I'd like to take a few moments to compliment one of the freelancers I work with.  Valerie K Clark has proofread copy for us on more than one occasion.  She's found errors large and small, and made or suggested corrections that made me and my clients look like we actually knew what we were doing.

Valerie has her own writing and editing business, which you'll find by following the link above.  If you need someone to write, ghostwrite, proof or edit, I can highly recommend her services.  You can also find her Facebook page through this link.

With Linda Young of KittyCorner in Liverpool, NY.

Last year I started a special Christmas in July program.  Normally something with this name means that the company is running a sale of some kind.  What I decided to do last year was take a percentage of our income and put it towards charitable endeavors, chosen by our clients.  This time, I tried something a bit different.

This year, most of our contributions were made locally, even though our client base is spread across the US.  While some of the recipients were suggested by our clients, I chose others myself.  One of the factors in deciding on the recipients was overhead costs – how much of the contributed money was going to the cause, and how much would go towards operating costs and so forth.  I’m happy to say that for most of our recipients, 100% of the donated amount went directly to the end recipients!

Our first contribution was to a memorial scholarship fund at CNY Karate, the school where I train and teach.  One of our instructors and long-time student, Sam Barber, passed away earlier this year after a brief illness.  His love of martial arts, and the changes he saw it make in young students over the years, prompted his widow to ask that funds be donated to a scholarship in his name in lieu of flowers or other memorials.  I admired Sam, and was glad to call him my friend and teacher.  Over the years, I’ve seen troubled young people learn self respect and self discipline at the dojo.  Many of the karate students who stick with the program go on to enter the college of their choice, and keep the life lessons they learned at CNY Karate propelling them ahead of their peers.

Another donation was made to a division of the Downtown Writers’ Center in Syracuse.  The Young Author’s Academy serves all youngsters with a love of writing and learning.  While it’s open to anyone in the greater Syracuse area, many of the YAA members come from less privileged areas of the community.  Our contribution to the YAA is going directly to supplying these enthusiastic young folks with important books and other supplies that will help them become the novelists or non-fiction writers of the next generation.

Syracuse Stories is a non-profit program that’s taking video commentary from people of all ages, races and backgrounds.  Most of the footage is being shot by volunteers.  In addition to donating the use of the Agile’ video cameras, we also fed these unpaid interns for the three days of shooting during the annual Arts festival July 27th – 29th.  These commentaries will be combined with interviews shot in Brazil earlier in the month.  The object is to create a ripple effect, drawing video commentaries from a larger and larger pool of communities around Syracuse, and then around the world, and making the edited clips available via the web for anyone to search and watch.  This is the 2nd year the group has collected these stories, and I look forward to seeing how things progress.

Kitty Corner is a unique entity.  It is a not-for-profit, volunteer “foster caretaker” system for orphaned or abandoned cats, run by two sisters out of their house in Liverpool, NY.  And yes, this one was selected by me.  My wife and I have two cats which we adopted from Kitty Corner.  They do a great job with their cats, and even keep cats that don’t get adopted.  But as a volunteer endeavor, they often find themselves scrambling for money and help – their web site is out of date, for instance.  The funds we donated go directly to the health and well-being of the cats, who all receive periodic vet visits while under Kitty Corner’s care.

We’ve also donated funds to a local non-profit cultural arts center, and to a national cancer research foundation this year.  We hope that you believe, as we do, that the small amounts we’ve been able to donate have gone to worthwhile organizations which will direct them to “where the rubber hits the road.”

We could not have done this without our clients and vendors – thank you so much for your help!

I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence or not, but two of my clients are writers. One is retired from academia, and the other has her foot in the world of education. Both are, among other things, well regarded poets.

Dr Ivan Brady’s latest foray, however, is as a writer of mystery novels. The Aaron McCaan Mysteries take place around 2000, and involve an ex-Marine who stumbles into some serious trouble in and around the Mojave desert.  The first novel, Sagebrush Kill, introduces us to a number of interesting characters including a dead Indian who has the audacity to keep walking around.  The opening chapter to the follow-up, Ritual Overkill, may be too much for the more squeamish readers out there.  We’ll find out when it’s released in 2012.

You can find Brady’s site which includes his blog here.

Georgia Popoff had the stones to give herself a title when there was none to accurately depict her position.  She calls herself a community poet, and I think we’d all be better off if more communities had them.  Her latest book, co-authored with a poet from Chicago is called Our Difficult Sunlight.  More than a mere book of poetry, this is a call to – and an teaching piece for – educators to introduce classes young and old to poetry, and to use art in general and poetry in particular as a way of expanding the horizons of students.  A noble calling if ever there was one.  Georgia’s blog can be found here.

Ever say to yourself, “I wish I’d been a fly on the wall when. . .?”  Ever wonder what it would be like to mix two cool compounds together and maybe be the one to discover a new super element?  I had both of those privileges today.  I put Brady and Georgia together at a table in Barnes & Noble and watched magic happen.  Instead of adding to one another, their mix of backgrounds, sources, networks and experience multiplied.  No, their skill sets raised the others’ to the power of 10.  I heard a lot of the discussion, and some of it frankly I did not understand.  But if half of what they talked about comes to fruition, it will be an amazing series of literary events.

And purely on the level of an ego stroke, both actually get what I teach my clients about self promotion.  And they are practicing it!  If you have any interest in poetry or education, you will hear more about these two in the next 24 months.  You can find links to their books on Amazon from the recommendation widget on this page.

In addition to making blog posts here, I’ve begun posting on my long-dormant Twitter account, AhZhillAy.  What’s nice about Twitter is that it forces me to shut the hell up after just a few characters.  “If you have nothing nice to say. . .”  Well, I’d modify that to, “If you have nothing of value to impart, don’t tweet anything at all.”

I also use TweetDeck – which allows me to cheat.  I take abt 15 minutes and pound out tweets for the rest of the week.  Then, TweetDeck posts them for me, regardless of whether I’m even on-line or not.  Granted I can do the same thing with WordPress, but since the form factor is so much longer, it would take me a whole workday to sit down and get a week’s worth of posts ready.  And by the time the 3rd or 4th one was ready to go, I’d probably want to change it anyway.

I’m not a fan of taking time away from the other projects I’m writing to post blogs (or even microblogs), but I firmly believe in putting yourself someplace you’ll be tripped over by potential clients.  The more often they say, “Every time I turn around I see your name,” the better chance you have of getting them to engage with you.

What are you doing to get tripped over?