Sleeping in the Desert

The usual picture we have of any desert is the cartoon image of the big cactus with “arms” and people crawling across the sand, leaving a trail by the skull of a long-dead animal. But many deserts are teeming with life. The Sonoran desert in Arizona is no exception.

The saguaro cactus is the one with “arms” and a full-grown one will hold about 600 gallons of water inside. Birds drink by  poking small holes in the cactus, and owls build nests in them. The cactus itself is held up by a skeleton of tubes. When a saguaro dies, it leaves a skeleton of these tubes, and even they are useful. They keep smaller animals off the ground so they can rest from their prey. The large lizard here is an example.

The mountain lion is another animal that lives in the desert. This one has had a nice meal and is napping in a crevice of rock. They are dangerous animals, despite his peaceful look. There was also a foot of glass between us, and I was grateful.

Lizards, snakes, tarantulas, desert squirrels, mice, shrews and a host of insects and birds thrive in the desert. They have adapted to the heat and scarce water. Now it’s our turn.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and naturalist recently transplanted from Washington, D.C. See her work at QuinnCreative.com Images and text, (c) 2007, Quinn McDonald. All rights reserved.

Desert Rain

It’s been about a week, and my life has changed enormously. Yesterday, I was driving down the street, sipping from a can of coconut water. It’s a wonderful drink, made from green coconut slivers and the water a green coconut holds. It’s not the caloric coconut milk, it’s the stuff you hear sloshing inside a coconut when you shake it. When the coconut is still in a husk. I’ve never drunk it before, and it’s wonderful. Slightly sweet and very mild.

Then the sky turned dark, there was thunder, lightning and. . .rain. Like a shower, but for a very short time. The air smelled wonderful, of wet sand and ozone. Another few drizzles, and it was over. Enough for desert plants to store up some water. Enough for desert rats to drink up.

A mile later, my car was covered with dust puddles. Before the rain evaporated completely, dust had settled in the water, and the water evaporated. Leaving a speckled car. Couldn’t resist taking a picture, which reminded me strongly of East Coast water in the first hard freeze. What looks like chunks of ice to the East Coast transplant looks like dust to the West Coast native.

Life is good here. I’m starting to breathe more and worry less. Life is a bit slower here, and when you turn on your turn signal, people let you move over in the lane. Yes, life is good here.

—Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach, who will shortly start up her art again. (c) 2007. All rights reserved.

Marketing When You Don’t Have Time

Whether you are an artist, freelance writer, or any small business owner, you know you have to market yourself and your work.  And as soon as this crush slows down a bit, you plan on doing just that.

Now it’s too late. The time to do marketing is when you don’t need to because you are busy, when you don’t have free time. Once you have free time, it takes weeks for the marketing to work and money isn’t coming in. I hate hearing it; I hate saying it, and it’s true. So I devised a way to get around the roadblocks and market.

One of the ways I market my work is to publish articles in magazines and ezines. Published work not only displays your talent and expertise, but the clips also help you market your work to others. There is a certain amount of drudgery involved in pitching your work,  getting rejections, finding another magazine, re-writing and then re-pitching your work.

I write an article–just getting down the ideas. What Ann Lamott calls a “zero draft”–not even a first draft. If the article is longer than a page, I staple it together and stick it in the yellow folder in my bag. When I’m in line at the post office, the grocery store, or waiting at the dentist, I pull out the folder and read through the articles. Sometimes I circle a paragraph and mark it for deletion, other times I’ll write notes in the margin. I don’t line edit it. I’m not ready for that, I’m still working on the idea stage.

When I’m waiting for a client to call back, when I can’t read another email, when I have a few minutes of time, but no more, I pull out the zero draft and review the notes. Sometimes the zero draft is really two different articles. Sometimes the zero draft is not worth keeping. If the article has promise, I’ll write the first draft, and toss it back into the folder. Over time, creativity wins out. The articles get written, re-written, edited and polished.

When I send them out, I am no longer attached to them. Rejections don’t crush my spirit. And because there are more of them in the folder, if one is rejected, another one can go out. Or the rejected one can be rewritten.

The marketing benefit comes from producing publishable articles without setting aside weeks of time to do it. The emotional benefit is that staying objective about the articles helps you pitch and rewrite more efficiently. There is the added benefit of not buying candy while you are in the supermarket line and not being as anxious when the dentist calls your name.

It’s a slow process that makes the most of how creativity works. Your brain keeps working on the writing, even if you are not focusing on it directly, and the process moves forward in small, but definite steps. When you get an article accepted, it seems like a bonus. Over time, I’ve noticed that I get more and more accepted, and the checks are an incentive to keep working.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

Change is inevitable. . .

. . .growth is optional. And nothing brings on change more than a move. I’ve given some thought to change in the last week that I’ve arrived on what might as well be another planet.

We spend our lives understanding that change is part of each day, and struggling to keep things exactly the same. We fall into a routine, we focus on the future, when things will be just as we arrange them. And we wander through our lives, ignoring the very thing that will help us become different: change.

I fell into the trap, too. I did not look forward to buying a car. A tight budget and no knowledge of cars made me feel inadequate. But a ticking clock on the rental gave me an incentive to learn about cars and choose one. It turns out that I made several big decisions that I absolutely would have refused to accept a week ago. What brought on the change? I forced myself (and it was hard)  to take a different perspective on my old views. To see how the different perspective allowed a larger shift in ideas and values. And then I stepped into the unknown with what I had learned.

I came out the other side with a new (to me) car, and a lot of respect for the process of change. For the idea that growth and exploration can be stopped dead in its tracks by perfectionism, and that a little lightening up trumps dead serious every time.

The new car made me feel real gratitude, forced me to depend on strangers (something I’m not good at) and moving through a problem with resolve. I’m a good decision maker, but I kept remembering I know nothing about cars. OK, once I admitted that, I could move ahead.

Perhaps a good way to tackle change is to admit you won’t know how it will turn out and can’t control most of the outcome anyway. Then plunge ahead, doing your best in the time available.

In Letters To A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke has a wonderful insight,

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

–Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) Quinn McDonald, 2007, All rights reserved.

Surprises in the Desert

You can tell I’ve been hiking in the Sonoran desert with a camera. But my camera failed me two weeks before I left; so I’m armed only with the iPhone camera. We drove South to Tucson from Phoenix. Passed some surprises–a large orchard. In the desert? Yes. I’m guessing they are almond trees, but I’m not positive.

And then a real surprise. On the desert floor, maybe 25 miles out of Phoenix, a number of descansos, grouped together. Descansos are roadside grave markers. These were about 100 feet off the road, but there were at least a dozen, followed shortly by others. Who were these people who died in the desert, and whose graves are marked and tended? Someone remembers and loves them, someone paints the crosses on their graves and paints them white.

At the Sonoran Desert Museum there were specimens of plant and animal life–all in their natural habitat. Snakes and spiders, millipedes and lizards were in viewable habitats, but much of the desert is outside, in the desert, in a wild habitat.

The views alone were breath-taking, but I was surprised to see animals, including white-tailed deer.

There are hummingbirds in the desert, too. (See him in the center of the picture, below,sitting on a white cup feeder.) Like monarch butterflies, they migrate. Monarchs don’t migrate through Arizona, but they do wander in occasionally, to the higher and damper areas.

–All images and text copyright by Quinn McDonald, 2007 All rights reserved. Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

Global Warming: Desert’s Ready

Having spent most of my adult life on the East Coast, the lush green scenery seems normal. Since Wednesday, the green has been very different—tiny, thick leaves on Palo Verde trees with green trunks; cacti in every shape and size, with beards and without; towering palms in a bright blue sky.

I love the vegetation; it seems to be already designed for global warming that came to the Sonoran desert ages ago. When I saw an ad for the desert botanical garden in Phoenix, I had to see it. It was worth the search. It’s not hard to fine, but I had to pay attention to the road and was distracted by one of the mountains that grow in the middle of the city of Phoenix. So I missed the turnoff. Still worth it.

There are cactuses that look like snakes, winding flat on the ground.

Others send up spikes to make sure their seeds scatter far, to give them a better chance at reproduction.

Still others have long, blond spikes that give them an otherworldly look when backlit.

It’s a remarkable place, handily adapted to the worst conditions. We might want to take a closer look to see how we can adapt.

–Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach now living in Tempe. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) All rights reserved. 2007.

The Move: Time and Frustration

Who could not love waking up to blue skies and mild temperatures in mid-November? Who wouldn’t love finding great little eateries, coffee places, convenient stores tucked into tidy stucco buildings that don’t look like strip malls?

I was hating it all. Not because I didn’t appreciate it, but because I couldn’t find what I needed, whatever I was looking for wasn’t where it was supposed to be, everything took longer and I was tired.

When you move, even if you move into a city you’ve visited, leave yourself more time to run errands and to get settled. You simply won’t be able to do it all in the time you needed at home. At home, you knew the best way to get to the office supply store, the grocery store, even the DMV. In the new place, you will remember you saw the grocery store, but you will have no idea exactly where it was.  You will use at least half a tank of gas circling the area, lost as an ant on a tennis ball, wracking your brain and thinking you are losing your grip on reality.

It does not help that back home, the Home Depot was next to the Dairy Queen and here the Home Depot is next to Starbucks. Your mind will try to establish the old links because the stores and signs look alike. But the relationship is different.  I might be 2,500 miles from my former home, but the Home Depot, CVS, Starbucks, and Border’s Books inside the Beltway look just like they do on the Sonoran desert floor.

And while you are driving in circles, give yourself a break–I didn’t leave enough time to buy a car, because a week seemed like plenty of time. But if you don’t know where the car dealers are, don’t know what to look for, and don’t know how to find or buy a good used car, you are going to spend a lot more time getting it done. Here’s something I didn’t do, but will wish for anyone moving to a new city: take a morning or afternoon off. Don’t plan anything. Don’t have a checklist. Just look around this new place and be glad you made it.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and communication trainer. She is moving from Washington, D.C. to Phoenix and is trying to keep her head on her shoulders. See her work at QuinnCreative.com 

Dodging Marketing Scams

When the phone call came from the credit card company, I listened. My business takes credit cards, so it’s good to pay attention when the credit card company calls. The man was obviously reading from a script, asking me to review my address. As I’d recently moved, it seemed logical. He had a few things wrong, and we fixed those easily enough.

English wasn’t his first language, and I was standing in the bank, and having trouble understanding him. Suddenly I heard the word “upgrade” and it became too clear.

It’s a common way to get you to pay for services that were free. The company calls, reviews your address and then says they are offering you an upgrade. Unless you listen carefully, and even if you are, it sounds free. You don’t have to sign anything, you don’t give our your credit card number, and it sounds like a good offer. It almost never is.

The package comes in the mail, followed, inevitably, by an invoice. When you try to call the number on the invoice, you go through endless menus, dropped calls, and misconnections. If you give up, you receive a second and third invoice and a threat of collection service.

This isn’t limited to credit card upsells. I received a call from a well known magazine for cooks, which my husband subscribes to. It offered a bound copy of the most recent year of the magazine. No charge. My husband had subscribed to the magazine for a long time and it was a “reward.” What they didn’t add was the string–another book purchase. And if you canceled, the bound magazines came with a hefty charge. It took my husband months to straighten it out, and the company sold my name and address to other companies, and presto, I’m getting junk mail, catalogs and telemarketer calls, because accepting a phone offer somehow makes you ripe for calls.

After several such mistakes, I came up with a three part plan to avoid telephone tricks:
–I refuse everything unless I make the call. For companies I do business with, I get the details if I am interested, then tell them I’ll call back if I want to sign up. Even though they tell me I won’t get the same great deal, if I do call back, they are always eager to help me.

–I got a mail box number at a local place that offers a physical address. It’s the address I give to anyone who checks in with me about upgrading my address. I pick up the material once a week and throw most of it out.

–I created an email address that I use to register on internet sites that I will use once or twice, give to catalog and internet purchases, and other places I don’t want to correspond with. Once a week, I glance through the list and dump it. One night, I received over 110 spam emails in the account in 10 hours. Those aren’t coming into my business email anymore.

Annoying as it is to have companies you do regular business with try to upgrade you, it’s not going to stop anytime soon. But stopping them early can save you a lot of time (that you can use to run your own business), money (that you can save) or effort (that you can spend running your business) and not fixing things you didn’t want originally.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2007. All rights reserved.

The Move: Doing Without

Once your house goes on the market, it has to look like perfect people live there.

When I work on my art, I have to see all the paints and papers that may go into it. These two things don’t work at the same time. So, right before the first open house, I packed up all my paints, pencils, papers, stamps, and all the things that lay scattered around the studio and packed them up. Since then, I can’t make art. I feel adrift and lonely, kind of antsy and empty.

There are other things I miss–leaving books and magazines around, not emptying the trash every day. But I really miss my art work. What to do without my materials? I find that I’m watching details of other artwork more carefully. Looking more closely at the changing seasons, the designs on buildings, ads, magazine design.

I’m ripping out images I like from magazines, creating impromptu collages –just playing with the ideas, then throwing them out. I really didn’t leave a thing out to play with and I feel I should have left out some sort of emergency kit.

I did leave out a fountain pen and I’m using it a lot in doodling and playing. But I still feel empty handed. The other day I found myself doodling a design that I could use, but had no place to work it out.

It’s an odd, but not unpleasant feeling. I really didn’t know that art was such a big part of my life. I didn’t know that I liked to do art in odd minutes and how much I got done that way. So now, as I make my way across the country, missing art is showing up in other ways. I’ll be teaching 21 courses at the Mesa Art Center between January and May. It seemed good to book all that time to dedicate to art. I’m reading art books and planning. It’s almost as good as finding a seed catalog in February. Can’t wait to see what blooms.

–Images: paint-liquitex.com; seed catalog–www.lib.ucdavis.edu

–Quinn McDonald is an artist and writer. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2007 All rights reserved.

Tips: Run a Successful Webinar (2)

Yesterday, we discussed writing a Webinar. Today, let’s see what it takes to set up a Webinar with a provider.

Setting Up a Webinar
In many situations, the writer, rather than the Webinar leader, is in charge for setting up the Webinar.
Here are some tips on Webinar presentations.

Preparing for a Webinar
Webinars are virtual seminars. They are a good way to reach those who need orientation or specific-topic training. It’s easy to think that a webinar is run just like a meeting, but there are some specifics that need to be planned ahead of time.

Find the Webinar Provider That’s Right for Your Needs
There are many webinar providers, offering different services, features, prices, and extras. Start at least eight weeks before you plan on running the orientation. You’ll need some lead time.

Before you call providers, develop a list of questions and items you already know about your needs. For example, time zones involved, computer platforms (PC and Macs), ISPs (Firefox, Ubuntu, Safari, Internet Explorer get different results), number of participants in total, highest number of participants in a single location, and approximate length of program.

Almost all support PowerPoint, but if you plan on developing material you will share through Adobe Acrobat or web development programs, ask the provider if they support that software program. Webinar providers don’t know what you are planning, and may not mention other choices, so ask. You’ll get a provider better suited to your needs if you can compare products, services, not just price.

Run a Practice Webinar
Webinars aren’t difficult, but they are different from running a meeting or a conference call. Ask for a practice session if you’ve never run one before. To make the practice work well, you’ll have to prepare all your materials first. Then ask two people from sites that will be participating to help you by signing on and asking questions. Some providers have a practice session built into the price or have a practice run rate.

Create, Send and Stick to a Schedule
Most people are busy, so send a “save the date and time” email about a month ahead of time. Include instructions for downloading software and installing it correctly. Ask the provider what ISP or platform is best. Don’t assume everyone uses a PC and Internet Explorer. Provide a telephone number if participants need help. Keep the number handy yourself in case something goes wrong.

In the ‘save the date’ email, send a link to a page on your website that shows the entire schedule for the webinar. If you run one Webinar a month, at the same date (15th of the month or the closest workday in the week prior) or day of the week (third Thursdays at 10 a.m.) it will help attendees plan their time.

Send a reminder of the contents and time of the webinar one week ahead of time. Send a “see you there” reminder the day before.

If you are the moderator, be ready to go 15 minutes ahead of time. Start on time, and respect your participant’s schedules by ending on time as well.

The moderator’s job is to present fresh material that is easily understood and to answer questions. PowerPoint was not made to be a report, or to be a read-only document. PowerPoint presentations filled with lists of bullet-point that are topic headings won’t work.

You won’t be able to cover as much material in a one-hour webinar as you can in a one-hour classroom session. You will need to repeat important points more than once. You will need to give examples and show diagrams, photographs, and charts that make your material easily understood.

After the Presentation
If your service provider offers a way to record and store the presentation, the moderator will find it useful to listen to it after the presentation. You’ll get a feeling for how you sound and present, and how you used PowerPoint.

Ask for feedback from the participants. You may be surprised at the good suggestions you get from hearing from the other side of the computer and phone.

Quinn McDonald is a writer who creates and runs business communication training programs. (c) Quinn McDonald. 2007, All rights reserved.