this woman’s work

You are browsing the archives from 2007 September.

Yesterday Madison was playing with a couple of refrigerator magnets.

“Look!” she squealed. “They fly together!”

She meant the magnetic attraction. It made me think of Noah at that age, also fascinated with magnets (on his brio train set — Madison doesn’t have the patience for the train set). Only he kept his discoveries to himself. If an adult — not a parent — would comment about what he was doing, he would stop and wait patiently for them to leave him alone, blinking his big blue eyes at them.

Madison invites participation; she solicits it. Noah was wary and discouraged outsider attention.

Noah’s first preschool teacher understood this about him and she loved him. She was patient, waiting to be invited and finding ways to support his need to observe but not feel observed himself. His next preschool teacher was a high-energy extrovert and she didn’t get him. She liked him — at least I think she did — but she was puzzled by him. Participation, she felt, was fun! So she couldn’t understand his need to sit on the sidelines.

Noah recently said that he hated that teacher but he’s wrong. At the time he thought she was funny so I think he’s remembering the stress of her leading his small group and forgetting the entertainment that went along with it.

I see how in this way life is going to be easier for Madison because the world loves an extrovert. She stands in our front lawn and waves to people walking their dogs past our house.

“Hi!” she hollers. “How’s it going? This is my brother Noah. We’re eating popsicles.”

She’s genuinely interested in other people and anxious to share her happy events with them. She’s bossy but generous and she likes to be a help. I think she’s going to shine at preschool.

She asked her teacher’s name today and I said it was Miss Lisa.

“Like Miss Anna!” she said. “Now I have a gym teacher AND a school teacher!”

She was playing in the water table full of shaving cream while we were chatting and her bathtub doll, Naked Baby, got shaving cream in her eyes and Madison was upset because she knows shaving cream is painful in one’s eyes.

“It’s ok,” I told her. “Because she’s a doll.”

Madison gave me a withering look.

“She is a person,” she corrected and carefully wiped the shaving cream away.

“Hey,” she offered at lunch. “Do you want me to sing Miss Mary Mack for you? Just let me swallow this grape in my mouth and I’ll sing it for you.”

When she and Brett go car shopping (he thought he found the one he wanted but the gas mileage was lousy) she chats up the salesman who ply her with balloons and lollipops. Observing the back-facing seats in a Camry stationwagon she said, “I have a brother named Noah and he is going to LOVE those seats!” (As you can tell, she likes to brag on having a big brother.)

And she’s brave. She’s afraid of the lawn mower and she’s afraid of the race car our neighbor is rebuilding because it roars when he starts it up. Yesterday she got out of the car to find Gramps had dropped the lawn mower off in our driveway. She walked over to it, bravely confronting her enemy and screamed: “DIE LAWNMOWER, DIE!” Then later she and Brett took a walk and passed the neighbor with the race car working on his yard.

“I don’t like your race car,” she told him. “We don’t have a race car because we are nice people.” (The guy has a 3-year old himself so he laughed and told her he understood.)

I love her welcoming attitude toward the world. I wish I could bottle it up and borrow it.

I’m trying to clear my desk so I can work today and tomorrow. I mean literally clear my desk because it’s covered in kid drawings and K’nex and someone has swiped all my pens so I need to track down some damn pens. (This is the glamor of having a work-at-home environment.)

I figured my fractions wrong and I’m not making 3/4 of what I need to make; I’m making 7/8! My mom is so proud! (Really! I called her!) Of course it makes me nervous because some of that money were from one-off jobs and not from regular assignments but I feel like, hey, I can get more assignments because I’ve gotten assignments in the past and so I will have assignments in the future.

My next set of postcards finally went out on Saturday so that pushes follow-ups to the week after this. This is the next one. (You can see the first one here.) Obviously they look better (and less blurry) in person. You can see that my campaign is working a theme because I want people to go, “Hey, it’s one of those Smart Cookie postcards again!”

I’ve averaged 3/4 of what I need to make every month since Brett’s been home. I didn’t know I was doing as well as that — I kinda don’t understand it. That’s what actually came in since April — not what’s still outstanding. I thought I was making 1/2 of what I need to make because I’d just been keeping track in my head.

I plan to be filthy rich by December. (Kidding. Kinda. Maybe spring.)

So I wanted to give an update about how things are going work-wise for those of you playing the corporate writing game at home.

1. Since I started networking the tone and content of my meetings have changed. Before I was going blind into big meetings and handing business cards out to everyone I saw. Now I’m scheduling meetings with individuals and we’re talking about what we can do for each other more specifically. Basically I’m nurturing leads for myself and I’m also helping to hook up people in my network with other people because I finally have a network.

2. I’m starting to have a better understanding of business in Columbus — which corporations are the heavy-hitters, which ones are impossible to work for, which ones regularly use freelancers, etc. I’m also getting a better understanding of business in general including the titles of the people I need to target and how things work and the language people use with each other.

3. I’ve also honed and re-honed my elevator pitch.

4. I’m getting a better idea of what I have to offer although I’m still not totally clear about what my specialty will be or what I’m really great at. My writing group tells me that my copy is “snappy,” which leads me to believe that I’m probably going to be best in an industry that doesn’t necessarily need to be dry.

5. I’ve learned that I really get this marketing thing. I think I’m pretty intuitive about it and sometimes when I’m talking to someone at a networking meeting I can get a clear understanding of what they’re doing wrong (and right) with their branding and campaigns. My confidence hasn’t caught up with this though; I’m working on it.

6. I’m still perfecting my calendar/appointment system. I think my best bet would be a PDA but I can’t really lay out the cash for that right now. We’ve got a broken TREO somewhere in the house (courtesy of Brett’s brother) but I have no idea how to make it work. Also learning to balance Noah’s school with my work (and Madison’s school) is going to be a bear. There was a meeting I really wanted to hit the Thursday after this but Thursday Madison has school, Noah has gym, we only have the one car and everything pretty much happens at once. I don’t know if I’ll be able to swing it. Damn.

7. I can’t remember names. I can see them (on their business cards, on their emails) but I’m so used to scanning names to get a general idea — enough to start typing ’til my address book picks it up and finishes it — that I’ve forgotten how to translate them into names I say. For example, this week I had an appointment with a woman and her name was K-something. I thought I knew it until I was in her parking lot and realized I had no idea. I knew it was K and had an R but that was it. I could see it but I couldn’t say it. (It was Karen and I was leaning to Katherine — Yipes!) Now I know I ought to just bring their card with me or write it down and look at it one more time before the meeting. (I had another close call with a Melissa/Michelle.)

In short, networking online and networking off-line aren’t the same thing. Duh. Glad I figured that out four months into my efforts!!!!