Living Without Chaos

 In a recent conversation with a writer she mentioned that writing helped her find focus in an otherwise chaotic world. My life for the past two and a half years has been extremely chaotic because as well as trying to make a living writing, I’ve been busy being mayor of a small Canadian town. My initial idea was that there would be meetings and speeches and applications for projects to make this a better place to live.

I was partially right.

What I didn’t figure in was a lot of resistance to change and various interpersonal issues and challenges to bylaws and phone calls on my home phone at midnight and five a.m. Nor did I figure in the sudden occurrences that would interfere with meeting deadlines.

The upside is that I had to really work at taking on only those projects that allowed for deadlines to be met in plenty of time. The biggest change in the work I do because of having to ensure deadlines got met was not taking on any more last minutes jobs. I write fast and research even faster. So I had to remove my 24-hour turn-around service.

Like everything in life, there was a domino effect. Change one thing, change them all. I morphed into a writer who handles a whole different type of writing. Rather than being a person who could pull together 10 marketing articles on any topic under the sun on 24 hour’s notice, I am now writing bigger and longer projects, creating order out of your box of notes, streamlining your research and rough draft into a scholarly dissertation, and finding the right words to translate geek-talk into user friendly manuals.

I’m happier as a writer with this new way of writing and these new projects.  I’m quite skilled at thinking long thoughts and understanding philosophical and idealistic concepts. I am also clever with technology and understanding its logic.  These two apparently conflicting abilities come from my background. I have a master’s degree in history which really translates into being a topnotch researcher. However, when I graduated with my MA 21 years ago, I immediately got into the computer/database/software world and since then have been a computer expert.

History or computers, it’s all about organization. It’s all about experience. It’s all about understanding how systems work.

As I wind down my term as mayor, I am ramping up a new tightly focused business model. And the focus in on finding clarity for even the most chaotic writing job you have. Much of the writing I have done over the past decade has been on an ad hoc basis. For instance, article marketing was huge for a while and I wrote hundreds of articles for marketing websites.  Most of the time, I sent them off knowing that the person also needed the other parts of the package such as press releases, web content, vision statements, graphics, branding, and newsletter copy.

Doing research, I’ve found partners who can provide the full deal. It is so much better to have a specialty — technical writing in my case — than to scatter my remaining brain cells randomly around pieces of larger projects.

You likely know all this already but for me, who has sought focus since I was 4 years old, this is an amazing breakthrough.