Kansas City Freelance Writer Liz Craig

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.

“Please stop! Don’t do any more!”

My client’s voice on the phone sounded frightened and panicked. But that was not unusual. What was, though, was that she was stopping me from working on part of a larger project. I had ambivalent feelings about halting mid-project.

On the one hand, I like big, multi-faceted projects like this one, involving both print and Web writing. (And, of course, the ability to bill hours for research, communications, writing, revising, etc.) But on the other hand, I had a major problem with the project. Namely, that try as I might, I could not understand what the client wanted. This kind of client (of whom I have had few) might be called the “Oracle at Delphi” type.

As you will recall from your studies of ancient Greek culture, the Delphic Oracle (a.k.a. the Pythia) was a priestess of Apollo with the gift of prophecy. She sat by a rock out of which certain vapors emanated, which may have been like ancient LSD. She would give you an answer, all right. Several, even, if you had more gold. The only problem was that her pronouncements were subject to many different interpretations.

The Delphic Oracle type of client can be frustrating—and kind of cute; they do try so hard to communicate their needs—but not nearly so crazy-making as the “Black Box” type. This client won’t tell you at all what s/he wants. You have to guess what’s inside the Black Box (the client’s head). Don’t worry, s/he will let you know if you guess wrong. Which, of course, you will.

I am a Gemini, which means Mercury, the astral body named after the messenger to the gods, is my ruling planet. So communication is my happy, happy place. I enjoy it. And I’m pretty good at getting the point and making a point, most of the time, anyway. So I feel terrible when, whether because of the client’s or my own failure to communicate (Did you see an image of Strother Martin wearing mirrored aviators just now? I did.) produces less-than-peachy results.

The most important thing (actually, two things) about which I’m unclear: One, am I off my client’s project, or just on this part of it? And two, is the client panicking because of my bill, which I e-mailed on January 1? Oh, there’s a third thing, the most vital of all: Will I get paid?

I imagine I’ll find out soon. Say, can you direct me to the nearest Delphic Oracle? Umm. Maybe I’d better just consult my Magic 8 Ball.

Virginia Barebo Schumacher, 95, of Jefferson City, MO, passed away Thursday, September 29, 2011, at Jefferson City Manor Care Center. She was born February 19, 1916 in O’Fallon, MO, the daughter of the late Millard Andrew and Viola Mary (Kessler) Barebo. Virginia, known to friends as “Dink” for her petite stature, was Charlemo Queen at St. Charles High School in 1933, the year she graduated. On November 23, 1938, in St. Charles, Missouri, she married Roy Edward Schumacher, who preceded her in death in 1986.

A natural singer with a beautiful soprano voice, Virginia at one time sang popular and semi-classical music each week on her own half-hour radio program at St. Louis University. In 1949, she gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth Virginia.

Virginia was a dedicated Christian Scientist who volunteered her time to the church as Music Chairman, Sunday School teacher, and Assistant Clerk. She smiled always, laughed often, and was unfailingly gentle and kind.

She is survived by her daughter, Elizabeth Craig, of Mission, Kansas; one grandson, Jonathan W. Fields, of Shanghai, China; one niece, four grand-nephews and one grand-niece. She was preceded in death by one sister, Mildred Barebo Sebacher, and one brother, Hally Lee Barebo.

I proofread documents for several departments of a national financial services company. When they’re pleased, I’m pleased. Here’s a note I received yesterday:

Thank you, Liz, for the quick turnaround and for the edits you made. Excellent changes!

“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.

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!

Being an only child whose grandparents and one parent have gone to the Great Beyond, I have inherited glassware, tableware, furniture, and—most emotionally charged of all— photographs. My Gawd, my people must have documented every second of their lives on film! A friend of mine has taken four or five moving boxes full of loose photos of my family and lots of people I don’t even know and is keeping them in his dining room for now, because they wouldn’t fit into my new digs. My mission impossible is to winnow down the photos so they’ll fit in a couple of shoe boxes. Or scan and save some on CDs. I’d send some to my son in China, but (a) he doesn’t care about them; and (b) to mail them to him would cost me as much as a week in the Shanghai Hilton.

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!

If I might quote the Rev. Martin Luther King, I’m free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last—from home ownership! And ready to get back to being a happy freelance copywriter, instead of a hot, exhausted suburban refugee. How sweet it is to be back in the saddle again!

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.

It’s true that I can write, and am, in fact, “a writer.” “Senior Writer” is the title by which I’ve been known in the ad agency world. But, as anyone who has worked at an agency, or as a freelancer, can tell you, there’s more to the job of writing than pulling out a computer and banging out some random letters. There’s the whole “thinking” part, for instance, which the title, “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.

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.

Harried business owners don’t have the time, energy or knowledge to manage graphic designers, webmasters, HTML experts, and others involved in a Web or other project. So if they turn the project over to me, let me communicate and negotiate with the other suppliers, then report to them, they save a lot of time, which equates to money. Not to mention that they avoid the anguish of trying to get business, do business, AND manage a marketing or advertising project.

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.

So, since I help clients as a consultant, thinker, planner, strategist and project manager, what do I call myself? Would a rose by any other name really smell as sweet? Or would another name make me smell sweeter? If I give up “writer” and go for the more accurate “independent marketing and advertising consultant,” will people actually know what I can do? Hmm. I changed it on LinkedIn. Let’s see what happens.

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.

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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.

No offense. I really respect the British royals, but I just had to show you this photo from their visit with the Obamas. Which person in this group looks as if they have just soaked their Depends?