Author: mizyank

Excerpt from Good Luck With That Thing You’re Doing

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Hey, everybody! I haven’t posted in a really long time but here goes…

This excerpt is a chapter from Good Luck With That Thing You’re Doing: One Woman’s Adventures in Dating, Plumbing and Other Full-Contact Sports, my collection of (nonfiction) humor essays about the absurdities of everyday life. This particular absurdity involves Easter…

A Hare Out of Place

Last spring I moved to an Arlington neighborhood whose inhabitants do more than pay lip service to the idea of community. People here make a point of getting to know each other and do things like leave welcome gifts for new arrivals. (An unidentified neighbor left me an eggplant, for example. I thought it was a nice gesture, though some readers feared I had been targeted by a produce terrorist.) The neighborhood also has a robust civic association that puts on well-attended, family-friendly events like a Fourth of July parade, a Halloween parade, and an Easter egg hunt.

My next door neighbors, Toni and Scott, are among the people who play the most active roles in making these events happen. They contribute countless hours of their time to help plan and organize. I’m an engaged citizen too, so I contribute juice boxes, which everyone knows are the cornerstone of any close-knit community.

The annual Easter egg hunt was scheduled to take place today, so I stopped by my neighbors’ house last night with my contribution. To my standard kid-friendly juice offering I had added a bottle of adult grape juice, which Toni and I proceeded to share. I hadn’t seen her in a while, so we had some catching up to do. About-two thirds of the way through the bottle, the topic of conversation shifted to the egg hunt.

“So do you guys have everything you need?” I asked. Continue reading →

Excerpt from Good Luck With That Thing You’re Doing: One Woman’s Adventures in Dating, Plumbing and Other Full-Contact Sports

/ mizyank / 3 Comments

First, a huge “thanks” to Marcia for her fantastic idea and trademark generosity of spirit. It makes this a wonderful community, and what a great way to get to know new writers!

I’d like to send off Excerpt Week with not a bang or whimper, but a laugh, with this Easter-centric chapter from Good Luck With That Thing You’re Doing, a collection of humor essays published in November.

Hope you enjoy!

A Hare Out of Place

Last spring I moved to an Arlington neighborhood whose inhabitants do more than pay lip service to the idea of community. People here make a point of getting to know each other and do things like leave welcome gifts for new arrivals. (An unidentified neighbor left me an eggplant, for example. I thought it was a nice gesture, though some readers feared I had been targeted by a produce terrorist.) The neighborhood also has a robust civic association that puts on well-attended, family-friendly events like a Fourth of July parade, a Halloween parade, and an Easter egg hunt.

My next door neighbors, Toni and Scott, are among the people who play the most active roles in making these events happen. They contribute countless hours of their time to help plan and organize. I’m an engaged citizen too, so I contribute juice boxes, which everyone knows are the cornerstone of any close-knit community. Continue reading →

Sounding a note of thanks for this community

/ mizyank / 8 Comments

It’s Thanksgiving morning, and I would be spending time quietly reflecting on all the wonderful things in my life if only my niece and nephews weren’t standing on the second floor launching pillow missiles at me here in the living room. When I went around the room to ask them what they were grateful for, one of them gave me a canned answer like “my family,” but the other two came clean and said, “my iPad” and “cheese puffs.”

Much as I appreciate the simple abundances in my life–food, a roof over my head, my health –what I appreciate most are my relationships. They fuel every aspect of my life, every single day. My gratitude encompasses the relationships I’ve formed through writing in general and this space in particular, a place where creativity and generosity abound.

Thanks to Marcia for starting this place that encourages writers to help one another, a practice that certainly ought to become tradition.

We all know we need to build a platform, but how many planks does it need?

/ mizyank / 13 Comments

I had lunch one day last February with my brother’s boss, a high-level marketing guy for a company whose product is wildly popular. He also co-authored and self-published a business book that did so well the Big Bookstores picked it up, so I wanted to pick his brain about what I could do to get my writing out into the world beyond my blog. I explained that, though I blogged fairly regularly, I didn’t do much to try to promote it.  The real focus of my writing efforts was a quasi-memoir that revolves loosely around my relationship with the first house I owned. I wanted his thoughts on how to pitch the quasi-memoir, which at the time was 70% complete, to agents, publishers, etc.

He held up both of his hands and said, “Wait a minute, Karen, you haven’t published anything yet, have you?” I shook my head. “Then you’re doing this all wrong.”  He went on to tell me I needed to build a platform and find a way to generate demand for the quasi-memoir even before it was written. This seems like such obvious advice, especially since my minimal efforts to promote my blog guaranteed that it hadn’t been seen by anyone who doesn’t share my DNA. He suggested that I read a marketing book that’s oh-so-helpfully called Platform.

I greet business books with the same enthusiasm as I do tax returns, so I won’t lie and tell you I read it in great detail. I skimmed it, focusing on the areas that interested me most and skipping right over duh counsel like “create great content.” The insights I gleaned from the book led me to crank out the collection of humor essays that I self-published on CreateSpace and released on Nov. 4. But doing all of that still isn’t enough, because you have to promote it.

Which is how I find myself staring down Day 23 of Shameless Self-Promotion Month. (Happy SSPM, everyone!) I understand that, no matter what you’re “selling,” you must have a social media presence. But how do you figure out where to allocate your time without cutting into your precious writing time, especially if you, like me, have a non-writing full-time job? Do you choose only two or three outlets –facebook, twitter and Goodreads, for example–and focus on those? Or do you try to touch them all and then stick with the ones where you get traction?

And I would especially love to hear from anyone who has figured out how to make sense of what feels like cacophony to me on Twitter. I know people form relationships and connections there all the time but I don’t quite understand how that happens when so much content is flying around so quickly.

Hoping to hear from all of you wonderful folks out there!