This blog has been out of commission for awhile, and I have no good excuse besides being terribly busy with work. In my mind, this isn’t the world’s worst excuse for not blogging, but I’ve missed you all terribly so I’d like to get back into the swing of it.

In the meantime, here’s what you’ve missed!

My two columns are fully up and running now, and I’m loving being a regular columnist. If you’re an artist looking for marketing help, my latest Handmade Success column talks about how to get more custom orders. I’m also running a sale on Etsy copywriting packages which has been immensely popular, and I forgot to tell you all about it. You can get a starter copywriting package for $99!

If you want to read about my underwear (or at least my underwear preferences), my latest Lingerie Addict column features my favorite picks for the Fall season (I almost feel like a real fashion blogger these days!).

Didy had his birthday on September 18th, and despite not knowing his real age we celebrated in style. He got two new shirts (one with pac-man characters on it) and a new Kong toy that he will probably destroy in a month. I usually run a sale for his birthday but had too many clients to get to it, so the sale to benefit the English Springer Spaniel Rescue America will probably be early next month.  In the meantime, Didy requests that you go check out their beautiful dogs so they can be as spoiled as he is.

Fall has brought a client explosion here, and I’m loving it. I get a lot of emails about what kind of clients I work with (lots of people assume it’s all artist clients), and I really work with a broad range. If you’re curious, here’s some of the clients I worked with over the break.

LGSciences does bodybuilding supplements in a natural and scientific way, and is a real standout in the field.

Mademoiselle  M is a jewelry collective from Quebec that makes amazing nature inspired pieces. I’m really excited about this one, because all my copy will be translated into French as well for the site.

Beso Designs makes gorgeous DIY wedding favors (and are fellow typography nuts). Nicole has even been featured in Brides Magazine!

Fondren Renaissance Foundation is my latest awesome non-profit client, and they’ve been fun to work with. If you’re into neighborhood/urban revival projects, you should check them out. Fondren has won national awards in that area.

I’ve also been working on two huge projects for clients (and one is a national campaign), but I can’t tell you about those yet. I will make sure to put them up on the blog after they launch!

What amazing things did you accomplish in August and September? Come tell me about them in the comments so we can all give ourselves a group pat on the back.

I’ve spent the last week avoiding work while obsessing over productivity.

This is a very unproductive and stressful way to live. It’s hard to work when you’re obsessing about how to get working.

When you’re an entrepreneur, you make stuff and provide services and then people buy them. You then use that money to pay your bills like a reasonable adult, except for the times when you splurge on things that make you happy occasionally. At least, this is what happens if you’re an entrepreneur without start up capital.

We’d like this to happen on a time table, but sometimes it doesn’t. For instance, this month, I haven’t made any money yet. I’m already anticipating the panicked phone call from my mother when she reads this, but it’s true.

Now, smart money says that I will. I’ve got lots of big guest posts coming out, my products are solid, and I’ve got a great platform to which to work. I’d like to sell ten spots in my classes this month, and I probably can.

Even better, all of my bills are paid. And I know so many unemployed people my age who are literally starving to death while living with their parents that maybe this shouldn’t seem like something to worry about.

Except I do.

I worry that things haven’t happened yet. I worry that I don’t have six figures in the bank like the big blogs say I should. I worry that even if I do get paid, I have to transfer it from my Paypal to my bank account in time to pay my rent with a check. My situation isn’t unique: entrepreneurs find themselves in these situations all the time, and we live through them.

So let’s back up, to breakfast yesterday morning.

I’ve been thinking about this stuff (read: obsessing, planning, feeling bad) all week, and yesterday I found myself eating a very nice breakfast with some friends of mine. We’re all advertising people, although we work in different facets of it. They work for an agency, which means they get a nice paycheck every month.

Except one of my friends, she’s exhausted. She’s doing the job of two people and has more clients than she can handle. Her job is eating her life; it’s about to literally swallow her whole. She gets a decent paycheck, and she’s still miserable.

Once I got home, I had this lightning crack kind of clarity happen.

I didn’t want her job. Paycheck or not, I didn’t want it. I love my job. That’s why I keep doing it, even when I’m scared.

The only way I know how to move is forward.

I know another woman who used to be a writer. She’s lovely, creative, talented, and now she sells real estate “because it’s easier.”  This woman is not a lazy woman, and she finds selling houses easier than being a freelance writer. That says so much about freelance careers to me.

Being terrified of what you do and loving what you do isn’t a mutually exclusive proposition.

Actually, if you run a business, they probably go hand in hand a lot. It doesn’t mean you’re flawed, it just means you’re human. But it also doesn’t mean the “safer” more standard career option is the better one either. If you think you’re the only one who feels like this, you’re not.

Just keep moving forward, and everything really will be fine.

P. S. If you’re wanting to get some help, I’m offering both beginning and advanced marketing classes this fall. They’re affordable and incredibly informative, so please go sign up to reserve your spot.

I can only work after dark these days.

After doctor number three (who is also a moron) has said no to treating my CFS, I’ve pretty much given into the day/night flip and rearranged my work schedule completely. So far, it’s working. I’m a very contented vampire these days.

As a result, I discovered Hootsuite, which is possibly the coolest tool ever (and yes, I know everyone else discovered it years ago). It lets me post during the morning when I’m sound asleep, and then pick up Twitter mid-day without a break. I think I’ve officially become one of the people who doesn’t ever really turn Twitter off, which surprises me a bit.

All of this became part of my big branding tweaking week, which I do every few months. It’s like spring cleaning for my web presence. This one was really bad though. It’s sort of like when you don’t think your house is that dirty and then you discover the dust bunnies have grown actual ears. But on the internet.

I have a different Twitter background than my website (Can any designers tell me if people care about Twitter backgrounds anymore? Is this a stupid problem or an actual problem?). I want to create a landing site but I don’t know if it has to be the same branding or not. I have a cute retro idea but I don’t want to confuse people. I’m launching a big new thing this week and I want to set up space for that.

In the midst of all this, I discovered the actual Cottage Copy twitter account, which I’ve never used. I had it auto-broadcasting for awhile, but now even that has gone silent since WordPress updated.

It was like the dust bunny had grown both ears and a tail and was laughing at me.

When I started, I made the Cottage Copy twitter. I then promptly made a personal twitter, which got a great following and I never went back to the actual branded account. Truthfully, I had pretty much forgotten it existed.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I tweet about a lot of things. Current subjects have been food, living in the South, lingerie, random business things. Past subjects have ranged from my forever unrequited crush on Ira Glass to soup recipes and politics. This paragraph will either really make you want to follow me on there or scare you off completely.  Anyway, somewhere tucked in between all the randomness is business promotion, which isn’t how it should be.

I’m absolutely breaking my cardinal rule of branding, which is to be consistent everywhere. I don’t talk a lot about my life here, so Twitter may seem like a strange change for people who get there through the blog. Also, if you don’t want to hear about food or lingerie or my Ira Glass love, you really shouldn’t have to.

Consistency matters. Being the same person across all social media platforms matters. And I’ve been stealthily screwing that part up, so this week I’m fixing it.

Here’s the new deal: If you want the blog and business side of me without the random obsessions, follow @CottageCopy on Twitter. I will be maintaining it and announcing cool new stuff with it, so it’s worth it. If you want uncensored rambling side of me, stick with @copygeniusgirl.

Either way, say hi on Twitter!

I haven’t been blogging in a while, in case any of you noticed.

I think this goes back to my last post in early summer about not wanting to write crap. I have this very big, ingrained thing from childhood to just shut my mouth if I didn’t have something good to say and wait until the moment passed to open my mouth again. And my last string of posts feel like I’ve just been blogging about me trying to dig myself out of small business stress mush.

But it goes deeper than that.

There are definitely moments, especially if you are active on social media, where what you want to say is really not what you should say, and it’s better to use something like this awesome piece of ingenuity to vent out your frustrations until the verbal storm passes. You should never fire the word trigger when you are angry or upset. 9 times out of 10, there’s a chance it can damage your career.

But there’s also something about being a blogger that calls, even demands, that we be true and real to our audience. That those opinions, however bombastic, be expressed and expressed loudly.

That pull can sometimes be called voice.

And having and cultivating a voice is a scary thing. It goes beyond just speaking your thoughts, but speaking them in a loud, unabashed way that’s uniquely and unequivocally you. It is typing those words and not flip-flopping when fire starts coming your way. It is risking, like Holly said earlier, alienating some readers for the sake of really grabbing your Right People by the horns and not letting go. It is taking responsibility that some of those words that you write can greatly influence readers–however many or few–in a positive or negative way.

And that’s kind of frightening, especially when your blog starts to really grow. I mean, what if you say something wrong? Or give the wrong advice and completely ruin a reader’s experience? Or not write the kind of blog post that people are expecting?

There’s suddenly this moment of performance anxiety that can freeze up your voice and actually make you lose sight of it. It happens a lot with writing fiction: you hear too much advice on your manuscript, and suddenly you’ve rewritten it to the point that everyone likes it except you. Or that advice stays in your head like a nagging step-mother, and now you can’t seem to write your next paragraph in fear that you’ll do it wrong. And then you wonder why you dread writing.

It’s easy to lose sight of your blogging voice. We all want acceptance. Posting something a little raw, a little edgy, a little more you and a lot less kosher, and then claiming it as your own runs that risk of being rejected. And some days, the cons outweigh the pros.

I’m the kind of person that if I can’t say what’s on my mind, I don’t say anything at all. Because I know, if I open my mouth, the first thing that will come out is the thing that I’m not suppose to say. Or it will be something very generic, and noncommittal. Safe. And while that might save my PC bum, it doesn’t really make me a happy person.

I thrive on communication. Expression. Strong opinions. It brings fire into my life and makes everyday interactions extraordinary. And when I can’t communicate… I lose use of my voice. I forget what it sounds like to speak without restriction. I lose confidence in who I am and what I stand behind. And that leads to me suddenly thinking that I really don’t know what I’m talking about.

I think… “oh, I can’t say that.” And if you’re a blogger… sometimes that can be death.

I’m not talking about the kind of writing I mentioned earlier that is mean, and cruel, and really shouldn’t be posted publicly. I’m talking about censoring yourself because you’re afraid to trust your voice and the topics you want to discuss.

The topics that mean the most to you. The topics that have the most bearing on your life right now.

Having a voice is scary. Having an audience that listens to your voice can be even scarier. But part of having that audience, and that voice, is trusting that, no matter how sharp your words can get some days, your true fans will understand, and they won’t leave you because you are speaking what’s really on your mind.

It took me a while to remember that, as I struggle with writing our first big set of courses and really nailing down my opinions on certain subjects. It took the better part of two weeks and a Kaffeeklatsch call on how fellow bloggers deal with posting those controversial, personal posts to really pull the clamp off of my blogging voice. It takes a while to really build confidence in what you have to say and how you choose to say it.

Don’t stifle it early. And I’ll try not to stifle mine.

Hi everyone! Laura here. And in the last week I’ve written 8000 craptacular words and absolutely no blog entries.

…Seriously. You’d think that after 8000 friggin’ words, somewhere would be some material that could possibly be salvageable. Turned from the mushy putty word pile it is and molded and shaped into a beautiful nugget of blogging life wisdom.

I don’t know where I’ve heard this before, but if you polish the shit out of crap, you get… well, very shiny crap.

There is no diamond underneath it all. There’s not even a semi-precious stone.

Trust me, I’ve looked. I have so desperately looked.

I am not a natural blogger. I am actually one of those people who grossly self censors herself and her thoughts in fear of being brandished too disrespectful or outlandish for public consumption (blame it on my culture), so finding my blogging voice after joining Cottage Copy has been a rather interesting and sometimes painful experience. My voice, when you first meet me, is usually very, very suppressed.

One of the reasons writing fiction became my first love is because it’s not about me. It’s about someone else who, though has parts of me in him or her, is not me in the real world, with real world details and confessions that can easily be tracked back to me. I can talk about things and stand behind points of views that are dear to my heart without putting too much of my real self on the line to burn at the stake.

I can have a little distance. Be a little detached. A little more brave to be bold because my personal history and all of its baggage is not in the way. It’s not my heart out there to be trampled on. …Well, actually, that’s not true. Everyone who creates something and shares it to the world does so at the risk of having their heart crushed. I’ve gone through years of this already as an aspiring novelist and as a digital artist and animator. It is painful. You never get used to that stab to the heart. You just learn to cover it up quicker.

It’s just that, with fiction, there’s a little shield. At least it feels like that now to me. I didn’t think there was one. I thought fiction (and art)–and being subsequently criticized on your execution, your form, your viewpoints represented in said art–was the epitome of naked self expression.

Until I started blogging. And realized, no… I was wrong. There is one more level closer to baring it all. One more step into the realm of uncomfortable accountability.

And that’s when you start writing about yourself, and how you feel, right now, without the buffer of make believe. Without the fairy tale medium to tell you it’s okay.

I never started blogging as a fiction writer because I didn’t want people to know about me. And the last week had been all about me. Shameful, pitiful me. Those 8000 words are filled with messy, uncensored, poisonous me thoughts that I would never want to admit originated from me.

But yet I couldn’t write anything else. Try as I might, I wrote shit after shit, and every thought that came after was “Omigod, this isn’t acceptable. No one should read this. This is not something that can help anyone.”

Page after page I plowed through, looking for that golden nugget. Trying to pull my weight for the blog (even though Holly had put me on mandatory vacation while I settled in Olympia). Because I wouldn’t accept the idea of being a dead weight. Even though all of my writing pointed to one simple fact: I’ve been stressed and overly emotional preparing for my summer trip, and it was purging out on the page.

I had avoided blogging prior to my 8000 word binge, because I knew this was what was going to come out. Ugly, raw me. Not the business me. Not even just the normal, fun to hang out with decent human being me. And I really didn’t want anyone to see that.

I froze up a lot at the keyboard, because I was scared of my honest me at my worst. And I knew what came onto the page didn’t fit any guidelines of business blogging conduct. My “blogs” if they could have been called that, weren’t presentable. It sometimes didn’t even have proper noun verb agreement because I’d write so fast and so broken that it was more emotional impressionism than actual thoughts.

But I still wrote it. I hated it. And I hated me for making them.

…But…if I had stopped every time I came across a raw nerve… then I never would have written this post. If I skated away from trying to capture what was so painful to me this week… then maybe I never would have been able to make sense of it, eventually overcome it.

There is something about writing that does help you get through some of your worst moments. And while I’ve always struggled with the page, to try and express the right image or scene in my mind, it’s sometimes much harder to try and make sense of yourself while you’re in the middle of your own tempest storm.

So I guess this post is an ode to all bloggers out there who are willing to look at their raw, unbeautiful selves and dig through all the shit until you find your path again. It’s hard. And you’re all brave to do it.

Photo credit: Navy Blue Stripes on Flickr

Today’s blog is sort of the companion piece to my guest post over on LaVonne Ellis’ blog, which you all should go read because she runs a wonderful blog and is truly one of the most thoughtful writers that I know online. In my guest post for her, I say that I never had any desire to be a writer growing up, which is true. I didn’t keep a diary, I didn’t write for fun, and I never had any thoughts about becoming a published author. I consumed piles and piles of books, but none of them made me want to write.

I think I felt like published writers came from this special pool of genetic material and I just wasn’t part of that. It never even occurred to me to try to write until much later in life.

The tricky part is that when I look back at my childhood and teenage years, there were these little sneaking indications that I might be a natural writer. Today I present, briefly, the strange and bizarre encounters that quietly drive someone to become a non-fiction and marketing writer:

When I was in third grade, we had one of those little picture book assignments. They gave us those pre-made books with the little two sentence dotted lines and the spaces to draw in, and we had to make a book about what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone else wrote books about how they wanted to be firemen, or police officers, or lawyers or doctors.

I wrote a book about how I wanted to be a ninja turtle.

I wasn’t picky about which one. I remember my teacher asking me why I wanted to do this, and I logically laid out the argument that being able to kick ass and eat pizza all the time seemed like a reasonably solid lifestyle choice.

I’m not sure if my mother remembers this at all, but I suspect she still has the book, and I suspect I can imagine just how embarrassed she was as a result of it all.

Cut to eighth grade, where we are given our first ever non-fiction writing assignments. We did a year long history project that year studying the local river and its history, and part of the culmination was a nature essay that was done during a field trip to the local park near my house.

This would have gone over better with a group of pre-teenagers if it had not been freezing cold and pouring rain that day at the park.

Never one to be deterred by whining students, my English teacher dragged us all out there anyway in our raincoats along with our notebooks and pens. I perched myself on a wet rock looking out at the river, and tried to write quickly so I could go back to the bus and get warm.

It was a ten minute walk from my house, and all I could think about was how nice it would feel if I was home in my kitchen with some hot chocolate and a book. All around me my classmates were writing about the beauty of the water as it sparkled, the cute baby ducks, and the wonder of the large trees in the park. In other words, they were writing to imitate what they had read, even if it didn’t reflect reality at all. The more I thought about it, the more the situation pissed me off.

I finally got angry enough that I scribbled down a quick essay on how miserable this trip was, and how ridiculous this assignment was. I wrote about the muddy river that probably had tires in the bottom, and then added a lengthy description of how even the ducks looked like they would prefer to be inside. I then tore the essay off my notepad and threw it in the pile and forgot about it.

A week or so later, I got pulled aside by my teacher after class. I naturally assumed I’d failed, but I also didn’t much care. I prepared myself for the lecture as he handed me back my essay, and flipped to the back and was floored to see that I gotten an A. He told me that his daughter had helped him read through the essays that the class had done, and had excitedly picked mine out of the pile. She’d loved it, and so had he. I think it was the first A I had ever gotten in his class.

My first real introduction to storytelling came in high school, and was spurred by a part time teacher named Mr. Welch.

He was known for being a little kooky, for lack of a better word. He was a Vietnam vet, and he had a reputation for being bizarre and unpredictable. He wasn’t afraid of confrontation, and he certainly wasn’t afraid to speak his mind. I took a class on the psychology of fairy tales with him, and then a mythology class the next semester.

Mr. Welch was someone who fundamentally believed in the power of stories. He wasn’t into stories in the fancy literary sense; he was more interested in the ancient archetypes that we still experience on a daily basis. I vividly remember him demonstrating this ability when he told my mythology class a very candid story about his Vietnam experiences that was terrifying and completely inappropriate for high school sophomores. He was the most honest writer and speaker that I’d ever met, and I loved his classes because of it.

Early on in my first semester with him, I decided to take up his attitude of brutal honesty.

I stayed after class, and frankly told him that I loved his class, but that the first essay assignment was dumb and cliche and I didn’t want to do it. Most teachers would have taken issue with my attitude, but Mr. Welch just sat and considered me for awhile.

To my surprise, he agreed that the assignment was stupid, but he explained that it was standard and that he didn’t have control over the assignments, just what we read. He offered to give me free reign over my own assignments, but also warned me that he would grade me at a higher level if I chose to write my own essays. It was a very adult bargain: more freedom in exchange for more responsibility.

I didn’t write another essay using an assigned topic with him for the next two years, and I worked harder than I’ve ever worked at writing in my life to make sure that my essays were up to his standards. I learned to write thoughtfully and honestly, rather than try and fit my writing into any pre-set parameters. It was an early lesson in writing and the concept of Right People.

I had originally drafted this post to include a neat little marketing lesson at the end, but I realized as I revised that I don’t really have one. If there’s a lesson here, it’s about honesty, being yourself, and that if you do all of those things consistently and loudly, then your Right People will find you no matter what.

Great marketing writing and great non-fiction writing is really about being honest with yourself and others, no matter how uncomfortable or counter-cultural that may feel at the time.

So, per the blog from the other day, it is here!  In two weeks, Cottage Copy will launch its first teleclass! This class, Stealth Marketing for the Small Business will consist of four teleseminars, all for free! I’ll help you develop a marketing plan that makes you feel good, and teach you some basic copywriting and marketing secrets. The focus on this class is learning how to market your business while being yourself and not making yourself hideously uncomfortable with the whole thing. There may be small amounts of zen, but not much, I promise. And it will be fun and interactive, so start gathering all the scary business questions that you want to ask. And, you get to hear my lovely voice, so that’s an added bonus.

If you’re interested, click here to sign up: it’s free, and we’ll all have fun. Hopefully I’ll get to meet some of you lovely blog commentators!

P.S. Mom, the link you want to click is the one at the beginning of this post. Love you!

A few posts ago, I mentioned that I was adding consulting to my repertoire. I’ve finally added it to my Services page, and in order to kick things off, I’m running a giveaway here on the blog.

I’m giving away two one-hour consulting sessions.

Each session gets you an hour with me, on the phone or over an instant-messaging client – your choice – to talk about the best way to create new copy for your website, blog, etc., or to massage your existing writing to better suit your needs and wants. You don’t even have to be a small business – as long as you’ve got something you want written or edited, you’re good to go. Each winner and I will set up a time within the next two weeks when we’re both available; all you have to do is have an idea about what you want to talk about.

Here are the rules:

1. Leave a comment on this post. You can introduce yourself, talk about how you’d use a copy consultation, or just say hi – the only requirements are that your post be in English and that you leave a valid email address.
2. The giveaway ends at 11:59 PM EST on December 26. (I’ll use the comment time to determine eligibility.)
3. On December 27, I’ll randomly select two of the eligible comments and send out emails with more information. I’ll also post the winners’ names (or preferred pseudonyms) in another blog post this weekend.

That’s it! Good luck, and have a great day!