Independence Day!
So, what is it, do you suppose, that an old story teller who loves mules, ghost towns in Southeastern Colorado, and a sassy writer who gives independent tours of the area have in common?
I’ll tell ya, it may not appear to be much on the surface, but underneath the rough exterior of that old codger is a writer who can get the job done. Last night (July 3rd) at the ACE Writers 101 Meeting, we reviewed a book that will soon be released, and Ole Oris did a mighty fine job of ripping it to shreds, bleeding all over it, and destroying every hanging participle and dangling do-ma-hickey on the page. He didn’t let a single passive verb slide by. He had out his red pen and he was marking it up. Even claimed my story was busy! Can you imagine?
Ultimately, we determined he doesn’t like -ly words, stop words, like the, that, as, just, and cliches. He’s also got a thing for anything that remotely smokes buzz-word or jargon. Oris even took off on a shopping spree to alienate was and were. (Although, he’ll have to admit, he didn’t find many of those.)
Dan Minor tossed his pen in the rink as a participating editor, adding in his two cents and half a bit, with culminating writing thoughts and ideas that came to rest like a rooster on Sunday morning. I appreciate his viewpoint and perspective! As an educator come writer, he’s got a unique view of the reader’s angle.
Vicki Mangum listened to the story and we decided it must be really good because we put her to sleep twice, because she got so involved in the story lines.
Patsy, I just want to let you know how much I appreciate your hospitality and knowledge of grammar and punctuation at these meetings. It’s refreshing to have help with the details of the meetings.
When the editing was over and I got home to rewrite the story, I found myself thinking about the Independence Day that’s coming up. Not just the Forth of July, which for me is a grand and glorious day of celebration, but even more — the Independence Day that will bring culmination to almost three years of writing The Ruskin Adventure Series. Am I stopping?
No.
This book number six will be a break away story, giving the kids a break and allowing the stories to rise to popularity, before I stick out the next book for appeasement. After rudamentary grammar, spelling and punctuation check overs, we’re spacing the next generation books out a bit, adding more depth, more intensity, and more common issues with single parent families. Does this mean the Ruskin kids will become problematic? Definitely NOT. However, they will get the thrills and chills of facing the reality that comes from having only one parent in this next bunch of books. And perhaps… even a visit from stalker dad who seems to think he can affect change in their lives by annoying the heck out of them.
Book number seven promises to touch on parental rights and responsibilities, along with the devastating reality of abandonment and dead-beat dads.
If you’re still behind the times and haven’t kept up with all the Ruskin Adventures, you might want to pay closer attention in the near future. They’ll be coming out in force, sometime in August!
During the same time span, Ghost Tours will be working on Planning Tours for the 2009 Tour Year, and there will be massive changes in the Writer Group - with the Coming Publication Conference on August 23rd.
Santa Fe Trail Tours and Vacations
When I mentioned a year ago setting up Santa Fe Trail Tours and Vacations it was one of those spur of the moment “Oh yeah, right!” moments. But then I set up the first of the tours.
The Prairie Ghost Tour became an event. The first tour included 11 guests, a guide, a driver, and more than eight hours of Historic Ghost Tours on 212 mile jaunt across the Southeastern Colorado Plains. We had a wonderful time and I learned more about Colorado Ghosts than even I was previously aware. The most significant part of the tour was the number of people who arrived via AmTrak and hopped right in the vans to take the tours. Hotels around the area hosted three couples who had flown into Denver the night before and one solitary person from Lamar, Colorado joined our tour.
Not only did they decide this was an exciting tour, but several have already scheduled themselves for next summer’s Historic Tour of the area. Local Day Tours are offered for folks from the area wish to learn more about the Pioneering History and Ghost Towns of Southeastern Colorado are planned randomly throughout the fall. If you’re interested in taking one of the planned tours, please contact Jan Verhoeff at 719.336.4036 or send an email to prairieghosttours@gmail.com for a quick link to a brochure online.
Planning tours will be going on most of the summer and fall, offering a reduced price per person with a bag your own lunch option if you live somewhere close by and would like to join the planning tour. Planning tours start at eight in the morning with a quick breakfast and continue through the day with a drive to various sites around the Baca and Prowers County areas. Bring your own Bag Lunch, plenty of sunscreen, and your sunglasses for a day of touring these areas for Ghosttowns, Historic Sites and Pleasant Vistas that will become part of the 2009 Tour Season Brochures.
Contact Jan at the above email for information about these planning tours. (Bag lunches may be optional depending on day and time - restaurants in some areas are available and highly recommended!)
Action Plan for Results
Create a Perfect Action Plan - 5 Step Formula to Manage Your Projects
By Paul Godines
Never has there been a more important issue, from figuring out how to get the kids home from soccer and get the tires changed and making dinner to making calls to clients too attending that important sales meeting. Whew…take a break catch your breath, slooooow dooooown.
Travel Options
Are you anxious to take a summer vacation? I was looking around for something to do with the kids this summer and found a great opportunity. No only can we take a vacation and have a great time, I’ll be making a few bucks in the process.
Just click this Travel Link!
Campaign for President of the United States
To ALL those who believe it necessary to send disrespectful messages about President Bush or the current administration, or find it important to their political position to run down my country. Consider this:
The Peace Mongers have it? We’ve lost the war according to those who willingly lie down and wait for extinction by global warming, or shake their fists in the air and scream at the President for taking us into war. (Just FYI: It isn’t global warming, it’s REVELATIONS, read the last Book of the Bible! Or for that matter, read the FIRST Book of the Bible. Creationism is more than theory, it’s being proven daily.) Al Gore, the liberal spokesman for Green who talks up living green, is making a ginormous footprint living in a big house and using up natural resources, while the President of the United States, George W. Bush, has an efficient home that isn’t using up natural resources. Those same folks who have forgotten that Terrorist slammed OUR commercial airlines into the Twin Towers? Oh, yes, those same folks tread water, spouting equal rights while marching for SPECIAL Rights for ’activist groups’. How are rights EQUAL if they are SPECIAL? Isn’t that what we fought against so many years ago, anyone being treated with SPECIAL RIGHTS, over other human beings, and now we’ve come so far as to be fighting for SPECIAL RIGHTS?
Copywriting - What you don’t say…
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, some superstar in the marketing industry comes up and slaps you across the face with such simply copy that you step back in awe, wishing you’d said that! It happens time and time again. Every moment of the day, I hear phrases that I think… “Gosh, I wish I’d said that first!” So, why don’t you?
Honestly, this isn’t rocket science here. It’s simply words strung together in sentences that make up paragraphs, that make up sales letters and other momentous copy events along the way. What’s holding you back?
Marketing online is a fairly simple program. You write stellar copy that targets specific audiences and post it in places where it can be found. The end result is… YOU SELL PRODUCT.
Monster Money Online can happen if you sell enough product using Internet Content to draw your audience, sell your product, and capture your buyer share of the market. If you’re still wondering how to do that, I highly recommend this product “Profit Maker”, just get it… You’ll be glad you did.
If you want to learn how to create your own Internet Marketable Information Products, visit Monster Money Maker and learn the 100% SECRET Method of Making Monster Money Online. You’ll receive an invitation to the Monster Money Maker Blog - SHOW ME THE CASH - and receive many hours of tips and ideas for making your own product.
Marketing Location - Are you Sure where you ARE?
Just this morning, I had a conversation with a newbie marketer wishing to use my services to help get a small business off the ground. Hey, this is my specialty!
I love helping new business owners put together business plans that make their business profitable and marketable to even a small location. Increasing their income streams with Internet options is a good plan, but many don’t wish to include world wide web in their business plan, so we stick with small town info. Nothing wrong there, but how do you market to a limited world?
All my relatives are RICH and lived in Nigeria!
Kinda like the old joke that if you’re living in Fowler you can’t be buried in the Fowler Cemetery. Of course, if you’re “living” in fowler, why would you want to be buried?
The Internet is an awesome resource, and an incredible source of information. From no other source would I have found out that most all of my relatives have been missionaries to Nigeria, have built incredible wealth during their time there (in a third world nation while feeding the sick and poor) , and have left it all to me in a bank where the only person who knows about this wealth is a magistrate (or barrister, or some other kind soul) who is simply loath to have the money wasting away, it should be given back to the rightful owner. Who is “me”! How fortunate that they found me after a strategic search of every single person they knew on the planet! I just happen to have a different last name, no connection whatsoever to the person, and a bank account - lest we forget an email address that is plastered all over the Internet for business purposes.
A person with less knowledge of genealogy might have bought into one of these magnificently written emails and sent their banking information right along, but I’m well aware of where my relatives are located. They’ve been in the same general area for most of the past century, and for some unknown reason, most of them don’t stray far from the branches of that old cedar tree on the prairie. Oh, we stroll around a bit, take leave of our senses and actually move to the far corners of the earth, but come time for the family reunion, we’re sitting by the edge of the bon-fire roasting marshmallows and our kids, grandkids, and great grandkids are just on the other side of the smoke throwing water out of the make-shift horse-tank pool.
But, what a concept, this rich relative missionary in Nigeria!
I’ve received more of these letters than I can count, and most all of them are from some dying member of the mission group (they’re all dying of cancer over there) who is frought with frustration, because I have yet to respond with my banking information to claim the vast wealth of my former relative. In some cases, these victims of heritage have even sent along newspaper clippings of the untimely demise of my unfortunate relative, who in most cases died in the interior in an unpublicized plane crash along with all members of his (or her) immediate family, leaving me the erstwhile closest relative.
The letters are tear jerkers.
Their words bring you to tears. They literally drown you in emotional appeal and bring your heart to rest on the desire to help these poor souls who are in such dire need to vindicate themselves of these vast fortunes.
What if, they wrote a book instead?
They could have published their book online like much of the rest of the world has done, told their story for all time, and won a pulitzer instead of the email they sent to me, which ultimately landed in the cyber landfill of deleted email messages. What if, they’d used their genius to do something vastly creative instead of attempting to con someone who knows better? What if, they’d sent me a book they wrote about my poor dear relatives? I might have purchased that!
These poor victims of Internet Grace are fully unaware that they could be sending out sales and marketing letters with value attached, selling books they’ve written instead of balogne?
Just a thought….
Marketing Guru, Seth Godin, Knows it ALL
Well, maybe not, but The New York Times says, “Godin reinforces what good marketers know.”
Seth Godin is one of those open hair piece kind of guys who acknowledges his expertise but doesn’t go overboard. He’s well aware that there’s MORE to learn. He hits high o the list of Internet Experts because his awareness of marketing brings knowledge to others. He understands the option of giving away information in order to get more of what he wants in return.
- Low price sells commodities with efficiency, not marketing.
- Integrity means keeping your word to build brand recognition.
- Average customers don’t have what it takes to keep you in business, it’s those best customers that keep coming back for more of what you offer.
- Cash share is better than market share.
- Marketing begins with creating the product.
For more Seth Godin - Visit Seth Godin’s Blog then come back and learn how to Make Monster Money Online with independent business plans and products as unique as you are.
There’s money to be made on the Internet and you can do it easily if you get connected to the right marketing circles.
Over-busy, Over-worked, Over-stressed, Over-whelmed with Joy
In the realm of life, I’ve found there are times when life simply moves too fast, and we must take a moment to step off the train and get re-acquainted with who we are in the midst of life’s happenings. Such was this past two weeks.
When Tatia graduated on May 18th, I knew there was a wedding coming up soon. She and Kevin were in love, ready to tie the knot, and seriously considering marriage vows as their next step. Their consideration of marriage vows had been a bit more complete than I realized. When we woke up the next morning, they went to city hall and got a marriage license. Their plan was for later that day.