business

by

NVCL/NSWA Writing with Writers Workshop – North Vancouver City Library, February 7, 2018

NVCL/NSWA Writing with Writers Workshop –

North Vancouver City Library, February 7, 2018 7:00 – 8:30pm

 

I’ll be teaching a writing workshop on Romance writing to the public in February, jointly sponsored by the North Shore City Library and the North Shore Writers’ Association. Perfectly timed for Valentine’s Day. Here’s the promotional blurb:

Romance Writing: The Power of that Dynamic Allure

Presented by Mary Ann Clarke Scott

 

Have you ever wondered how romance fiction differs from other genres? Or what’s going on in a romance novel besides kissing? Have you ever wondered if you could be the next Nora Roberts? Then this workshop is for you.

 

Chatelaine Grand Prize winner and NSWA member, Mary Ann Clarke Scott, will guide us through the writer’s contract with the reader. We’ll examine the roles of the Heroine and Hero in this character dominant genre, and look at the internal emotional character arcs.

 

Bring pen and paper, or laptop, and be prepared to join in, as Mary Ann Clarke Scott, challenges, educates, and inspires the amorous spirit in all of us.

 

 

Come out for an evening of hands-on writing instruction and learn some key facts about writing romance and women’s fiction. “Friends of the Library” serve wine, and it’s a great opportunity to meet me in person, and to buy print copies of my books. I’ll even sign yours if you do!

 

 

 

by

A Busy Month of Author Appearances, Conferences & Networking

It’s been such a hectic month I haven’t managed to post any news. Here’s an overview of what I’ve been up to.

Vancouver Public Library Indie Author Day

The first annual Indie Author Day at the Vancouver Public Library was also my first public appearance as a published author. I met with several other authors that I knew, including Joel Mark Harris, Christine Dodd and fellow RWA member Cheri Champaigne, with whom I shared a table. I also did a short reading from my book Reconcilable Differences.

img_1253img_1244img_2880img_1250

Surrey International Writer’s Conference

For the first time in several years, I attended the Surrey Writer’s Conference as a full delegate and indulged in inspiring keynote speakers such as Daniel Jose Older, workshops and panel discussions with new authors and perennial favorites such as Diana Gabaldon, did a blue pencil session on an unpublished manuscript with favorite author Susanna Kearsley and pitched the same to a few agents and editors, garnering several requests for submissions. Fingers crossed and good luck to book two in the Having It All series: Coming About.

img_2913img_2911

Author Signing at Indigo Park Royal in West Vancouver

My first author signing event involved a bit of nerves and fretting, but ended up being a ton of fun as friends and family stopped by to buy books, get them signed and wish me well. And a few strangers too! Far better than the dreaded picture of me sitting alone in the book store at the mall having people walk by while avoiding eye contact and listening to the proverbial crickets.

img_2931

Vancouver Women’s Conference

Finally yesterday I attended the full day inaugural Vancouver Women’s Conference organized and hosted by TV and radio personality and sex expert Maureen McGrath who brought together a room full of speakers and presenters to focus on issues of interest and concern, including the new POTUS, women in the workplace, balancing life and work, sexual health, assault and healing, empowerment, business modeling, mothering, fertility and menopause, and even fashion.

img_2943

And that’s all, except for the fact that it’s National Novel Writing Month now, and I’m supposed to be hunkering down to revise and complete Coming About, book two in the Having It All series. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could get it published by later winter or early spring 2017. That’s what I’m aiming for.

In the meantime, one last promotional effort for Reconcilable Differences, which is free on Amazon Kindle today and tomorrow. So if you’re still looking for a digital copy, now’s your chance. Click here to start reading today.

A final request: if you’ve read it or plan to, don’t forget to leave a rating and review on Amazon or Goodreads. That way I can get put away my promoters hat and back to writing more stories. Thanks!

by

RECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES AVAILABLE NOW

Reconcilable Differences book cover

Published!

I can’t believe it but it’s finally true. You can finally buy my first novel, Reconcilable Differences as an ebook on Amazon HERE. The beautiful trade paperback edition will be released within the next couple of weeks as the interior layout details are finalized.

Despite all my frantic worry about how it would happen, it just happened in its own sweet chaotic way and of course all out of order and in defiance of any plans I might have made.

The Business of Selling Books

So. Phew. You’d think the pressure would be off. But you’d be wrong. Now I’ve got most of the technical publishing stuff out of the way, I’ve got my author-preneur hat shoved tightly onto my head, and that’s a whole other arena of activity and worries. I’m finally in the position to make sense of, choose and implement a raft of book marketing strategies that I’ve been studying for quite some time.

There are too many to mention, not all of them appropriate for me. And no one could do them all. Giveaway and contests, special promotions, discounts and bonus incentives, book reviews and bloggers. All to build an email list, create brand recognition, improve rankings and of course, I hope, sell books.

Sometimes I wonder if the big business opportunity of the day is educating, coaching and selling products and services TO the gazillion new independent authors in the world. And of course any fiction author will tell you that this business stuff isn’t the reason we all buried our heads in the figurative sands of our imagination. Well it is, but in an inverse sort of way. How ironic that the publishing industry asks this of us more than ever before.

 By the way you can find Reconcilable Differences online HERE.

via GIPHY

The Philosophy of Vulnerability

Aside from the stresses of publishing and marketing, I’ve been losing sleep and contending with rats in my brain this last few days for an entirely different reason. The moment I hit “publish” I’ve been riddled with anxiety, torn between the urge to run for the hills, delete the book, unplug from all social media, and spend the rest of my days contentedly growing organic heirloom tomatoes. And alternatively, giddily tell everyone I know about my first very kind five star review on Amazon and ask them to tell their friends to buy my book and give me more hugs. Or stars. Or Olympic medals, whatever. I’m easy to please.

My fear, of course, is that someone will find fault. That someone will loath my book and point out it’s flaws for all the world to see. Or tell me that it’s well-enough written but it’s a stupid or boring book in the first place. Isn’t this what I’ve been avoiding all these years? But this is a foolish fear. Of course this is guaranteed to happen. Someone will hate it. Suddenly I’m deeply sympathetic with everyone who throughout history has published their words, shared their art or music, or for that matter, represented their country in a big race for an Olympic gold medal. But hopefully someone will love it too. Many someones.

It Takes A Thick Skin to Share Your Gifts 

via GIPHY

That’s part of the territory. It’s time to thicken up my skin and step forward. Feel the fear and do it anyway. If you’re a creative person, the day will come where you have to share what you’ve done with the world. This is where I have to remind myself of the benefits of following my dream, pushing outside of my comfort zone, taking risks and living in the moment. All of which I’ve been trying to do these days. I don’t want, on my deathbed, to regret that I’d been given gifts and failed to use or share them.

Next Steps

Now, I think, is a good time to revert to my best practices. Taking care of myself, spending time with mindfulness, which for me means hiking in the rainforest, and getting centered. Tapping into the part of me that connects with the source of story ideas and the urge to write and share them in the first place. A reminder of why I do this, and hopefully the motivation and drive to carry on. Maybe one of my characters will speak to me, and help me decide whether to work on Book Two of the Having It All series or continue with revisions on Book One of the Growing Into My Skin series.

Please Comment!

If you can relate to this, either to doing, the risking or the fearing, now is the time to share. I know I’ll feel a lot better knowing I’m not alone in these feelings. And I’ll bet you will too. So leave a comment below, telling me what you’ve done, or still dream of doing, that makes you feel vulnerable. Or share what you do to cope with this. Everyone who comments will be entered into a draw for a free copy of my ebook, Reconcilable Differences.

by

Digital Age Workers and Jobs of the Future – Part 2

Education is More Important than Ever to Prepare for Future Jobs

Continuing from Monday’s post:

Jeremy Rifkin, American economic and social theorist, presents the argument that an emerging zero-marginal-cost sharing economy will make itself felt most strongly in the labour market, where “new employment opportunities lie in the collaborative commons in fields that tend to be nonprofit and strengthen social infrastructure — education, health care, aiding the poor, environmental restoration, child care and care for the elderly, the promotion of the arts and recreation.” (The Sunday Review, March 15, 2014 and on CBC Ideas.

 

In this new economy, the youngest generations at last emerge to take the upper hand. They who have been weaned on digital communication technology and the new social practices that accompany it will be best suited to navigate this new economic and social reality.

IMG_6806

They who have been weaned on digital communication technology and the new social practices that accompany it will be best suited to navigate this new economic and social reality.

 

Rifkin argues that the first impact of the “Third Industrial Revolution” will be a massive “rollout of hardware buildout” to accommodate digitization and new renewable energy sources. Overlaid and subsequent to this forty year transformation of our physical plant, the vast majority of jobs in the new automated world will manifest in the growing social economy, including education and welfare.

 

The trick is to facilitate the change. Despite doubts about the challenges of supporting and realizing this global transformation and ensuring its truly democratic impacts expressed by Bob Rae, Anita McGahen and Janice Stein on the CBC Ideas panel, the alternative, the status quo, looks grim.

 

All of these changes make possible a better, laterally integrated, democratized society that enables a liberation of human potential unprecedented in human history. Toward this end, new jobs will universally depend upon education. The question remains: who will get it?

 

It’s been argued that the steadily rising cost of education, combined with increasingly scarce financial aid for students, is taking a professional, or even a basic undergraduate degree, beyond the reach of the working poor, and even the middle class.

 

Returning to the question of competition for education and jobs, it’s been argued that the steadily rising cost of education, combined with increasingly scarce financial aid for students, is taking a professional, or even a basic undergraduate degree, beyond the reach of the working poor, and even the middle class.

 

While competing for advanced education becomes more challenging due to rising costs and competition, education alone is not enough to guarantee success.

 

Students of today, and young workers, must be conscious of how technology is changing the very fabric of our world, and therefore influencing the shape of the job market in the near and distant future. Making wise and fruitful educational choices depends upon being able to see into the future and to strategize accordingly. They may intuit and take for granted the new world they live in, including technology and the new sharing economy, but they will do better to understand how it works, how it differs from the world of the past, and their place within it.

 

Students of today, and young workers, must be conscious of how technology is changing the very fabric of our world, and therefore influencing the shape of the job market in the near and distant future.

 

As baby boomers prepare for retirement, it is important that they also consider the legacy they leave behind. They must not turn their backs on a world that is increasingly difficult to understand. Rather they must ask: Are the youth who will replace them prepared to function, run and thrive in the society that is emerging in their wake? And what can be done now, while they are still in positions of power and influence, to ensure that the next generation will succeed?

 

Mary Ann Clark Scott, formerly an architect and environmental gerontologist, currently works as an education savings advisor, a novelist, corporate storyteller and freelance writer.
by

Digital Age Workers and Jobs of the Future – Part 1

file000898499863Digital Age Workers and Jobs of the Future

 

As a mother and aunt of a few young digital-age millennials, I often ponder the particular challenges these emerging adults face in our overwhelming and rapidly changing world, and how they will fare in the future.

 

In the last century, post-war changes to society, including wider access to education, industrialization, a growth economy, the sexual revolution, and changing social values tended to have a flattening effect on social hierarchies and increase opportunities for advancement and success. The world we now live in is very different.

 

“Canada’s economy is built on a simple but deeply entrenched belief: that every new generation will do better than the one before it.” MacLeans Magazine

 

Personal observations lead me to agree with Jason Kirby’s opinion back in 2009 that the above may no longer be true. The reality for today’s youth is increasingly the opposite. Costs of living are higher, incomes lower and debt even greater than they have been in previous decades.

 

Young graduates have a much harder time getting established than did previous generations.

 

Economic recessions combined with competition for jobs with established and as-ever numerically advantaged baby boomers, as well as a rapidly evolving, technologically changing job market, mean that young graduates have a much harder time getting established than did previous generations.

 

Evidence that today’s young adults suffer from anxiety and depression in unprecedented numbers, as well as often cited statistics about late launchers and boomerang kids, support this notion.

 

The January 24th issue of The Economist included a pair of articles pointing to “America’s New Aristocracy” and “An Hereditary Meritocracy”  which reveal that America’s founding principal of equal opportunity for advancement and success is being undermined by systemic filtering.

 

Wealthy, educated and powerful couples tend to beget more of the same, and both educational and career advantages, from cradle to college, accrue to the children of the existing elite, meaning that opportunities for success are slipping away from the rest.

 

The amount of recent political dialogue about the fate of the “middle class” and ensuing debates about how to define this term shine a light on the growing struggle average Canadians have to survive and thrive.

 

There seems to be general consensus that the “middle class” is growing, and the gap between the middle class and the privileged elite is widening.

 

While it’s no surprise that politicians are free with this term, even economists who insist on statistical definitions do not agree. Despite this, there seems to be general consensus that the “middle class” is growing, and the gap between the middle class and the privileged elite is widening.

 

This phenomenon in part explains the widespread growth in income disparity. “[An] OECD report shows Canada is near the top of the heap in terms of both growth in income disparity over the past three decades and in absolute terms.” http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/canadian-income-disparity-growing/

 

Add another ingredient to the mix: the changing nature of our economy in terms of both the types of jobs that are emerging (and disappearing) and the emergent alternate economy that social media and the internet have spawned.

 

Jeremy Rifkin, American economic and social theorist, presents the argument that an emerging zero-marginal-cost sharing economy will make itself felt most strongly in the labour market, where “new employment opportunities lie in the collaborative commons in fields that tend to be nonprofit and strengthen social infrastructure — education, health care, aiding the poor, environmental restoration, child care and care for the elderly, the promotion of the arts and recreation.” (The Sunday Review, March 15, 2014 and on CBC Ideas.

To be continued July 1, 2015…

Mary Ann Clark Scott, formerly an architect and environmental gerontologist, currently works as an education savings advisor, a novelist, corporate storyteller and freelance writer.
by

The Cut Direct

WHERE HAS BUSINESS ETIQUETTE GONE?

 

images-2

BY-GONE DAYS

 

Those of you who read Regency fiction will know what this term means: The cut direct. For those that don’t, it refers to the social snub, a complete diss. Which was done very rarely only under extreme circumstances when a person was in the wrong place at the wrong time or behaving in an inappropriate way for their social class or the setting, or importantly was known to have done something shocking or socially unacceptable. It was extreme and it was noteworthy and it was a shocking cut down.

 

It was not done simply because you were too busy or self-important or didn’t like someone. Despite the accentuated social hierarchy in Regency England, people in those days understood that every person was worthy of acknowledgment regardless of their place. Whether a servant, a merchant or a member of the nobility, everyone had an appropriate address and everyone was acknowledged. It was ungentlemanly and unkind to treat people badly or to just simply ignore them. Not that there were not social boors then as now.

 

Which brings me to my reason for my blog post today which admittedly is a bit of a rant. This is been bothering me for sometime now.

 

Be Nice or LeaveFALLING STANDARDS

 

In the last couple of years, I’ve had occasion to apply for employment or to make inquiries with a number of business people. And I’m frankly still shocked at the lack of appropriate business etiquette that seems to be the norm in today’s world.

I sometimes wonder if it it’s a problem unique to the younger generation but I hope that that’s not the case and I would rather not believe that.

 

Although if it is a demographic phenomenon I can only assume that the current generation have learned their bad habits or failed to learn good habits from their parents, teachers and mentors. Perhaps we simply forgot to pass along what we understood and took for granted.

 

Free-Vector-3d-Social-Media-Icons-Pack-2012-New-Twitter-StumbleUpon-PinterestANOTHER CASUALTY OF THE ELECTRONIC AGE?

 

Alternatively, and more likely, this can perhaps be explained by our sudden global immersion into an age of electronic communication. Early on (The 80s and 90s?) there was some kerfuffle about lack of etiquette in email communications and people talked about that and took the time to critique and to pass along what they felt were important guidelines for appropriate behavior.

 

Now of course we have Facebook and Twitter and Instragram and LinkedIn. All these new, abbreviated forms of communication added to our options for and to further confuse our standards of appropriate social congress.

 

But things have clearly gotten out of hand.

 

Standards of behavior and modes of communication that might arguably be appropriate for some of the new social media platforms should not therefore translate into our person-to-person, face-to-face interactions. I should say that this does not apply to follows, friends and likes. But I’ll leave advice about what’s appropriate on those platforms to the social media experts.

 

telephone and keyboard in officeA SOCIAL OBLIGATION

 

It used to be and not so very long ago that if you phoned someone and left a message they were socially obligated to return your phone call. It didn’t matter if they were busy or if they didn’t want to talk to you or even if they didn’t like you. The onus was on them and it reflected poorly on them if they simply ignored your message. The same went for written communications and invitations, which clearly extends into the world of e-mail. It maybe electronic but it’s still mail.

 

If you’re very busy and very important… It’s likely you have staff and one of their responsibilities is to take care of your correspondence. Note the word correspondence: the CO and the RE meaning that it involves two parties and it’s reciprocal.

 

Sadly we live in an era of spam. We are all of us bombarded with email spam, with advertising, with telephone solicitations of every kind. All of them intrusions into our privacy (you remember privacy don’t you?) And the stuff of course must be ignored and should be ignored but that’s another rant.

 

But I’m talking about our personal one-to-one communications. The kind that impacts on our daily lives and our livelihood. I realize that sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between one and the other. It’s my belief that we need to assume that a person who’s contacting us with their own name has a good reason to do so, is doing their job and pursuing some worthy goal and deserves to be acknowledged respectfully and politely. Until proven otherwise.

 

trash behind mesh fence

FINISH WHAT YOU START

 

Furthermore if you initiate communication with a person or persons and then someone responds to that you owe them the courtesy of a reply. If you post a job and receive responses to that in the appropriate mode and manner then the onus is on you and it is appropriate business etiquette to acknowledge and reply to those responses. It is just plain rude to ignore them.

 

No matter how busy or important you are you owe those people the respect of an acknowledgment. Very likely you have staff whose job it is to do exactly that. It’s up to you to say thank you for responding and then let people know if the position is been filled or if their application is unsuitable. They’re worthy of that. Has our new, electronic age of communication so depersonalized our exchanges with other human beings that we can now without compunction treat them like trash?

 

Everyone’s time is valuable. If someone made the effort to find your notice, to prepare materials, and to submit them, how can you imagine that it’s alright to just ignore them? Is that how you treat your clients? Is that how you want to be treated? Let’s remember the golden rule people. We’re supposed to be living in a civilized society.

 

It reflects very poorly on you and on your business and business practices. This applies equally in personal and social situations. And yet regretfully it seems to be the new norm.

 

What about you? Have you received “the cut direct”? How did it make you feel? Did it change your opinion of that person or company? If you agree with me, how do you think we, as a society, can address this failing? Create courses for students to teach social and business etiquette? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.