Writing Boots

Friday Happy Hour Video: If all commercials were like this we'd pee during the shows

Ode to the SPARTUS

The alarm clock on the night table beside our bed,

Cristie had before she met me in college in the late 1980s.

It's called "SPARTUS" and it has wood paneling on the sides and the top.

(A nod to a bygone age when alarm clocks were carved out of wood?)

The SPARTUS appears to have been designed by the same stylist who built the AMC Gremlin.

It boasts a "Battery Reserve" (which we've never had to use, Thank God),

And there's a button that says, "Snoozer/Battery Tester";

The button is loose, from all the pounding; and the "Batt Low" light has been on since the first Bush presidency.

The SPARTUS is dirty, as if some of the years of dust has soaked into the plastic.

Its tone is at once tired and harsh, wheezy and sharp, old and unsentimental.

I hate it some mornings and think, "Maybe in the last quarter century,

alarm-clock engineers have found a pleasanter sound."

("You probably wouldn't like any alarm sound," Cristie says.)

But the SPARTUS has sounded the keynote to many happy early-morning golf days and some butterfly-stomached pre-dawn departures and a number of family vacations.

Some mornings I roll over look at the SPARTUS and casually muse, and I imagine Cristie does too,

"How long are we going to have this old thing?"

Until it stops waking us up, I figure.

Where they actually do write it like they used to

I like to read boxing writing, because when it's good it's great and when it's bad its like this phrase, from Johnny Bellino's quarterly Chicago boxing mag, Boxing Shorts:

"The superbly conditioned [Tony] Zale, after being punished by Billy Boy Patterson for 12 rounds, knocked Patterson out so hard in the 13th, that the sweat flew off the loser's head and made a rainbow in the ring lights!"

Do you follow "Fake AP Stylebook" on Twitter?

You should, it's good for mental health. Writing Bootista Eileen Burmeister shares one of her favorite "Fake AP" rules:

Avoid using masculine pronouns in sentences where the subject's gender is not specified. Broads find it offensive.

Let's make conferences just like the Internet!

Denise Graveline is one eloquent woman. In fact, she is The Eloquent Woman, bringing her good brain and her vast experience as a writer and as a communicator to her blog posts "on women and public speaking." I'm such a fan of Graveline that I've made her posts a regular part of Vital Speeches' website.

But recently Graveline advanced a gravely misguided but currently conventional idea about the future of business conferences.

She wants to transform conferences into the very flickering, helterskelter social-media shitstorm from which they are now our only port.

Et tu, E.W?

In a post titled "Remixing the conference: 5 cues for organizers," Graveline acknowledges that traditional conferences, allow attendees to "connect with lots of others with shared interests, interact with experts, get recognition from their peers, and find lots of high-quality content and plain old schmoozing opportunities."

That's a lot to do in two or three days! Alas, say Graveline and her cohorts in confab complication, it's just not enough anymore. That's because attendees are so used to social media, Graveline says, that "they are way ahead of [conference] organizers ... demanding more and better content, audio-visual support for audience-members on the backchannel, and options for watching the conference from afar and for free."

Specifically, Graveline recommends that conference organizers:

• encourage and actually help facilitate audience live-tweeting of the conference

• indulge audiences' ADD: "audiences are looking for shorter speaking times, varied session length and even more content," Graveline claims without a durned bit of evidence

• elicit and pump in the reaction of far-flung audiences who are absentmindedly gazing at the sessions on video conference or glancing at handouts online.

Though there are some good ideas on Graveline's list (for instance, she points out that conference organizers can use social media to solicit and vet potential speakers) ... mostly, the post makes me wonder when the last time Graveline and has really been to a conference.

Mentally, I mean.

Because in my conference-going experience both recent and past, a traditional conference is itself a tsunami of stimuli. Surrounded by one's peers in the flesh for the first and last time in a while, one is simultaneously struggling to absorb new ideas from speakers, and to imagine how those ideas might be modified and applied back at the office.

Hour upon hour, session after session, more ideas, more reactions, both intellectual and emotional. Notes scribbled, business-cards collected, hands shaken, social fuck-ups made and self-forgiven, bad sessions walked out on, good sessions walked in on, the exhibit hall slinked through, dinearounds signed up for, at the bar for one more, blinky breakfast roundtables barely made.

There are new people to meet, old colleagues to catch up with and random encounters to contend with and to integrate into the experience. All the while checking voice mail and e-mail to make sure a hundred crises haven't erupted back at the office. Oh, and speaking of the office ...

... toward the end of the event, the pressure builds to sum up the conference for your boss who fought for the budget money to send you, and for your colleagues, who have been covering for you all week.

What did you get out of it? What did you come away with? Any ideas we can use?

By the time you get on the plane, your head is overstuffed with techniques, case studies, the odd-but-nagging opinions of others, half-developed theses of your own—and if it was a truly productive event, it's a little achy from booze, too.

And to this Denise Graveline wants to add constant tweeting and live-blogging, more and shorter sessions, a sense that Unseen Others Are Watching and Listening on the "backchannel," and erratic input from a global peanut gallery?

I read Graveline's list from the point of view of a conference organizer, too. I are one.

And as a conference organizer, I realize that one of the most important gifts I can give my attendees is a respite from the random. A conference, however overwhelming for those who are really interested in acquainting themselves with new people and ideas, is a comfort, because it's here and now and us and nobody else.

To make conferences better, we ought to make them not more like a schizophrenic Twitter feed, but less.

And not less of an intimate, shared experience, but more of one.

Yes, one.

For writers to whom it doesn't come easy

The ultra-classy Vancouver writing coach Daphne Gray-Grant has made "It's The Thinking That's Hard," a video to evangelize the writing technique that transformed Gray-Grant from an editor who hated to write ... to a writer. The theme song here is composed and performed by her 15-year-old son.

Signs you might be losing your perspective ...

You edit a publication for a medical institution, and you herald the pending publication of the latest issue thusly:

This issue is devoted to all aspects of colorectal cancer. If you'd like to receive a free subscription and be placed on our mailing list, send me a message with your name and address.

Whee!

Your conscience: It is yours after all—so treat it accordingly

I ran across an interview of Mark Twain by Rudyard Kipling, that contains this solid advice from Twain, on conscience:

Your conscience is a nuisance. A conscience is like a child. If you pet it and play with it and let it have everything that it wants, it becomes spoiled and intrudes on all your amusements and most of your griefs. Treat your conscience as you would treat anything else. When it is rebellious, spank it—be severe with it, argue with it, prevent it from coming to play with you at all hours, and you will secure a good conscience; that is to say, a properly trained one. A spoiled one simply destroys all the pleasure in life. I think I have reduced mine to order. At least, I haven't heard from it for some time.

Girls of the Gridiron, Part Two

They came for the contact, they stayed for the relationships: Here's the second in my Chicago Tribune series on the (so-far undefeated) Chicago Force professional women's football team. The story, and the video below, focus on the veterans on the team, as they struggle through an unexpectedly difficult game against the Wisconsin Warriors.

Friday Happy Hour Video: a "modern spiritual"

It's not another drug video this Friday, it's "a modern spiritual," okay? This week, thanks to music-hipster Curtiss Peterson, we put our hands together for Gail and Dale, performing "One Toke Over the Line."

On The Lawrence Welk Show.

Yep.