A perfect afternoon on the sofa

I love this photo of Gwyneth Paltrow from one of my favourite movies A View From The Top. I watched it (again) yesterday. It’s just so silly and funny, but at the same time really motivational, AND it includes scenes of Paris. Not to mention Gwyneth’s character is made over during the movie from tacky to chic. Le sigh. No wonder I adore this movie.

I wrote this quote down while watching; it spoke to me (in Candice Bergen’s voice, with a twangy Texan accent):

‘No matter where you’re from, no matter who people think you are, you can be whatever you want, but you gotta start right now. Right this second in fact’.

Candice is Gwyneth's mentor in the movie, a former flight attendant who has retired and written a book. Watching the movie I was thinking to myself, I would really like to read that book. Shame I can't order it from the library.

After watching the movie I am motivated to do better in all aspects of my life - at work, in my slimming efforts, being a good person. The list goes on. I love it when movies do that.

Make your influences clear

‘Please, you’ve got to listen to me,’ I shouted, hammering on the door. ‘Doctor Browning! Open the door!’ It opened a crack – just enough for an eye and a shock of white hair to appear.

‘You’re crazy,’ the Doctor whispered. ‘There’s no such thing as time travel.’

‘You’ve got to believe me, Doctor,’ I pleaded. ‘I’m from the future. My name is Martin McFoo. You sent me here and now I’m stuck. You built a time machine out of a Lamborghini using uranium to generate six point one terrawatts of energy.’

‘Six point one terrawatts?’ yelled the Doctor. ‘That’s impossible!’

‘You did it, Doctor. You sent me in the car at ninety-nine miles per hour and I came back in time and now I’m probably going to sleep with my own mother. It’s kind of disturbing if you think about it.’

‘Great Skeet!’ exclaimed the Doctor.

‘Listen, please,’ I said. ‘I need to go back. You’ve got to send me back. I have to... RETURN TO THE PRESENT!’

Emphasise your villain’s bad qualities

Doctor Slithingly watched the readout on the computer screen and rubbed his hands together.

‘Excellent,’ he muttered, his voice a thin, rasping hiss. ‘Excellent!’ He laughed to himself in a chilling falsetto. ‘Soon my plan will come to fruition. Soon I will destroy them all!’ The room resounded with the sound of his insane giggling.

This was the culmination of years of research – years of testing tissue samples and creating unnatural biological hybrids – but now it was over. Now, finally, he would destroy them all – every single type and variation of leukaemia. In doing so, he would render useless the work of thousands of charitable organisations as well as denying medical professionals the world over a source of income. He would prevent the publication of hundreds of inspiring stories of survival and sacrifice which might otherwise have sold millions of copies worldwide.

‘Bwahaha!’ he laughed. ‘So long, you meddling haematological neoplasm, you!’

Making your home like a boutique hotel

I found this article over the weekend. It's about the 'staycation', a new-money saving way of going on holiday by staying at home. I'm all for the staycation. As small business owners, we don't get to go away much at all, but our version of a staycation is to spend the night (or even - gasp - two) at a fancy hotel ten minutes down the road from our shop. It still feels like a holiday!

What I like most about this article is that it has lots of lovely ideas on how to make your home like a boutique hotel, and quite novel ways to enjoy your staycation. They may seem a bit silly, but, like the carpet picnic, are actually really fun, and shake up the ordinary. And we all need that sometimes.

I think our next staycation will be at home. And in the meantime I will be using all the wonderful tips on making our home like a boutique hotel. Why not live like this every day?

Here is the article:

Holidaying at Home

This is how my next holiday will go: the husband and I will pack the kids into the car at a civilised hour. We will drive for 10 minutes, have a leisurely brunch somewhere new, then drive for another 10 minutes to our boutique hotel.

It will be spotless and private. There will be flowers on the table, luxury toiletries in the bathroom and plenty of toys for the kids. The beds will be comfortable and configured exactly to our needs. There will be a cosy fire and the mini bar will be full of complimentary treats. Our hosts will have anticipated our every desire.

It will be our own house.

It's called a "holiday at home". Which is not the same as a week off work that you spend at home because the bathroom needs repainting. Nor is it (necessarily) a week spent in front of the television.

A holiday at home means you become a tourist in your own city and transform your home (even just in your mind) into a hotel. That means no work, no chores and no errands. It means abandoning your routine and trying new things: foods, restaurants, parks, attractions.

Yes, it might take a leap of imagination, especially if your home is closer to a backpackers' lodge than a five-star hotel and it rains for the entire week, but if you can pull it off think of the benefits: no expensive airfares, no jetlag, no "are we there yet?", no $9 Mars bars from the mini bar, no need for carbon offsets, no driving in circles in a strange city.

Holidaying at home has caught on so strongly in the US it's got its own buzzword: the "staycation". With the financial crisis and soaring oil prices, staying home has become the new going away.

Like any holiday, a staycation can benefit from preparation. Save for it and set a budget, just as you might for a holiday overseas. Tie up household admin and loose ends before you "go". Use some of the money you might have spent on airfares and accommodation to get gourmet groceries and treats delivered and book a cleaner, a gardener, a lawn-mowing service, a laundry service, a mobile massage therapist and beauty therapist, a dog walker, a nanny - even a personal chef.

Wellington life coach Cassandra Gaisford suggests you pinpoint what you need a holiday from. "What needs to remain the same, what needs to change? If you need a break from walking the dog, or the ageing cat is peeing on the carpet you may want to think about checking them into a pet motel.

"Plan some FTEs - first-time experiences. Rediscover your sense of adventure. Break out of the comfort rut. Your FTEs don't have to be huge - they may be seeing a show or eating something different."

Transforming your surroundings can also help you relax into holiday mode. Ponsonby interior designer Fiona McLeod suggests you ask yourself what it is about a luxury boutique hotel that's appealing.

"For me it's tranquility and minimalism. Get everything off the floor except your furniture and your feet, and completely clear the kitchen bench except for a bowl of fruit. If you have a fireplace, light it, and add to the ambience with candles and aromatherapy.

"Treat yourself. Buy a pile of magazines and fan them out on your coffee table. Buy luxury bath and shower products and splash out on a few extra accessories, like designer cushions, new towels or an ornamental bowl, to make your home slightly different from the norm."

As with any good holiday, a staycation is about eating fun food. If holidays mean lobster and fresh mango, put them on your shopping list. If you regard cooking as a chore, don't do it. Go out for meals at restaurants and cafes you've never tried, or live on "room service" (home-delivered takeaways). If you enjoy cooking, buy gourmet and unfamiliar ingredients and create new dishes.

After our family staycation, we will return home at leisure, perhaps stopping at a cafe on the way to transition out of holiday mode. We will be rested and stimulated. And the bill will be very reasonable.

The rules of a staycation

1. Set a departure time.
To help you make the mental switch to holiday mode, and declare an end date. Get excited.

2. Switch off the world.
No phones, no email, no mail, no internet and definitely no work. Tell your boss you're holidaying in the Sub-Antarctic Islands and can't be contacted.

3. Abandon routine.
Eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired, drink whenever you declare it to be cocktail hour. Let the kids play Scrabble until midnight and give them chocolate for breakfast and Weet-Bix for dinner.

4. Hire "staff"to do your chores.
Do not go on errands or do housework.

5. Diet be damned.
If you even touch that packet of mixed veggies in the freezer, you're disqualified and have to go back to work immediately. Daily icecreams are compulsory.

6. Go on day trips and try new things.
Be a tourist: think dolphin-watching, a harbour cruise, a wine tour, a drive in the country, the Auckland Harbour Bridge walk, shopping somewhere new for something fun. Hire a luxury car, do a wine-tasting course, try something creative, go to the theatre or learn a new sport.

7. Avoid familiarity.
Take the children to playgrounds and parks they've never been to before. Play tennis (if you don't usually). Walk or cycle as much as possible.

8. Spend your holiday allowance frivolously.
Buy a good book and new toys for the kids (and you). Turn your home into a day spa.

9. Send postcards.
Take photos, make videos, buy souvenirs.

10. Host cocktail hour.
Serve your friends daiquiris from coconuts. Better still, invite them for the weekend - even if they live nearby.

- Of course I don't agree with the point about sending your pet away. That to me is the best part of the staycation, you get to enjoy your pet's company too. -

Creating the Page-Turner: Tricks to Great Pacing in Your Books

For twelve years, I wrote a syndicated weekly newspaper column. I only had six hundred words each week, so I learned to wrap the column neatly. The ending was always tied up with a clever image, like a bright bow on a tidy package.

When I went back to college for my MFA in fiction and began my first novel, this search for closure no longer suited my writing.  Novels explore, they expand, they lead to deeper secrets and more adventurous events.  When one of my teachers noticed this tendency to neaten up my chapter endings, she decided to broaden my understanding of pacing.  How it differs in books--as opposed to short pieces
like newspaper columns.

First she tempted me with a question:  Did I want my reader to close my book after each chapter, feeling complete and able to walk away from the story?  Even though my newspaper-trained writing mind yelled, Yes!  I knew the answer was, "Not at all."  I wanted a page turner.

So she shared this amazing trick:  She advised me to read the last paragraph of each chapter and rework it slightly, to pause the story in the midst of an unanswered question, an unfinished situation, or a foreshadowing of problems to come.  To not wrap up anything, really.  To leave the reader in a state of wondering right up to the end of the book, when the story concludes.

Negative Capability--A Lesson from John Keats
The poet John Keats worked extensively with something he called “negative capability.”  This theme appears in much of his work—and in brief, it's the willingness to be unresolved and accept that uncertainty is a good thing.   Not so easy for a closure-lover like myself, trained for years to create airtight packages.  But as I researched this in novels I loved, I realized most of my favorite writers did it.  Whether by accident or by design, they always left me with bigger questions at the end of their chapters than I'd had when I began reading.

I read further on the subject, revisiting the work of Rainier Maria Rilke, and his 1903 book, Letters to a Young Poet.  In this priceless volume, Rilke advises his young friend “to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.” Rilke explained that the answers to these questions “could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now” in hope that we can “live [our] way into the answer.”  

I decided to apply this to my book manuscript.  I was by now convinced that readers might well enjoy this suspension, this openness, in books as a whole and at the end of chapters in particular.  Even though  I had to deliberately unlearn twelve years of a certain writing style, I spent day after day working specifically with this new understanding of pacing in my chapters.

It took months to figure out new endings for my chapters, but once I began to explore the idea of creating incomplete endings, the tension in my book increased dramatically.

Finally my novel was published, and I began to hear from readers who confirmed the effect of this pacing work. I still have the letters and emails.  “I stayed up all night reading your book” and “I couldn’t put it down—I finished one chapter and had to begin the next one to find out what happened.”  Worth all the work, I decided.

If you want to try it, here's the exercise I used.  It's excerpted from my forthcoming book, Your Book Starts Here, which will be published at the end of 2010.


This Week's Writing Exercise

1. Find a published book in your genre and open it at random. Squint at several pages, studying the ratio of white space to dense text.

2. Read two pages aloud. Listen for the sounds, the rhythm. Does it feel fast or slow? Where does the pace vary?

3. Locate a chapter that contains a suspenseful moment or turning point. Notice if the sentences are short or long, if the verbs are particularly vivid. How did this writer adjust pacing to create this tension?

4. Next look at the chapter transitions. Study the paragraph that ends one chapter and the paragraph that begins the next chapter. What effect does it have on you? Are you left with a need to turn the page, read on? Or is there a feeling of things being wrapped up?

5. Copy three paragraphs into your writer’s notebook, changing where they start and stop. See what effect you get with different pacing.

Starting a Law Firm | This and That

Starting a Law Firm | Demand For Posts

I'm back. I actually got a comment today that asked if I could update what I was doing or try to get on a more regular writing schedule so they knew when to check back. I'm trying to write every week, but sometimes I just get too busy to do it. When things pile up, the less important things get pushed back. Sadly, this is a less important thing. With that being said, however, there is this nifty little thing on the right side of the screen that says "subscribe in a reader." Click on it and follow the directions and it will let you know every time I write something new. That way you don't have to keep checking back in all the time.

Postage and Copying Fees

Had a request about postage and copying fees. I buy stamps when I need them. Usually use a book or two per month, depending on what's going on. If I need more I just go buy more.

As for copying, I don't do any copying. If I need a copy of something I scan it into the computer and print it out. That rarely happens. If someone wants a copy of something I try my hardest to let me email it to them so they can print it out if they want to. Part of starting a law firm is controlling costs. This is an easy way to do it.

As for the rest of the office supplies, I go through a package or two of paper a month, and that's about it for office supplies. But you have to remember, I'm a criminal attorney and we don't have a lot of paper flying around like you crazy civil lawyers. We prefer to pick up the phone or send a nasty email when we have a problem instead of filing a bunch of motions (joking...sort of).

New Law Clerk at the Firm

I finally did something I should have done a long time ago and hired a law clerk. She's been working for me for two weeks and it's been awesome. She doesn't really spend any time at the office. I know you're dying to hear about the set up, so here it goes.

I pay her $15 an hour. She just keeps her time and gives it to me. I pay her like a contract employee - so I don't have to worry about taxes. She just gets a 1099 at the end of the year like any other contract employee would. We meet on Mondays for an hour or so. At the meeting we go over what she's been doing and I tell her about new cases I have and new projects I have for her. Then I email her more detailed instructions and any materials I have that can help her get started.

I have a rule that she can come to any court hearing that she wants to. I've got a highrise account so she can see what's scheduled. If she has questions, I answer them. We talk a little strategy here and there and I try to explain why I'm doing what I'm doing. She does her work where ever she wants (she has access to the office but it isn't necessary) and emails me her work when it's done. I use track changes to make comments and suggestions until a final product is created.

Here's the great thing about having a law clerk, though, it cuts my work time in half. If you've been practicing for any amount of time you quickly learn one thing - spotting the issues is the hard part, doing the research is the easy part. But, with that being said, doing the research is the time consuming part. Law clerks love to research and write - it's all they know how to do so far. So it's a great trade off for me. I get to teach a law student how to be a lawyer, and they get to create some great work product doing something they know how to do.

And I guess that's the starting a law firm lesson of the day - learn how to leverage your time. Sure, you could do it all, but how fun is that? And, with the time you save on research and writing you now have that much more time to devote to marketing your law firm, which is just as important (and something your law clerk definitely can't do).

Here's an old post about hiring law clerks. I have no idea what it says!

Phone System Changes

Also wanted to let you know that I have signed up for a free trial with receptionhq.com, a virtual reception company. I found that I was missing too many calls with court and things like that and needed someone to make sure I didn't miss those. I just signed up with them this week and have been pleased with the service so far. The rates are reasonable, and they seem like they know what they are doing, which is nice.

I know you all love hearing about law firm phone systems and the nuts and bolts of starting a law firm so I thought I'd throw you a bone.

Ads on the Site

I decided to put ads on the site, and you may have noticed that. I didn't do that for those of you that actually read these posts, I did it for people that are just passing through and like what they see. Please only click on the ads if you are interested in the product. That's the whole point right?

Have a great weekend. And let me know if there's anything you'd like to talk about specifically.

Emphasise your hero’s good qualities

Once upon a time, there was a king who was just and wise and strong and handsome and clever and all the people in the kingdom loved him. However, he had never found a wife. All the women in the kingdom loved him, of course, but he was so devoted to ruling his kingdom well and enjoying all the wonderful food and wine his subjects produced – particularly the wine – that he had never found the time for marriage.

In order to make his kingdom the best it could be, he took a lot of money off his subjects in taxes, so it was important that he spent lots of money on wine so they would get some of those taxes back. He was a very thoughtful king. And in order to keep his kingdom safe, he executed a criminal every day and hung the body on the gate of his palace. Some days, the king’s guards had to work very hard to find someone who looked like a criminal!

One day, he was walking in the grounds of his palace when he saw a beautiful servant girl carrying two pails of milk to the kitchen. The king, being a romantic at heart, noticed that with her hands full, there was no way the servant girl could stop him touching her...