No More Football

We are one nation under God. Let’s keep it that way. We can disagree on religion, politics and just about any other topic you can think of. You can divide us into categories based on what we look like, where our ancestors came from, what we believe, what we read, what we watch or in any other way you choose. BUT we are all Americans and we stand united as one nation.

To symbolize our unity as a nation, we have chosen a flag of 50 stars and 13 stripes. It’s red, white and blue. When our precious flag waves it means we are still the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” Anyone who desecrates the American flag or refuses to honor it during the playing of our national anthem disrespects what America stands for.

America is not a perfect place. No country is perfect. It’s right to protest when you believe you have been wronged or when you feel a disenfranchised group needs to raise its voice. But when the flag is raised and our national anthem is played, we should all stand together as one. One of the best examples of this unity in diversity concept has traditionally been our sports events. Two teams, bitter enemies, stand together as Americans to honor the flag and our national anthem before the game begins. There are plenty of opportunities to protest or express your personal beliefs without seeking to break the bond of unity that is our nation.

With the recent decision of professional football players to dishonor the anthem, I have decided to dishonor the sport of professional football by no longer watching the game on television or attending any professional games. You are invited to join me in this protest.

Write That Book!

Blog Your Way to a Book Series #1

Writing a business book is one of the scariest of activities. Yet, becoming an author is often the key to opening the door to promotions and new job offers, launching a new business, taking a local business global, and increasing sales. Along the way, your book project becomes the means for taking your expertise to a new level through research and learning opportunities associated with your book project.

But Paul, book writing is such a huge project!
You can handle it because you’re not going to sit down and write a book. You’re busy and you don’t have the time in today’s fast paced world. What you do have time to accomplish is a blog. With enough planning upfront, you can turn your blog posts into a book. Think what you can do with a 15-minute daily commitment. And if you find you have more time on your hands for the writing process, you can speed the whole thing up and get your book to market faster.

How book is a book?
Books in the traditional book store sense can run to several hundred pages. But with the Internet, people are self-publishing ebooks of a much shorter length. With planning, you can write a series of small books and later combine them into one large book so you don’t have to wait for long before you have your book up on Amazon. And you do it by first writing blog posts.

Hey, Paul, I don’t know what to write about.
You may feel that you are no expert like those national gurus who come around making speeches and selling lots of books and six-figure consulting gigs. Guess what? Those folks didn’t start out as experts either. They became specialists when they combined their knowledge and experience with a boatload of research needed to write a book about their topic. And they don’t think of their book as an educational tool for a grad school class. Instead, they use it like a company brochure or business card to minimize or eliminate their competition.

I’ll write more about what it means to be an expert in the next post in this series. In the meantime, start thinking about your area of expertise. What would make a good book topic for you? And begin having fun by outlining and writing about your book idea. And if you would like my coaching help, post a comment below or contact me through my company’s info@ email address at ironlayersecurity.com.

Read Like a Writer

Read Like a Writer Series #1

In high school and college literature classes you are taught to read like a critic. In criticism, you are concerned about how the novel, short story or poem fits into the long history of literature. To understand the book you are reading, you want to first have an understanding of the main currents in English and American literature. As part of this study, you will learn about story structure, but the main focus is on the way the story fits with other stories in the same genre or school of literature.

Writing a story is about constructing a story that hooks your interest and holds it to the end. The more the writer knows about literary tradition, the better the writer will be at producing a story consistent with past trends in literature. But the main issue for the writer is crafting an interesting story rather than its literary merit. To put this in perspective, I have heard too many literature professors over the years say something along the lines of: “We know a good story when we read one, but we can’t always tell why it’s good.” That’s a critical opinion. A writer on the other hand better know what makes a good story good or he or she won’t be able to write a good story.

This blog series is about how to read a novel or short story like a writer writes a story. The first rule in reading a story is to simply enjoy it. If it’s no fun to read, then it’s okay to not finish it. An author has to earn your reading time by holding your interest.

Rule number 2 in reading a story is on you. You are allowed to stop reading at the words THE END and move on to another story. However, if you ever wondered how the writer “did it.” That is, how the writer got you excited about the story and moved you in some way, then you want to turn back to the beginning of the story and take another look. This series is about what to look for when you take that second look. Over time you will learn to see some of these things the first time around, but it’s always okay to take a second look at a favorite story. And a third, a fourth, a fifth, etc. It’s up to you.

I would be honored if you chose one of my stories for your next reading experience. If you do, please let me know how you enjoyed it by commenting below or on Amazon. I also enjoy hearing from readers at my author’s email address which is paul dot lloyd dot author at gmail dot com. (Thanks for taking time to figure that email address out so I don’t have to worry about the spider bots getting me.)

Be sure to click on the BOGO button above for my latest buy one, get one free book offer.

Are you a big wheel?

Work-Life Balance Series

Picture an auto tire mounted on a fancy wheel with golden spokes. Notice how the spokes crisscross each other. The spokes are gold, the tire is black. The overall effect is of an upscale wheel fit for a driver who appreciates the finer things. People who drive cars with spoked wheels can afford anything they want.

Look at the spokes carefully. See how they crisscross? On the job, your team crisscrosses like this when they share responsibilities. When your team works in harmony like this, it’s a beautiful sight to behold. When your team fails to act together, the results won’t hold air and your project will go flub... flub... flub down the road until it comes to a halt. The team achieves nothing.

Be careful how your work team crisscrosses its roles. The person who is best at a certain task should be the one who performs that task. It’s okay to crisscross roles on occasion but don’t overdo it. Switch roles to help each other carry their burdens.

Now, a product that looks like a high-priced wheel is fit for the carriage set. Price such a product high because they are willing to pay. You might not sell as many of these products, but your financial return on each one will be great. Which of your products is the high price one with the crisscrossed golden spokes? How much do you want to charge for it? It’s okay to be outrageous with the pricing of one of your products. It will make the others seem a better buy and you will sell more of those.

Do you want to give one product away? Double the price of another to earn back the money you lose through the giveaway. The other products are to be priced progressively in-between.

Where to find story ideas worthy of your writing time

What do you like to write about? As the brand statement in my banner above states, I focus on writing "Fiction that explores the monsters and strangers among us.” I also write nonfiction on assignment from companies and individuals, especially those who want to publish or self-publish their own business books. But fiction is what I love to write because, at heart, I’m a story teller. The “monsters and strangers” bit comes from something that happens almost every time I create a story. A monster shows up or a weird person pops in who definitely fits the definition of “stranger” that your mother warned you to stay away from.

There’s an old song with the line “Love is Strange” recorded by Mickey & Sylvia. The title is especially true when the lovers in a tale include at least one strange person or monster.

I enjoy spinning yarns about lovers in the moonlight, but don’t be surprised if one of my lovers grows a long snout, sharp fangs and lots of hair when the moon is full.

So where do my strange story ideas come from? Sometimes I begin with a single sentence that pops into my mind or when I have a young man in mind who is about to meet the girl. As I wander down the page with the keys clicking like crazy, something happens in chapter 4 or 5 or 6 when a monster or stranger shows up. I dump the first 4 or 5 or 6 chapters and begin with the stranger. Why? Strangers are interesting. Lovers only so-so. I have to admit that as I have grown as an author, I'm less likely to dump an entire chapter. Instead, I  just hang out at my desk until the monster shows up so I can start the story with reader-grabbing moment.

Other times I recall a nightmare and write about it. It could be a regular, ordinary nice dream, but those usually aren’t memorable enough to make it to the keyboard.

Another place story ideas show up is when you play the “what if” game. What if a boy meets a girl at the beach and they fall in love? Nah, it’s been done. How can we make it more interesting? Boy meets girl? Well, duh, that has to happen, but what if it’s not a pleasant first meeting? What if the meeting takes place in a forbidden place?

Here’s an example…
What if a teenage boy wakes up in the middle of the night to discover the girl he has a crush on has pointed a pistol at him. It’s not the way he imagined her in his bedroom at that hour. She proceeds to insult his private parts that, as far as he can recall, she has never seen, but she insults them anyway.

The girl fires her pistol.

Fortunately, the boy’s best friend breaks in with a possible female terrorist. They’re both carrying military-style rifles with bayonets fixed. The teenage girl terrorist takes out pistol girl all the way through the bedroom window. The boy’s best friend announces “This didn’t happen.” He then leaves with the terrorist.

As it turns out, the female terrorist isn’t a fanatic at all. She’s a teenage alien shapeshifter from some planet on the other side of the galaxy who crashed on earth and is now dodging the men in black. The boy could chalk up the whole episode to a nasty dream, except that doesn’t explain the actual bullet hole above his bed, does it? And it doesn’t explain the broken window his teenage crush crashed through with a bayonet sticking out of her chest.

And that’s just for starters.

I find the events described above fascinating, especially when you find out that the young lady who fired the weapon is still alive, was never stabbed, and has no recollection of the event despite the bullet hole’s continued existence above the boy’s bed. How does the boy with the crush know all this? It becomes obvious when the girl climbs back in through the window the next night with romance in mind.

The right story idea leads to interesting events, places and the strangers among us. It’s why I like to write about them in my novels. If you want to read how the story described above turns out, download a copy of my ebook Snpgrdxz and the Time Monsters from Amazon. Also available in paperback.

How to Get Started Writing Your Own Business Book

Business Book Writing Made Easy Series

How would it feel to hand a book with your name as the author to a sales prospect or business associate? Maybe you just want to impress your boss or other higher ups in your company. Or you want to enhance your job hunting prospects. Maybe you can even use a business book to jumpstart your own business.

You know showing up at work with your own self-published business book would send your credibility through the roof, wouldn’t it? A business book is the most powerful marketing tool you can imagine. Among the many uses for a business book, you can:

1. Engage your customers at the very time they are thinking about your topic.
2. Position yourself as the expert instead of somebody just trying to sell something.
3. Teach your customers the way you want them taught

With a business book, your voice dominates the reader’s mind while they consider your topic and related products and services. With a book writing plan you can accomplish the following:

1. Write and edit your book better and faster so your readers can’t put it down
2. Build your online readership before you market your book
3. Add to your credibility as a speaker and subject matter expert (SME)

Take the first step
Writing your first business book is like eating an elephant. It’s overwhelming. Instead of tackling an entire book, just write the outline. That’s the first step in your business book writing plan. There are many more steps along the way that I simply can’t cover in a single blog post. But here’s a bonus step that will help you get started writing from your outline. Take one item from your outline and write about it for use in information outlets like:

1. Trade Magazine article
2. Email Newsletter (Yours and other people’s)
3. Blog post (Yours and other people’s)
4. You Tube Video
5. Website content

Later, you can repurpose the content you created around a single idea or bullet point from your book outline back into your book as a chapter or portion of a chapter.

Questions?
I’ll include more about writing your own business book in future posts, but if you want to jumpstart your business book writing process, email your questions to me. Use BOOK QUESTION in the subject line. If you would like to book (no pun intended) me for a speaking gig on how to write business books, use SPEAKER REQUEST as the subject line. The email address is the proper format for paul at zuklloyd dot com. Or click here.

The Baby Boom Generation Caused Global Warming

That’s right, folks. I figured it out this morning while lollygagging in bed doing what comes natural to me until I realized that every Boomer on the planet does the same thing. Think about it. I’m not talking about the occasional blip, blat or pfft. Not at all.

Do you realize how huge the population of Boomers is? We’re the biggest population bubble ever to burst onto the scene. And here we are today in our senior moments making like Machinegun Kelly. The atmosphere never had a chance with Boomers firing their guns at once and exploding into space to cause a huge buildup of methane in the upper atmosphere.

As you well know methane is the primary cause of global warming. Just ask any cow. Yes, Boomers in our great numbers have become the cause of the worldwide warm up. The only thing safe for us to do is return to those days of yesteryear of calm, relaxing youth when nothing worried us, not even the occasional skull found in a field by the woods where we used to play Army and kill each other.

Global warming is real, folks, so you have another reason to worry about those pesky underwear changing moments or the occasional SBD. As the prophet Pogo warned in the Book of Possum, “We have met the enemy and they are us.”