boomboxes. Be still my butterfly heart. But you know what is melting my beeswax these days?

Numbers.

2.

My Gentleman Calleroh, we go back and forth about the romance thing, but the friendly, loverly calls continue, always, every night, because they’re just so good - suggested something that he thought would rock my business. I was silent. He backpedalled and apologized as if he had stepped over some invisible boundary. You know, by talking about money. My money.

I said, actually that turned me on.

3.

Betty Dodson knows about sex and women and desire and the liberating thereof. She’s the author of “Sex for One” and famous for leading clit-finding group expeditions. I mean workshops. She’s not just a revolutionary, she’s the fucking revolution. Viva la Betty.

Betty Dodson systematically scraped away social, sexual expectations of women and even some feminist conventions to embrace her own desire and stroke her own fire. She talks about sex. She talks about porn. She talks about vibrators. She believe that she deserves pleasure and so do you.

Viva la Betty.

And until recently, Betty Dodson – sexual revolutionary and midwife of female masturbation – was all uptight about money.

4.

She worried. She scraped by. She stayed broke.

She tackled sexual repression and left financial repression right the fuck alone.

5.

So that’s what I’m thinking about this week, because I’m right there with Betty.

Sex: I walk that dog unleashed. Money: errrrrr, how awkward.

6.

This is interesting, because we’re pretty brazen in the blogosphere about why we’re here. To share, to love, to learn, to make some money. Uh huh.

So, good. Excellent. Let’s talk about it. We are and we do. Over and over and over again.

Kinda like sex, yes? Porn is everywhere, our pop stars skirt the porn thing, and sex sex sex sex sex. It is everywhere except in reasonable discussions. No wonder our kids are learning about sex from porn.

We should be really worried that our kids are learning about sex from porn.

It is, Alan Moore put it in his long and gratifying essay about the history of porn and art, titillate and condemn, titillate and condemn, titillate and condemn. Getcha all aroused and then make you feel ashamed. Again and again.

We do that, culturally speaking, with sex, and with money.

Money is everywhere. Money is status. Money gets you laid. You should get some more of that so you can get some more of that.

We’re soaked to the skin with messages about money, and challenges to get more of it. It is okay to talk about getting more of it, because that’s just industrious.

What’s a little less acceptable: to talk about the actual sums involved.

Even less acceptable, it seems: to talk about giving it away. We’re supposed to do our charity work under the cover of dark and never mention it in polite company. Never mind online.

Just like something else.

7.

There is no reason to be shamefaced about giving.

Charity: do it however you need to do it. In private. In public. With the lights on or off and with as many people as necessary. Or not. Solo is okay, too.

8.

Because it is a joy to give.

Sometimes there is clarity in generosity. Sometimes, when I don’t know what to do, when my own inner sanctum is a whirring hamster wheel - and that little rodent can run, I assure you – I take a breath and get out of myself. I give. I offer. I support. I compliment. I love.

9.

I am not going to be shamefaced and shuffling about my joy. any of it.

10.

And so, back to women and money and power and pleasure and Betty Dodson and the lovesexymoney revolution.

Sex and money can be avenues to empowerment. Own your liberation, then share it.

dowhatchalike.

do what feels right.

get hot ‘n bothered – about giving and receiving, money and sex. the numbers. the love. the self. the share.

Love in the Time of Las Vegas

On the flight to Las Vegas, Heather, my sassalicious/salacious friend who likes to front like she’s tough, cracked and cried and gushed about how much she loves her husband. To be fair, she’s terrified of flying and was flying (high!) under the influence of two Ativans and three vodka cranberries.

Please note: very very bad combination. Do not try this at home, or anywhere. It gets messy. Heather knocked my laptop off the seat tray and then knocked her drink into my purse and later knocked boots with her camera in the airport bathroom. To summarize: inadvisable.

I digress. This is part three of my Las Vegas trilogy. Las Vegas is all about money and sex and I’ve mused about the meaning of those things already. So now let’s talk about the place – other than Las Vegas – where money and sex unite and ignite: marriage.

Kelly: Do you get butterflies about Tyler? Or is he like an old shoe?
Heather: What kind of shoe are we talking about? Be specific.
Kelly: I don’t know. He’s your shoe.
Heather: Yeah, I do. Last time he went away…when he came back, I got the butterflies.
Kelly: Like your stomach flipped over?
Heather: I had been alone with the kids for three and half days/years. I was REALLY happy to see him.
Kelly: If Tyler wasn’t your husband, would he be one of your best friends?
Heather: If he talked more, or at all, sure…you know, we did the long distance thing before we got together. So I guess we were friends first.
Kelly: How did you talk on the phone if he doesn’t talk?
Heather: He talked then. He worked hard. We talked for hours and hours on the phone. That’s why we had sex on the first date. It was all that talking.
Kelly: Can I write that you had sex on the first date in my blog? Does your mother read my blog?
Heather: Is it in Canadian Living? My mother only reads Canadian Living.
Kelly: We should be fine.

I asked Heather this because she’s my sister from another mother except she’s a reformed tramp. (Reformed in the sense that she only slings it in one direction now because she’s happily married and them’s the rules, usually.) I ask Heather because she’s like me and she’s got what I want. But I ask other people these questions because I wonder – eternally, constantly, with every breath – if passion is a sprint, a marathon, or a long slow walk that keeps rockin’ fifty years later in twin rockers on the porch.

And because love and marriage are everywhere in Las Vegas.

The couple in the row behind us kissed all the way from Bellingham to Las Vegas. In Vegas, there were sex cards galore…and brides. I saw a bride kick a cowboy straight in the shins.

In my head, I cheered on the shin-kicking bride. (I’m a terrible pacifist.) Earlier, that same cowboy was insistently and persistently friendly with me while I tried to have a drink with my colleague and his wife. Cowboy desperately wanted me to meet his friend. He told me his friend had “mustache rights”. This meant nothing to me, but it meant something to my co-worker who got very, very upset.

After Cowboy left, I was brought up to speed on the meaning of mustache rights.

It is not a good pick up line.

Sometimes this human mating game is perplexing and other times just plain unfathomable. Thirty-sex years into it, I’m still figuring out the rules and I like them less and less the more I learn. And one thing that I have learned for sure is that love doesn’t play by the rules – hence our need to make them. We think codes and lines  and boundaries and laws will keep us safe. But love is an outlaw.

And oh, how I love love.

Cowboy’s attempt to play drunken wingman for his mustachioed friend interrupted a great love story. My coworker and his wife were telling me how they met and married.

They were high school sweethearts who broke up when he went off to college. He graduated, got married and stayed married for twenty-four years. He got divorced and got married again for twenty-four months.

In the wake of his second divorce, he signed up at Classmates.com.  A week later, he had a message from his former sweetheart, saying “I don’t know if you remember me…I’m married and living in Florida.”

He wrote back and told her about his life, his divorce, and his pending trip to Florida, asking “Can I take you and your husband to dinner? I’d love to catch up.”

She wrote back “Funny you should mention your divorce…I’m in the middle of a divorce, myself.”

He called her, and when she picked up the phone and it was like they had never stopped talking.

He went to Florida to see her. He started going to Florida every six weeks. Then every four. Then every two. Then he was out of airmiles and free trips and told her that it was time for them to live in the same place. She quit her job and moved to Washington, DC with him.

And then they got married – in Vegas – on January 1, 2003. Every year since then they end and start the year in Las Vegas, the place where they ended their days apart and started their life together.

My big, burly friend – who, a few days earlier at a company dinner introduced me to filet mignon and the Manhattan (steak and bourbon. I like ‘em. Who knew?) and explained to me in abrupt, gruff detail the meaning of Cowboy’s mustache rights – then leaned over to me and said, “I bet you didn ‘t know I was so sensitive, did you?

No I didn’t . But now I do. And I’m so glad I do.

This story – this long, interrupted, lost and found love story – ran honey through my veins.

It could be straight from the pages of Lost and Found Lovers. In a study of 1001 participants, Dr. Nancy Kalish found that lovers who reunite later in life end up staying together (78%) and have an astonishingly low divorce rate of 1.5% compared to the national average of 51%.

That seems to me to be good odds for a gamble, and better odds than most. When it comes to my heart, I like to know my numbers.

Months ago, I wrote that there is research correlating the length, success and happiness of marriages to length of courtship – but not in the way you might expect. The longer the courtship, the shorter the marriage. A courtship longer than thirty-one months predicts divorce within one to four years. Couples who marry in haste - nine to eighteen months after starting a relationship - make it past the seven year mark and report very high levels of marital happiness.

So – don’t trust me, trust Ted Huston, PhD. I’m just wondering about butterflies and new relationship energy and the recipe for happily ever after. So I ask around. I look around. I get around. I poke around in books and libraries and make queries with my bff, Google. And what I’ve noticed is that the happily loved-up people I know seem to have a couple of things in common: it was passion, right away and they liked each other. Like, really really like each other, like spending time together, enjoy each other’s company, and laugh a lot. They hang out. They would be friends even if they weren’t lovers. But they have to be lovers because of all that passion.

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Day 3. The scary, sad side of sex and Las Vegas. And people. Because it is made by us, for us.

I’m all about The Sex but Las Vegas is making me feel like a prude. And confused.

Sure, sex is a great recreational activity. It can have bows and tassels and feathers and giggles. It can also be a spiritual experience and a source of reverence. It is also an industry. I know this is not news. I knew it. But now I really, really know it.

On the strip there are people in bright coloured hoodies that say “Girls Direct” handing out business cards for escorts. The cards have naked women on them. These cards are everywhere, on every corner and scattered on the sidewalks. These cards freak me out. The whole thing freaks me out. I’m not even talking about the sex work. I’m thinking about the people handling and handing out the cards. There are women, who probably don’t have work papers, and who probably work all day at some low-paying job, who stand on corners at night – cold nights – and hand out sex cards advertising women for sale. This makes me sad.

I’m not sure if sex work, per se, makes me sad. It kind of does, because I exhalt sex. I wish it could be like that for everyone. I wonder about strippers and sex workers and porn stars – male and female – and wonder if all sex becomes a job for them. Off duty, do they still have loving, incandescent, transcendant sex? Or does it become boring and a chore and the thing you do for work? In other words, work.

So the sex cards and the newspaper boxes filled with catalogs of naked women have made the usually invisible sex work  visible to me. And the money. The Las Vegas strip is all about the naked hustle. I liked it yesterday but today I’m overwhelmed.

Today has been weird. Today I was by myself which might have made me look like a stray or possibly prey. It brought out the predators. Some were just harmless, awkward, embarassing pick ups. Some were deeply unflattering drunken approaches. The worst was when I was walking just off the strip. A guy slowed down, pulled over, turned on the interior light and rolled down the passenger window. I thought he was going to ask me for directions. But then I realized that he had pulled up his shirt and was twirling his nipple.

What is that? Is that about sex? Is that really a pick up and does he really think that has a chance of success? Or is the thrill in the scary?