Don’t you sometimes feel that the world is coming at you too fast? The rush of e-mails, ads, news blips, text and phone messages, Twitter, Facebook, and to top it all off, frenetic music coming from your radio or iPod? Are you overloaded and quietly going mad?

Before you start trying on straitjackets, try this: Radio Bach.

My little feathered companion, Buster the Parakeet, just didn’t look himself last week. Puffed up like a little ball of feathers, his eyelids drooping, he looked miserable. And I didn’t know what to do.

Green parakeet like Buster

The old sure-fire cure of antibiotic in his drinking water failed to un-puff him. And he didn’t seem to be eating, so I gave him a millet spray. He went after it like a millet addict. He denuded one spray in a matter of minutes. So I gave him another. The next day, another. Then, last night, hallelujah! his puffiness had mostly receded. Except… doesn’t his chest still look puffy? Yes, he looked like a puffer pigeon. More research. The closest answer to what might be wrong: sour crop. That sounds awful. It’s like a super tummy-ache caused by food getting stuck in the crop instead of going through. And the cause could be — MILLET! Gack! I was killing my little Buster with kindness!

It all brought back traumatic memories of the time I killed a dear cockatiel by feeding him the wrong diet. It didn’t help that the bird vet (a mean woman indeed) told me the bird’s liver was “the size of Cleveland” and went on a rant about how people don’t know how to feed birds. I told her he liked bird seed, and she said, “Of course he does! It’s like popcorn!” Who knew? I shudder to remember how my beloved Jou-Jou died right in the vet’s hand as I watched. It couldn’t possibly be happening again!

So no more millet, and Buster’s chest looks less puffy today. He actually chirped a few times yesterday, which is a good sign, since he’s normally a little chatterbox and operatic singer all day long.

We’ll see what today brings. I long to hear his pleasant chirpings. They create the happy soundtrack for my workday. Now, if I can just quit doing the wrong thing, I expect I’ll hear it again very soon.

You go, Buster!

When I was visiting at my grandmother Barebo’s house one summer, she demonstrated how to tell a male kitten from a female kitten. Someone had brought a fuzzy little kit and said, “I don’t know if it’s a male or a female.” Mom B. seized the surprised kitten, whipped it upside-down, and peered beneath its tail. “That’s a male,” she declared.

What punctuation is this kitten wearing?

Amazed, I asked, “How do you know?” She replied, “If it’s a male, there’s a colon under its tail. If it’s a female, it’s a semicolon.” Picking up the kitten, I took a look, and sure enough, I saw two black dots punctuating the kitten’s backside.

So now you know how to tell the difference between a boy cat and a girl one by their respective rear-end punctuation marks. But do you know the different uses of those two punctuation marks?

To shift, or not to shift? That is the question.

A semicolon is used at the end of one independent clause to introduce another, related, independent clause. Example: (Hey, that’s one way to use a colon, by the way.) “We gave up waiting in the rain to get in to see the new Kauffman Performing Arts Center; it just wasn’t worth it.”

The semicolon acts as an “almost-period,” but it’s not as final. It signals the end of one thought and the beginning of a related thought, or a further comment on the first thought. It often appears where an “and” or “but” might also have been used.

The semicolon can also be used to separate items in a list that might be confusing if you used commas instead. For example, you might write, “Sally had a list of things to do that day that included taking the car to be washed; having her hair re-dyed (the color it was supposed to be in the first place); and driving Nellie, the poodle pup, to the vet, Dr. Neiman, to be spayed.”

Awwww...

If you wanted to introduce a colon into the mix, you could write:

“Sally had a list of things to do that day: take the car…” and then proceed with the rest of the sentence as shown above, changing the verbs from gerunds to regular verbs (“take” instead of “taking”). The colon in this case says, “Here’s the list.”

The colon also can be used after “following,” as in “To create a username and PIN, do the following:” Other words or phrases that precede the colon include “as follows,” “to-wit,” and other words introducing a list of steps or items.

The colon can be used instead of a comma in a sentence like, “Washington Irving said: ‘…..” Or likewise, it can be substituted for a comma in a formal letter salutation, as in “Dear sir:”

For more uses of these kitty-sex-detecting clues, here’s a good source.

So now, each time you see a kitten, you’ll think of the proper way to use colons and semicolons. Right?

“Liz Craig is wicked smart and a wizard with words. Do your brand a favor and hire her.”
— Joleen K David on Jul 28, 2011

When I moved to Omaha in 1985, I worked as an Associate Creative Director for 19 hellish months at Bozell & Jacobs. I won’t go into detail, but let me say I was not the only creative there who was suffering the slings and arrows of an outrageous GM who crumbled and ate writers and art directors for breakfast like Frosted Mini-Wheats. Nearly everyone in the creative department was taking Xanax, seeing shrinks, or nurturing ulcers.

So it was a sweet relief to be let go during a mass layoff. My art director partner and I rolled our stuff out to the parking lot in a mail cart, and we laughed and laughed and laughed at our great good fortune to have been set free from whatever ring of Dante’s Inferno we’d been inhabiting.

I took the next couple of months off enjoying Thanksgiving and Christmas, and glory be! in January, I got hired at a local ad agency called Smith Kaplan Allen & Reynolds, aka SKAR. My colleague and head of the writers was the kind of woman some women might hate because they’re jealous. A delightfully smart, funny, gorgeous woman named Joleen. I respected her in every way—for her brains, for her client savvy, for her superb strategic thinking and writing, and most of all, for her wacky sense of humor.

These days, we keep in touch via email, and I’ve been back a couple of times to see her and the agency. As the daughter of Wayne Smith, the Smith in Smith Kaplan, now she’s heading up the agency. Under her guidance, the place has been transformed from what was a rather dowdy cubicle city to a cool, sleek, inviting haven for some of the best creatives in the Midwest. Joleen is a natural leader/innovator, and she follows the David Ogilvy philosophy of trying to hire people who are smarter than she is. Which is nearly impossible. But she finds good people and draws the very best out of them.

So thanks, Joleen, for the great recommendation, so many years since I ended my 10-year stint at SKAR., Sometimes I wish I’d stayed, but Kansas City lured me back home, and 15 years and three agencies later, here I am, happily freelancing and recalling the good people and good times at SKAR.

Joleen, I hope you continue to have fun, make money, and always remember me. I’ll remember you, I promise.

“The best way to get a good Google ranking is to blog relevantly and frequently,” I always advise my clients. So imagine how sheepish I feel having ignored my own advice for nearly three weeks. But I have an excuse. Moving.

Multiply by 25.

And not just moving, but casting at least half my belongings overboard beforehand. Have you ever tried to fit 20 pounds into a 5-pound sack? That’s roughly what it’s like moving from a 4-bedroom, 2-bathroom house with finished basement to a 2-bedroom apartment. Oy! The stuff I have/had/still have/don’t know what to do with!

Who are these people??

At my garage sale before the move, I netted a few hundred bucks. I admire the gritty determination of the people who dragged themselves out to dicker over my lounge chair, rusty wheelbarrow, notepads, plastic cups, lizard squeeze-toy, and various and sundry knickknacks in searing 100-degree heat. There’s no stopping true bargain-hunters when the scent of “cheap stuff” is drifting in the fetid air.

But I still have a trunk full of glassware that’s too good to simply give away, and two sets of beautiful china from my mother and grandmother. When this Saharan heat subsides, I’ll try to sell them at an antique mall. That’s what I did with my mother’s Royal Ruby glassware and gorgeous milk glass. If I’d had the time to market it online, I might have gotten more, but time was the one thing I didn’t have.

As I was fretting over getting rid of hand-me-down furniture from two generations, my boyfriend remarked, “You’re going to have to decide if you want to live in your house or your mother’s or grandmother’s house.” He stunned me with that statement, and he was absolutely right. I’m still wondering what “my house” is going to look like when their stuff is gone.

So I am moved into smaller quarters more appropriate to a carefree single lifestyle, and though I’m still surrounded by boxes whose contents I know not where to put, I am back at work as a freelance writer in the Kansas City area, approximately two miles from where I used to live. Two miles, hundreds of worries, a thousand tears and ten thousand sweat droplets away from a house that always was too big for little me. And now, I am experiencing the joy of freedom! I am liberated from lawn mowing, mulching, snow shoveling, property taxes, weed killing, tree trimming, pruning, and all the other things required to maintain a homestead in suburbia. I have no more lawn-related equipment, having traded my mower to my lawn mowing fellow for three last mows. Ah, what a relief it is!

YippeeYiYea!

If you’re an independent creative working from home, do you ever feel like a latter-day Jacob Marley, your clanking chains making you the prisoner of your computer? Or like chain-gang member Woody Allen in “Take the Money and Run?” (If you like to laugh, please check it out.) Or have you broken your bonds, like escapee Paul Muni in “I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang?”

I'm free!

The reason I feel compelled to sit at my desk all day is that most jobs come to me via email, and some must be done post-haste. So when I have to go to the grocery store or pharmacy, I feel as if I’m playing hooky, and I high-tail it back home as soon as I can to check my email.

To feel a captive in one’s own office is not good. There’s a whole wide world out there waiting to be explored! So how can I get out there more?

First idea was to get a smartphone, so I could tell when email came in, and whether I needed to tend to it right away. FAIL! Got a paygo plan that offered a free Samsung phone. Now I know why the phone was free! It stinks. Oh, yes, you can check email, but it takes flippin’ (as dear Sarah P. would say) forever. And the batteries hold power like a sieve holds water.

This phone stinks.

Okay, I know some people who have ditched their landlines and gotten iPhones or other smartphones that let them do everything but clip their toenails with them, but am I ready for that? I have both cell phone and landline, the equivalent of wearing suspenders with a belt. But someone pointed out to me that if you only have a cell phone, when the power to the cell tower goes out, you have no phone. HELP! No phone at all?

Right now isn’t the best time to think about going out on the town, or in the town, actually. I’m preparing to move a certain amount of my stuff from my 4-bedroom house to a 2-bedroom apartment nearby. Right-sizing my lifestyle. Problem is, I’ve inherited a lot of stuff (beautiful dishes, linens, etc.) from two generations before me, that I never use. Like my mother before me, I have kept them in storage in the basement because they’re “too nice to use.” Now, there’s a silly idea. As long as I keep them, I’m chained to this stuff, too.

I’ve got some lovely pieces of Royal Ruby glassware on Craigslist, and today I’m listing my mother’s milk glass. All of that stuff is beautiful, but I have to think of the 3′ X 4″ storage cage at my new apartment, and exactly how much will go into it. Not much, that’s how much. And my son in Shanghai doesn’t give a chopstick for any of it. Not to mention, it would cost more than the national debt to send it to him.

All this Royal Ruby glass for sale!

In an attempt to downsize, I took five U-matic cassettes containing all of the TV commercials I’ve ever written and produced to a fellow nearby who is transferring them to DVD, so I won’t have to lug these obsolete plastic boxes of tape around forever. I also gave a 16mm film my dad had made back in the 50s for Purina to a friend in communication studies, and someday, he says he’ll transfer that to DVD. So I’m at least shrinking my media load.

Remember George Carlin’s terrific riff on “stuff?” It’s all true. And moving stuff is very trying. Moving while trying to get some work done is doubly trying. Oh, AND trying to organize a big garage sale (though you get more for your stuff at an “estate sale,” I’ve heard). Never have I done a garage sale, and this will be a pretty big one. Anybody have folding tables I could borrow?

Anyhow, when I am finally ensconced in the new apartment, I dearly hope I will not feel chained to my desk and stuff. As I recall from living in an apartment before, I tended to go out more. Say, tree leaves are still green, aren’t they?

Today, I outlined and wrote a sales presentation for a company I’d never heard of until a few days ago. A PR friend of mine had called and asked for my help on the writing end of a big branding/positioning project with a number of closely-spaced deadlines for items progressing to a complete revamp.

Hey, doing anything is easier when you don’t have time to do it. You doubt it?

Without thinking time, you don’t have ruminating time. You go with your first instinct and make it work. It’s kind of exhilarating. Kind of devil-may-care, even!Of course, background info helps. And on this project, it was coming through in small drips as the writing progressed. It’s still coming in, even as I’ve just finished the presentation script. Do I go back now and change things? Heck, there isn’t time! My PR friend has to present the danged thing in about an hour!

Thank goodness for tight deadlines, I say. Now for a little nap.

For the past 10 years, I’ve been calling myself a freelance writer. But recently, a friend who is cognizant of the kind of counseling I give my clients, suggested that “writer” is a bit limiting.

There's the whole thinking part, which "Writer" doesn't address.

By way of explaining this to a foreign client who was unfamiliar with the process and wondered what I had been billing him for, since he hadn’t seen his campaign yet, I drew a picture of an iceberg (I do have some artistic skills, but anyone can draw a triangle.). I drew the waterline close to the tip.

What you see is not all you get.

Then I explained that all the background info gathering, analyzing, thinking, strategizing, getting bids, estimating, budgeting and planning were in the part below the waterline. You can’t see them. The part you finally see, the finished project, is the very tip of the iceberg. You have to pay for all of that, just as you have to pay for an architect’s plans before you build your house.

My client’s question brought to mind the image of a dad-to-be looking at his third-trimester-pregnant wife and saying, “You’ve been saying for months that you’re going to have a baby. I don’t see any baby. So what gives?”

But getting back to services I offer clients: beyond simply writing, I do project management.

Business owners are busy. Really busy.

Managing a project in print or Web or video for a client is child’s play, compared with my duties as an ad agency writer/producer. In that capacity, I was in charge of every aspect of a production, from keeping the client happy (Number One, always) to producing estimates to riding herd on the production company, casting talent, directing same, selecting wardrobe set designs, keeping costs in line, and overseeing anything else that would affect the final product.

Would he have been as famous?

Popcorn Girl
Short Story – 860 words
©2011 Liz Craig

My name is Dorthy Parrott. I live in Mexico, Missouri, population 13,000. It’s the kind of place you get born in, get brain-dead from boredom in, and forget to leave.

Excitement is pretty scarce around here. Driving around the courthouse square with its miniature Statue of Liberty is about it. Oh, one time Roy Clark came to town to appear at the Audrain County Fair. I saw him at the Acapulco Lanes after his show drinking beer out of a plastic cup, but I didn’t want to bother him.

As a native Mexicoan, my expectations have never been high. Until recently, I spent most of my waking hours sweeping up popcorn off the floor of the Liberty Theater, which keeps you looking down in general. The best thing about the job was getting to see all the movies for free. Watching the beautiful stars up there, I could forget Mexico, being fat, wishing for a boyfriend, and Mama bugging me to do something with myself.

It was pretty much the same routine every night. Watch a movie, sweep up the popcorn and Milk Duds afterward. Tie up trash bags and lug to dumpster. Repeat.

But then one day, something different happened. Larry Bright gave me a Powerball ticket to repay me for letting him in for free whenever Mr. Doumanian, the owner, wasn’t around. I had a crush on Larry, but I knew he’d always see me as the lump I was in high school, even if I slimmed down to my ideal weight according to Cosmo. I thanked him for the ticket and stuck it in my uniform pants pocket, then forgot about it.

A couple of days later, though, I found the ticket when I was about to wash my uniform. I thought, “No way will I win more than a couple of bucks.” But when I compared my numbers with the winning numbers in the paper, I nearly passed out on the kitchen linoleum. Then I started screaming, and I couldn’t stop. Mama ran in from the yard to see what was wrong. When I told her I had won $110 million with Larry’s Powerball ticket, she started screaming, too, and when we were all out of screams, we entwined our arms the way they do on TV at New Year’s and toasted my luck with a 10 a.m. beer.

Mama wanted me to build us a house in Branson, so she could go see that Japanese fiddle-player any time she wanted. I said nobody actually lives in Branson. Besides, the sight of all those seniors from Arkansas in plaid polyester outfits would depress a person after awhile.

The question was, what did I want to do with the money? What did I want in life, anyway?

First, I decided to give a million to Larry. Mama started yelling, but I stood firm because I thought it was the right thing to do. After all, he had been nice enough to give me the ticket. A million would ease his suffering over having blown it.

Then I quit my job and let the money (still about 6 mil after they took out the taxes) sit in the bank while I figured out what to do next.

A few days later, I had a dream. I was thin and gorgeous, and I was dressed in a long white satin gown. I swiveled my hips sinuously as I glided down a long white marble staircase to meet a crowd of screaming fans waving autograph books. I smiled graciously and signed my name in their books, making each fan feel they were the most important person in the world for just a moment. They all loved me. Then I sashayed out to my sleek silver limousine and waved like the Queen, turning my hand in little circles, as it pulled away from the curb. I woke up with a warm feeling in my heart and a clear idea of what I wanted to do.

So this is it: I’m going to hire a personal trainer and a nutritionist and get down to my ideal weight, and then I’m going to have my face re-sculpted and my teeth capped, and I’m going to get into the movies. I know you can buy your way into Hollywood. Look at Pia Zadora. Well, maybe she’s not such a good example. But anyway, Mama just wants to take one of those “See the Stars’ Homes” tours, but I told her nobody who lives in Hollywood takes those tours. Because you know all the people who live there, and they invite you over.

United Van Lines just pulled up. We’re only taking a few things to get us started; I’ll buy good stuff when we get to Beverly Hills. The real estate agent found us a house there that once belonged to Jean Harlow. We saw the pictures of it, and it’s fabulous. The best thing about the house is that it has a movie theater and a popcorn machine. You know, I might even sweep it out now and then, just for old times’ sake. Come and see me sometime–in the movies.

- 30 -

This is my first attempt with xtreme media. I was inspired a couple of years ago by a video of a graphic designer and totally clueless client. It was obscene and funny, and completely true, if you know the biz.

Give me a break on the quality. The motions don’t match what I wanted, but I have a request for help in to the company. Maybe more better videos later.