by john | Jan 14, 2010 | Writing
And not the Girls Gone Wild type that have made Joe Francis a bajillionaire.
I keep track of tiny little tidbits of stories and poems in my notebook. But I keep my notebook on my phone and in my computer. I use a program called Evernote to keep track of my multiple to-do lists, and I use one of these lists for story ideas and things I hear that stand out to me. Then when I’m stuck on something to write, I roll these over and over in my head until something falls out. I also think Evernote is a pretty killer productivity tool since it syncs your electronic to-do lists between phone, web and computer, and if you’re as scatterbrained as I am, if it doesn’t make it onto a list, it never, ever gets done.
So here are some flashes that I’ve got in my little notebook right now –
black burkha in the carolina southern sun
standing on one leg on a street corner with no foot left
tie you to my soul with strands of blood and hope
I leaked milk and cried blood into the snow for you.
fly on concrete angel, let the winds of the city carry you away.
porn for breakfast.
she wore her androgyny like a badge of honor
I have walked through the fires of my souls and come through battered scarred but whole
girl can’t afford seminary tuition so she works as a stripper
He sees the world in colors
Right now, the last two are my favorites, the girl who is working her way through seminary as a stripper and the boy who sees the world in colors. That last one is a reference to autism that I saw on some TV show this week. Somewhere there’s a story about the confessional girl, living in a sinful world, dancing for dollars and working her way closer to God. What should I tackle first off that list? You tell me, I’ll write something tonight and bring it back to you. It might suck, but I’ll take the assignment.
by john | Jan 14, 2010 | Poker
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by john | Jan 13, 2010 | Music
And not Jerry Douglas, either. Bluegrass fans will get the reference, and if you’re not, you should be. One piece of awful news this week – the Neighborhood Theatre in the NoDa area in Charlotte might be shutting down. I find this particularly distressing because it’s one of my favorite concert venues, and is perfectly sized for a lot of the shows that I want to go see. Some of the best concerts I’ve ever attended were at the Neighborhood Theatre, and it would be a shame if no one could step forward and buy the place. I wish I had the resources, but I don’t, but if there’s a consortium of folks that are looking for someone to help with tech and promotions, lemme know.
But back to great concerts I’ve seen there. The first time I ever saw Robert Earl Keen do a whole set was at the Neighborhood. I’d seen REK at the McGlohon Theatre at Spirit Square, but didn’t watch the whole set. This time I watched the whole thing, and rocked out with all the other hillbillies all the way up til the main breaker blew out in the middle of Road Goes on Forever, and the last piece of the show was done in the dark with only monitors for sound. It didn’t matter to the crowd, we were all drunk and knew all the words, anyway.
The first time I saw Great Big Sea was at the Neighborhood. I’m pretty sure I went alone, and sat in the middle of the room and just jammed while the boys from up north put on a helluva show. The John Hiatt show was another one i saw alone, because Suzy bailed at the last minute. John played alone and (mostly) acoustic, with his guitar, a stomp board for percussion and an electric piano. It was pretty amazing. That was his Tiki Bar tour, and I don’t know how they got him there for a solo show, but it was pretty awesome. So was the first time I saw Reckless Kelly, the first time I saw Hayseed Dixie, the last time I saw Sam Bush, when he played a bunch of cuts off his Circles Around Me album, which I think is his best solo album so far, and when Bonnie and I went to see Peter Rowan. We sat in the seats toward the side of the stage, and I’m pretty sure Bonnie scared Peter a bit when she yelled out for “Rain and Snoooooowwwww!” Peter jumped a little, but he played the song for her.
So it’s been a great venue for music in Charlotte for the last ten years or so, and has had a lot to do with the revitalization of the NoDa neighborhood, so I really hope somebody can come along and pick up the lease and keep the place rolling along. Otherwise it’ll be just another victim of the tightening economy.
by john | Jan 12, 2010 | Real Life, Writing
So two things of happiness this evening, as I remain freezing my arse off in Atlanta. It’s been colder down here than in Charlotte for the past several days, and this Southern boy does NOT like the cold. But anyway…
I just got done chatting with the nice lady at the student loan joint, who informed me that the first nice lady I talked with was wrong, and my payment isn’t taking a 25% increase, only to be followed by a 25% increase ten days later. I am still stuck on this graduated repayment plan, which will see my payment increase by 25% every two years, but that means that my payment goes up again in January of 2012. By that time I think there will be little enough left on my total loan balance that I can hopefully just pay the fucker off. Sooner than that if I get anything working the WSOP from home this summer, but who knows what’s going to happen in that regard. So, on the one hand, my payment is increasing substantially this month. But not so substantially that I can’t make the payment and still pay all my bills, so that was a good conversation.
But the much better news is that one of my poems was accepted into the March edition of the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature! The poem “Aftermath,” which was briefly featured here before being taken down to maintain its unpublished status, was accepted after just one submission! Now I know that it’s rare to have the kind of success right out the gate that I’ve had. I won the Charlotte Writer’s Club Board Prize for Poetry right before the end of the year last year, and two of my poems were selected as finalists in the Atlanta Review poetry contest, and now one of my pieces has been accepted for publication on the first shot. This is, as we say in poker, too small a sample size. But these little successes are encouraging, and it’s keeping me writing new stuff. I’ve decided not to enter any poetry book contests right now, because I don’t think I have a solid enough body of work to warrant a book of only poetry. I am going to branch out a little and submit some short stories and non-fiction, and there are a couple of first novel contests that I’m looking at as well. But if I can keep my nose to it and keep submitting, hopefully the list of publications on my resume will continue to grow.
And for those of you who’ve known me for a while, Aftermath was written about my uncle’s suicide. That was my first attempt at putting those feelings together on paper, and I’m glad that the folks at Dead Mule felt that it was worthy of publication. I think it honors Ed’s memory and my family by sharing the universal nature of loss and our common reactions to it. So it’s kind of an important piece to me, and I’m glad that I’ll be able to share it with a wider audience than just here on this little piece of the internets.
Home tomorrow afternoon, then Charlotte StoryTellers Guild Thursday night, Just Do It at Theatre Charlotte Friday night, Charlotte Writer’s Club Tuesday night, Charlotte Mini-Con next Saturday (attending, not showing anything there) and Carolina Writers’ Showcase next Saturday Night. Mark your calendars for anything that seems interesting, hope to see you there!
by john | Jan 12, 2010 | Real Life
Warning – the below post includes no pics of hot college cheerleaders, nor does it include any hot pics of men in cheerleader skirts.
Full Disclosure – the above sentence is purely for the SEO spiders in a shameless attempt to increase webcrawler traffic.
But I’m really not going to wear a cheerleader skirt. Even though that seems to be most of my job. I’m a sales manager, which can mean many things to many things. And sometimes different things on different days to the same people. Most of the time, I concentrate on the sales part of the title, as I’m one of the leading sales people in my office. That’s actually the easy part. After 14 years in the same industry, with the same company, in the same location, I know my market. I understand who the players are and how order go to market. I understand what projects to go after and which ones to take a pass on. And I win more than I lose, which at the end of the day is a pretty good marker for success.
The manager part is way harder. Like many industries, ours does not hire managers, we promote them from within. Just like principals that are promoted out of the classroom, this can be a hit or miss proposition. Many great sales people can’t manage worth a damn, and for the first few years I was in this position, I was one of them. On the upside, I was only managing two people besides myself, so my ineptitude was pretty harmless. Fortunately for me, as our group expanded to where I was managing more people, my company realized that we probably needed some training. I balked at some of the training, but what it did teach me was that I needed to learn how to do this thing. So I read some books, and I read some blogs, and I started to work at it.
And what I’ve come to realize is that there are bunches of different types of managers. There’s the minutiae manager, who never misses a meeting or a follow-up call, who has all their reports in on time and doesn’t have any trouble with paperwork. It may come as some surprise, but that ain’t me. There’s the rah-rah manager, who inspires their people to ever greater heights by their boundless enthusiasm and love for the job. That’s not really me, either. I try to be more of the analytical and fun manager, but I end up more the grumpy cheerleader.
I’m snarky by nature, but I have an ability to see complex things in fairly simple terms. This allows me to slice through a lot of BS and tell people what’s really going on. I have to fight my natural bitchiness to keep the message positive, but I am at least able to boil things down into one or two sentences that are easily understood by everyone. This talent for synthesis is something one rep of mine remarks on frequently, and I tend to use it a lot when I’m trying to inspire my folks. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Some folks just aren’t ever going to get it, no matter what, and eventually with them you’re going to cut bait. But most folks just need to understand the process (or maybe have the process tweaked for their talents) in order for them to succeed. So I spend a lot of time being the grumpy cheerleader. How do you manage people?
