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Welcome to the pet project of a great group of authors from Echelon Press!

We have gotten together and are interviewing one another or writing essays that we are posting weekly to our numerous websites and blogs, creating exposure for us all! I will post the links to the interviews conducted on yours truly, just as soon as they are available.

My first interviewee is Kerul Kassel.
Kerul is a non-fiction author of the book: http://www.stopprocrastinatingnow.com/
And, the soon-to-be-released book called: Productive Procrastination (Echelon Press, 2007)

I am very excited to welcome Kerul to my Blog!
Check out our interview below:

Tell us a bit about yourself and the genre you write.

I'm a fairly new author, and my writing was inspired by my clients and workshop participants. I found so many people beating themselves up about what they hadn't accomplished in life, and it was weighing them down, draining them of energy, and that was so unnecessary! I wanted to help them let go of that punishing perspective and replace it with a new lively, fun, experimental, forward-thinking one, and I could reach more people by writing a book. You guessed it, I write non-fiction, specifically about procrastination: www.StopProcrastinatingNow.com/book.

Did you choose your present genre; or did the genre choose you?

It definitely chose me. But I’ve always been a non-fiction sort. I do love fiction, but the books I’ve collected tend to be reference oriented, such as field guides, how-to’s, photographic essays, books on psychology, philosophy, literature compendiums, animal behavior, and more recently, self-help. Have you always wanted to write?Not in any definite way – I’ve always just wanted to be happy! At times in my life, writing has been a path to that, sometimes through journaling, at other times through telling a personal story or documenting a situation or event, and more recently, to help me get clear on and communicate good ways of mastering one’s goals, dreams, and time.

Have you ever had writer’s block? If yes, what have you done to overcome it?

Writer’s block was a frequent companion during the writing of my first book. The block was usually doubts about the value and originality of what I was writing, what other people would think of it, the quality of the style, grammar and voice, etc. At that time I had a coach who suggested that whenever I made an appointment with myself to write and found no words forthcoming, that I make a diary of sorts, just to spill out of my brain whatever was in it to free up some “RAM”, so to speak. It worked, and in my next book, Productive Procrastination, The Procrastination Diary is included – an almost daily account of the struggle with writer’s block. I hope it helps give people a sense of humor and ideas for options when they’re putting something off because it feels uncomfortable, scary, overwhelming, or difficult.

Do you have any advice for the young writer just starting out?

Write, write, and write some more, and write for yourself first, for fun next, and for others last. I know that you’re supposed to write for your “target market”, but your voice will be truer if it’s really you, and you care about what you’re writing about and are enjoying the process. Some people write for the joy of it, some people write for pleasure, some people write because they want to inspire or entertain or educate, and some write for money. What fun if you can do all of those things!

And just for fun, if you could be a Transformer, which would you be? An Autobot (the good bots) or a Decepticon (the evil bots)? =D

I’d definitely be a good bot, but I can’t pretend to know anything about Transformers. If there’s a transformer that empowers people, has purple and pink in it, loves animals, and is a protector of the environment, that’d be me.

Thank you so much Kerul!

Stay tuned! And check back each week for a new interview!

I woke up early this morning, Independence Day, because I don’t have any goals.

I don’t mean I don’t have goals for today; I do indeed. I will make Green Goddess vegetable dip, I will limit myself to one small plate of treats at the pool party, I will perform one household task from the list of Things to be Done, and I will finish a collection of Jonathan Franzen essays that I would be reading this moment except it is under a sleeping cat.

No, I mean I don’t have goals professionally. This came up because a friend, hearing that a number of job interviews Were To and Have Been Taken, asked me if I was “ready” for the the job interview question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

First, perhaps this is an error, but aside from reading up on the organization and its personnel and asking around about the principles, I don’t prep for job interviews, beyond worrying about what to wear and strategizing about foods to avoid at interview luncheons (anything red and liquid, to start with, though I will heed one friend’s suggestion to avoid crispy tacos). So I’ve probably flubbed that question several times in the last two months alone, and have routinely flubbed it in the past for every job I’ve had since entering LibraryLand in 1991.

I also assiduously avoid coaching myself with lists of questions before the fact (unless the organization provides them as “pre-work,” of course). I skimmed that list, and it would be very helpful if I were interviewing someone, but if I stayed up prepping myself on 121 questions, I would sound canned, and that’s worse than being temporarily stumped. If I can’t handle a simple question extemporaneously to an interview group’s satisfaction, then that’s a big clue it’s a bad match on both sides. You hire me, you get me, the extemporaneous, uncoached, unplugged version.

But back to goals. It’s reasonable to think beyond where you are right now to places you’d like to work and accomplishments you’d like under your belt. But I know people who live their careers in the future tense, always thinking about how they are going to get to the job that puts the right title on their door. I don’t see that as working toward a professional goal. I see it as medicating your life, bargaining away your time and soul in exchange for the chance to be the [fill in the blank]. Most of these people are pretty boring and a little sad, as is to be expected of a monochromatic life.

(I remember one place a few years back where the game to be played was “let’s brag about who spent the most time working on Christmas Day.” I was a real spoilsport for saying that I left early on Christmas Eve to wrap presents, buy food, and hunt for a bottle of Drambuie.)

I wonder, too, when I see people whose lives are completely taken over by their career goals, if that isn’t a way to avoid facing questions such as “Is there room for love in my life” or “What is my relationship with God” or even “Do I really like myself?” I also know that when you get to be the [fill in the blank], it’s not going to fill that hole in your soul created by the time you didn’t spend with friends or family, the church services you missed, the gardens you never planted. You never get that time back.

(Note that I’m not arguing against working hard and doing a good job. I’m talking about perspective and proportion — the difference between burning the midnight oil on a crucial project versus burning the midnight oil because you don’t know what else to do with your life.)

You also can’t do a great job at your current gig if you’re constantly thinking about where you are going next. Your decisions have to be driven by more than “I want to be a [fill in the blank].” Despite the illusion of busy-ness, career-zombies expend so much energy on themselves in their work-narcissism that despite all the hours they claim to put into their jobs, a lot of that effort is all about them. I’ve seen people so absorbed with their own careers that they neglected the needs of those they worked with — or even trampled on those needs, taking all the plum opportunities and soaking up so much of the organization’s resources that there wasn’t enough left for others.

I stopped having grand career goals about twelve years ago, following a series of life events that made it clear my priorities had been badly awry — events, not extraordinary but still personally hard, that included  serious illness of a loved one, death of a beloved, aged pet, and disillusionment with a cherished professional goal that up close, turned out to be meaningless. I also had a renewed sense of the joy and bittersweet brevity of life with those we love.

Once I stopped having goals and built more balance in my life, I started having fun, and I became a much better librarian. In the last decade-plus, I have spent far less time worrying about my “career” and a lot more time thinking about how to improve things wherever I work. Wandering across the country in family moves, I directed a small, special library for the EPA; I was a rural library director; I was a systems librarian for a nice-sized suburban library; I ran a respected, state-funded web portal and took it through some major transitions. If I had an implicit goal, it was to leave every place better than when I arrived, and I would like to think I have batted a thousand in that regard.

So where do I see myself in five years? I don’t know. Probably right here, in Tallahassee, if you want the literal truth. The real question is how — not where — others see me in five years. Will I be seen as a team member who works hard, does a good job, plays well with others, and has fun moments? Will I have at least a couple of victories under my belt? Will I have helped others reach their goals? Will the place — and librarianship — have been better for my presence? Because it doesn’t matter where I go next or what my title is; what truly matters is that the collective answer to those questions should be an emphatic “yes.”

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Note: somewhere in this wee catechism is the request for assistance to create a custom Wordpress feed, possibly in Atom (only because it’s an unused feed in a Wordpress installation I’m using). I’ve found some documentation, but real-world experience would be gratefully received.)

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A few months back I wrote for Techsource about the need to be very judicious and strategic about library IT projects — and it was a talk directed at those outside IT, who in their enthusiasm (which is a good thing) may overwhelm their IT departments with poorly-thought-out requests (which is a bad thing).

I’ve been struggling to provide a new service, Twitterprose, and the effort reminds me of that article. The idea is smart, fresh, and has relevance to libraries and 2.0 efforts: use Twitter to deliver daily lines from the best (or at least most interesting) of creative nonfiction. I don’t call my idea innovative because Debra Hamel already has Twitterlit, but my twist is the genre — wee, poor, neglected creative nonfiction — and the links, which are either to LibraryThing or to online essays and journals.

I provided Twitterprose for a couple of days by manually posting to a Twitter account, but then decided to get clever. Yes, in a week where I had two articles, two presentations, a committee document to review, and fresh creative writing for a workshop to pull out of whatever orifice availed itself to me (plus the curve ball of M-ch–l G-rm-n erupting over on Britannica), I got clever.

It is at this point that the project turned into the story — I believe it is a Leo Rosten story about Hyman Kaplan — where the protagonist gets on an overheated bus with a ball of bread dough that begins to expand, and expand…

It wasn’t enough that I had a Twitter account with the service; I needed an accompanying website. I remembered Anne Lipow leaning forward over dinner a few years back, telling me to register a clever domain name now, before someone else got it. Now, I thought to myself, now!

This is the easy part: between GoDaddy, Dreamhost, and WordPress, I had a website up in, oh, a couple of hours. I could have stopped with the domain registration, but I was on a roll, and one task fluidly followed another. My other tasks were not getting done, and I turned in a much smaller piece to workshop than I intended… but I had the website up. That’s something, right?

The loaf of bread still seemed manageable enough when (despite many decent canned themes available from WordPress, some of them literally a click away within the WordPress installation) I decided that I needed a theme with an attractive and personalized image at the top — say, books from my library. O.k., so I lost most of an evening standing on a chair taking pictures of books from my collection (because of course they had to be the right books) and learning how to stitch the images together in a panorama before deciding that I was best served by a simple, McSweeney-esque theme already available inside WordPress. It’s all good, right? After all, I was learning something new and important.

On the domestic front, we ate frozen Lean Cuisine pizza on our own for the second night in a row. Or was it the third?

It was at this point I asked myself — in that casual way you ask yourself, while driving in an unfamiliar country with maps in other languages, “If this is Luxembourg, why does it look like Trier? ” — just how would the website feed itself to Twitter? Because that, after all, was the point: an elegantly simple 2.0 service that posted updates in two places, a blog and Twitter, with the automagic assistance of the Autobahn-smooth tubes of the Interwebs.

The ball of dough in my lap was swelling, swelling; it was stretching the paper it was wrapped in, and causing notice.

I had heard about Twitterfeed. Painless, I thought! All I needed to do was register the feed with Twitterfeed. Wait, they recommend a Feedburner feed; I’ll install the WordPress plugin and then set up an Feedburner account. Tweak, test, tweak, test. The WordPress theme stubbornly points to the default feeds; I’ll correct that through the Widgets. Oh, wait, I need something called an OpenID. For that I can use my Yahoo ID. I’m not sure what’s open about any of this, but o.k., I get an OpenID, and after a little flailing around set up my account in Twitterfeed.

So the next day I post to the blog, and eagerly peer at Twitter every few minutes for several hours. Nothing happens. A few hours later, after I update the Twitter feed manually, I write the Twitterfeed people and learn that Twitterfeed ignores entries without titles. O.k., I can dig it. The day after that I write an entry that’s all title, but the Twitter post mangles the link to Librarything.

I write Twitterfeed’s folks, who advise that the link for LibraryThing should wrap around the blurb — not a simple trick in Wordpress — so I write Debra Hamel, who cheerfully advises she created a custom Atom feed just for Twitter (in fact, in an earlier message she had mentioned this, but in my eagerness to get on the bus with this project, I conveniently chose not to pursue that telling detail).

She wrote a custom feed?

So let me recap: the week before ALA, with piles of work to do (some of it bread-and-butter), I plunged into a new service that required domain registration, a new website set up in Dreamhost, nameserver configuration, installation of blog software, and several new accounts on services I haven’t previously used; then I spent more time fiddling with images to “customize” the design for a website for an unknown service with 31 subscribers, all of whom I know; then I learned what was really required to make all this happen, which includes wading through the half-baked and sometimes outdated documentation for WordPress (sorry, it is possible to love WordPress and agree that its documentation is often a day late and a dollar short) to set up a custom feed.

What I have done is get off the bus and set the swelling ball of dough in the fridge. Nobody but me knows or cares if Twitterprose is updated manually or by computers, those delightful labor-saving devices (cue insane laughter). The evolution of Twitterprose – which at one point I envisioned sharing at ALA, through buttons and bookmarks, and ever so casually remarking with my geek friends, oh yes, it all works so easily — can await more halcyon times, such as Sandy’s trip in July, when I can putter with syndication feeds and get my special Twitter feed Just So.

Yesterday afternoon I chained myself to the couch with my committee work and a red pen (Sandy: “Why are you on the couch? That’s so quaint!” Me: “To avoid the Web”) and gave a long document a serious scrub-through, then wrote my dialog for my social-software-presentation video, which will be a simple talking-head offering and not a clever animation of web-surfing through that real-kewl open source software someone just shared with me.

And I categorize this under Librarian Wisdom, not Hot Tech or RSS, because the lesson is so obvious to anyone in IT. Public service folk want Second Life accounts, but they don’t know what’s involved in tracking down that very busy guy in campus IT who needs to open special ports up on a per-IP basis. You want IM accounts, but haven’t factored in that IT does care about closing off file-sharing for people who really are gullible enough to accept files from a nice man who says he just wants to help them clean their computer.

Even geeky folk don’t always know what they’re getting into — and usually not because they lack expertise: quite often it’s because they’re busy enough, and task-focused enough, that they don’t always stop to remember that anything that looks easy probably took a few weeks of sweat equity to get that way, and that cool surface elegance usually masks a massively expanding ball of dough that took the project into the most unexpected areas.

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Nicole, over on “What I learned today,” wonders if she’s burned out. Just because she’s working, blogging, presenting, and trying to sell a house at the same time?

What I say here is nothing new, really… which is partly why I’m blogging it: because I’ve got so much happening this week that even Gormania can’t get me prolix; this is just a blurp from the brain. But perhaps there’s an angle here that’s new to you.

1. Cherry-pick your opportunities. You don’t have to accept every talk/opportunity that comes your way. You don’t have to blog on every topic. You don’t have to go to every conference. You don’t have to try every new social software. Just as libraries should think about what they’re jumping into (today we’re doing trading cards… no, wait, blogs… no wait, wikis, or did we mean Second Life?), you should be selective with your own opportunities. Do a few things well, not many things spread thin.

2. Scope out your project deliverables. This is related to #3 (estimating time/effort), but it’s worth underscoring that for any project (even personal projects, like selling a house!) it’s worth parsing out what exactly is involved. I just spent hours on a draft proposal for a project, and I’m glad I did, because it made me realize things I hadn’t factored in the equation, equipment I needed, caveats to bring up.

3. When you’re asked to give a presentation (or do any special project), to figure out what you should charge and how much it will absorb your attention, add up all the time you will spend — planning, preparation, travel, presenting, catching up on things you couldn’t get done because you were doing all of the above — and then double it.

4. Take breaks, and not just daily/weekly breaks (doing what YOU find restful), though these are extremely restful, but deliberate chunks of weeks or months where you are not doing “extra,” traveling, preparing, etc. This requires that when someone runs into you somewhere and asks if you can do a talk, you say “maybe, sounds interesting,” then you sit down with your calendar and really ask yourself if you want your one month with free time broken up by several days of planning and travel. Not too long ago in my own life, I had some time off that was eroded by a family visit that was not exactly restful, several activities related to a future job that I felt I should attend, and a presentation trip. In the end, I cheated myself out of intentional quality time “off the grid.”

5. Use a little tough love. In the past couple of years I have practiced tough love several times. Once, I had agreed to write the introduction to a book, provided, I made it extremely clear, that the chapters were available no later than a certain date. The deadlines slipped and slipped; I sent out several warnings. Six months later, I was “reminded” of this task while I was preparing a household move. I told them no, I was available when I said I was available, and this was just no longer possible. I’ve also regretfully turned down whuffies (free presentations) because I am self-employed and my talks put food on my table.

6. Accept some situational pressure. For ALA, I’m feeling a lot of pressure because there are several things that landed on my platter within the last three weeks, just as paid work came my way. One committee, after six months of silence, sent me a fat Word document last Friday for review by Tuesday… another is planning details now that could have been done last month… and so forth. Oh, and did I agree, like a lunatic, to do a screencast on preservation and social software? People, they’re so… human!

Meanwhile, I am either trying to produce work-for-pay or develop intelligent contracts for the same, while I try to meet an overdue writing-workshop deadline and help the church get its new site up. The cure? ALA will come, and then it will be the summer. Sometimes you just ride the wave… just like you’ll get your house sold and amazingly, you’ll have a life again. Figure out what you can cast off, and let it go for a while… then be sure to think big-picture the next time you get the urge to do something new.

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