More ways to find me

I'm writing more than just this blog.  As a matter of fact, you've probably read something I've written and not even known it was from me; as a freelance writer, I spend a lot of time ghostwriting web content for others.

Now, though, it's time to branch out.  Here are some ways to find more from me:

• Examiner.com:  Have you checked out my column over on Examiner.com?  I'm writing every weekday about consumer issues, how-tos, taste and product tests and just general tips for ways to enjoy life better, less expensively and with less stress.  Examiner.com is a great website containing everything from hard-hitting news to celebrity and entertainment and everything in between.  Subscribe at the link above and never miss a day of ways to make your life better.
• Grandma Adventures:  The first book in my "Grandma Adventures" series, called "Grandma's Alphabet" is available on Amazon.com in both e-book and paperback formats.  The Grandma Adventures website is now running a serialized version of my new "tweens" book, "Tracking the Elephant in the Room."  Every week, I'm posting the next chapter of the story of twins, Aggie and Abby MacEwan, as they solve the mystery of the missing Kalahari Elephant.
• Business books and seminars:  I now have five business books available on Amazon.com, the latest of which is "Texts and Email Are Ruining My Life!"  And I'll be coming to a city or company near you during 2016, with Lunch & Learns about things like email management, time management and how to provide feedback to your team without conflict.  For more information about having me speak to your company, email me at laurie@right-scribe.com and we'll get you all the information!

I'll continue to post here when something new comes up as well as my usual thoughts about what's going on in the world, so thank you for following me on this adventure!  I appreciate it more than you know.

New book available on Amazon.com!

The latest book in my "Grandma Adventures" series is now available on Amazon!  Called "Grandma's Alphabet," the book is designed to encourage communications between adults and children, especially older adults and grandparents.  For those without grandparents, it helps foster love for older ones by showing they can be fun, silly and full of laughter.

"Grandma Adventures" is a book series with three sections:

• Early childhood:  Books will include alphabet, colors, animals, numbers and other primary learning tools for little ones.
• Childhood:  Grandma Laurie will take older children on adventures by letting imagination turn a backyard into a safari, a kitchen into a restaurant and a bedroom into a scavenger hunt.
• Pre-teens:  Follow the adventures of Aggie and Abby MacEwan, twins with a special knack for solving mysteries.  Written similar to the Nancy Drew Mysteries, these books will encourage reading for fun.

Join in the fun!  First, go to Grandma Adventures page for serialization of my new pre-teen book, "Tracking the Elephant in the Room," then go to Amazon and order a copy of one of my books, ranging from business books to children's books.

Thank you so much for your support!

"Texts and Emails Are Ruining My Life!!!" Latest book is live!

Are you addicted to texts and email?  Does your family complain that you're spending more time looking at your phone than talking with them?  Do you take your phone into the bathroom so you can quickly reply to texts and email?

There are solutions to ridding yourself from these problems and they're addressed in my latest book:  "Texts and Emails Are Ruining My Life!"

One of the biggest problems with texting and emails is the fact that they are one-dimensional.  When you send a text or an email, the recipient can't see your face or body language, which can cause an issue if your language is misunderstood.  Sending what you think is funny may be offensive to someone else, especially if they can't hear your voice in their heads and know what you mean.

For example, a business man went to China for the first time, on business.  He had communicated with his Chinese counterparts by email to set up their meeting but had never spoken to them or met them in person.  He texted those he was supposed to meet and asked where they were to meet; he couched the language as a joke, one he and his friends would have understood and laughed.  Unfortunately, those he texted didn't get the joke and thought he was making fun of them.  Needless to say, the joke ultimately was on the American business man - he lost the account.

Could he have avoided the problem?  Certainly.  There are three questions to ask before sending a text:  Is it necessary?  Is it simple and understandable?  Can it be done better on the phone or in person?

Other topics covered include how to tell if you're addicted, text and email truths, getting yourself rebalanced and keeping up once you get there.

Get your copy of "Texts and Emails Are Ruining My Life!" at Amazon.com !!

Writing For My Life - New Book Announcements!

I haven't posted in a while, not because I have nothing to say, but because I have too much to say.  As a freelance writer, I spend most of my days writing for other people - putting their ideas and dreams into readable form.  And when you write for others, sometimes, your own thoughts get lost.

When my most recent contract ended, I was at a loss - what was I going to write today?  I had to look for more work, but while I was between gigs, I decided I would write - just write.  The result?  Two new books.

My best friend teases me all the time, that she's the brawn and I'm the brains of the operation.  She's a retired firefighter, now living in New York, working on a large volunteer construction project; I'm so proud of her.  I wish I had the talent or the health to be able to do what she does.  I can't lift, walk, stand or do anything that requires any physical strength.  I wouldn't have the first idea about driving a forklift, something at which she excels.  So I'm consigned to sit and write.

Julie laughed when I told her I was going to write a book while between jobs.  "I don't know anyone else who would just sit down and decide to write a book while trying to find work."  We're quite a pair.

Anyway, the result of this period of forced non-working is that I've written my second children's book, which will ultimately be part of a childrens' book series called, "The Grandma Adventures."  This book is "Grandma's Alphabet," a simple alphabet book for toddlers, designed to be read with an adult and encourages conversation.  My beta readers love it and I've started a Publishizer campaign to help raise money to have it professionally illustrated.  No one wants to see what my drawings might be.

The second book came as the result of a conversation about my email management book, "Help!  My Email Is Ruling My Life!"  The book was originally intended to help new managers get a grip on their email, which explodes when one goes from being managed to managing.  Things have changed so much just since the book was originally written in 2012, to the point where everyone needs help not just with email, but also with texting.  What is the etiquette of texting?  How many texts in a row are too many?  So I decided it was time to refocus my original book and go with something fit for anyone, not just those in business.  The title is still being worked out and beta readers have given us some really great feedback.

We'll post more as we get closer to publication.  In the meantime, thank you so much for your support.  Can't wait for everyone to see what's next!

Leading A Life ... In Lead, South Dakota - Part 2

As I mentioned in the last column, I was able to return to my old home in Lead, South Dakota.  Lead hasn't been a thriving community since at least 2001, when they started the process of shutting down the Homestake Gold Mine, but what I was on this visit stunned me.

Here is a town that, in the 1930s, was one of the few areas in the country that didn't suffer through the Great Depression.  Because Homestake supplied most of the gold used by the government to back its currency, there were more jobs than people and everyone in Lead had plenty.  Homes were well taken care of.  Roads were better than those in most metropolitan areas.  The community's pride was evident.

Today, the town has definitely fallen on desperate times.  The impact of the Homestake closure is clear.  When we lived there, my late husband was a house painter and most of the homes he had painted in town had not been touched since he did the paint job, which was over 10 years ago.  Many of the homes stand vacant; the owners who had paid their homes off before the mine closed simply locked the door and walked away when they couldn't sell after the shutdown.  Those who owed money on their homes were foreclosed upon.  Regardless the reason, the number of vacant homes in Lead is startling.

The biggest blight on the landscape was seeing what happened to Homestake over the last ten years since I last was in Lead.  In years past, the mountainside next to the road leading from Lead into Deadwood was stacked with the buildings that made up the refinery; they were fixtures in town.  Now, the refinery has been torn down and the promised park has never come to fruition.  So the mountainside stands bare, save for some of the concrete still remaining from the refinery.  Very sad.

It's not that the town is completely falling in on itself, although that happened in the 1980s, when the center of town caved into the mine, leaving a huge gaping hole right where Main Street used to be.  The area is now called the Open Cut; the town is building a visitor's center to try and attract someone to come visit the town.  There are actually really well-maintained homes for sale at extremely reasonable prices.  When you consider the average listing price of a home in Austin, Texas is $340,000, finding a 3-bedroom, 2-bath house in Lead for $105,000 is a steal.

So why don't people want to move there?  It's simple - the weather and work.  If you're a Yankee, used to snow in the winter, unless you're from the mountains in Colorado or Vermont, you really can't appreciate the amount of snow the area gets.  The first weekend of October 2013 saw over three feet of snow and that snow stuck around and was built upon over the next six months.

Living in the mountains in winter is touchy at best.  Four-wheel-drive vehicles are a necessity, especially if you live at the top of one of the hills in town.  If you stayed home every time it snowed, you wouldn't leave your home from October until the end of April, so you learn to deal with it.  My husband, a Texan, learned the hard way, needing to be towed out of several sticky situations he slid into the first six months we lived there.

Work is the other big challenge.  Most people who have made a success of living in Lead work for themselves, most in the construction field, although there are those, like me, who work on the internet, so it doesn't matter where you live.  With construction, though, the weather plays a significant factor again - you need to work like crazy from May until October so you can have enough money to survive from October to May.  The family we stayed with on our visit sustains themselves on the money the husband earns as a roofer for six months of the year, working a zillion hours until it's impossible to climb on another roof for fear of sliding off.

Yet, the place, for all its foibles, is beautiful.  I've never lived anywhere as beautiful, regardless the season.  And quiet.  In most areas of the country, there is the constant noise of traffic.  In Lead, it's just quiet.  It's the rare place you can go to just be still, something most of us never get to experience.  It leads to a calmness and tranquility hard to find these days.

If you get a chance to visit Lead and Deadwood, I would heartily recommend it.  I'm so happy I got a chance to go back, to visit the home I shared with my lovely husband and daughter.  While I could never go back there permanently, it remains one of the best experiences of my life and I'm so grateful for the opportunity to spend five years in, what we lovingly called, Mayberry.

Leading A Life ... In Lead, South Dakota - Part 1

Thomas Wolfe said, "You can't go home again."  To a certain extent, he was right.  As humans, we change.  We grow.  The experiences life throws at us cause fundamental changes in who and what we are, on how we perceive life.

The place we came from changes, as well.  Entropy, the idea that everything, from the time of its creation, slowly declines from there, is at work both on the places and people we encounter, rendering ever visit totally new.  Sometimes, the changes are imperceptible, at least from the outside, but on closer look, they can become a yawning chasm between what we remember and what actually is.

So it was that I returned to Lead, South Dakota a few weeks ago.  My husband, daughter and I lived in Lead for five years, between 1999 and 2004.  We moved there from Denver, where we were living when Columbine happened.  We had already planned on moving out of Denver when Columbine occurred, but that definitely sealed the deal; my daughter was in seventh grade at a school not too far from Columbine. 

We wanted to get away from the rat race Denver had become.  It was a big city, with all the big city problems.  We wanted to go somewhere where the air was clean and fresh, somewhere time had forgotten, and we certainly found it in Lead.  Lead is the sister city of Deadwood, South Dakota; you might remember Deadwood from the show on HBO. As bad as things seemed in the HBO show, the reality was ten times worse, in terms of the living conditions and the sheer rankness of the area.  

At the time we moved there, Lead, located at the northern edge of the Black Hills of South Dakota, along the border with Wyoming, up 6000 feet, had always been a mining town.  They have mined gold there from the time gold was first found in the 1800s until it was closed in 2002, about a year and a half before we left.  The Homestake Mine was there, reaching 8000 feet down toward the earth's core.  Frequently, we would be sitting at the dining table and the house would rattle, as the men in the mine were blasting to dislodge one more bit of rock.

It was a bustling little town, with homes built wherever a miner had pitched a tent.  When the miner got married, the tent was replaced by a one-room house.  As children came along, another room or two were added, then a bathroom, when indoor plumbing came to town, and then maybe a kitchen, giving the homes in town the feel of having been scabbed onto, which, of course, they were.

In 1910, Lead was the second-largest city in South Dakota.  It was one of the few towns in the United States that wasn't impacted by the Great Depression.  There was so much gold coming out of the Homestake Mine, no one went hungry.  Business thrived.  Everyone was prosperous, so much so that when Deadwood fell on hard times, Lead bailed them out.  The more Lead thrived, the more Deadwood sank into poverty, with little to support its businesses, other than tourism, and there wasn't much of that.  Deadwood was the poor step-sister to Lead.

Then things changed.  Deadwood, after yet another devastating fire, so common in the Black Hills National Forest, was almost destroyed in the late 1980s, so the "great experiment" was launched, bringing another kind of gold into the Black Hills - gambling.  Deadwood had always been known as a lawless frontier town, with the likes of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane wandering around town, so why not take advantage of it?  Why not play it up?  So Deadwood became one of the few places in the country where gambling was allowed, outside a Reservation.

As Deadwood came back to life, life in Lead started undergoing significant change in the other direction.  First, the middle of town collapsed into the mine, leading to the Open Cut, a large, open pit in the middle of town, where the mine is open to the air.  Everything had to be rebuilt around it and, in many cases, was never rebuilt.  Then, in 2002, Homestake Mine closed, ringing the death knell for this once-thriving city.

We were living in Lead when the mine closed.  It was heartbreaking.  Generations of families living in the homes in Lead were leaving in droves, chasing the next mine or going back to school to learn a new way of life.  Homes were abandoned, when no buyers could be found - who wants to live in a town where there is no industry and the closest large city (in relative terms) is on the other side of any number of mountain passes?

Regardless of the change, I loved living in Lead.  Because the area was so insulated, you knew everyone in town; there were about 3000 people living between Lead and Deadwood at the time.  Life was difficult, especially in the winter, which started at the end of September and sometimes wouldn't leave until the end of April.  But there was nothing like sitting by the wood stove, a raging fire keeping the house warm (except my daughter's room), as the snow piled up outside.  I was sad to leave it but we had no choice ... my husband was dying and he needed to be where it was warmer, so we moved to Texas.

This was my first visit back in 10 years and boy, how things have changed.

Coming up:  Part 2:  Leading A Life ... In Lead, South Dakota

Thoughts On Robin William's Death: Depression Lies

Like most everyone, I'm still processing the death of Robin Williams yesterday.  The fact that his death impacted so many shows the impact his life had on so many.  Unfortunately, he didn't feel that impact in his own life, believing the lies depression told him instead.

I'm writing this because it's important.  We've lost too many in our lives to depression and its lies.  It's important to know there is help and a way out that doesn't involve the end of a life.  And it's important that those who care about someone with depression know it's not willful misconduct or lack of love that drives the depressed person; it's the lies they're hearing.

I remember the first time I saw Robin Williams.  It was in the 1970s and he popped into Richie Cunningham's world on "Happy Days."  I couldn't take my eyes off him.  He was a frenetic ball of energy, bouncing around the set, talking a million miles a minute.  As he moved through his career, he never seemed to lose that energy, that boundless child-like amazement and he took us with him on his wild ride.

Along the way, there were reports of rehab stints, where one or another of his addictions got the better of him, but it never diminished the love we had for him.  Even in the depths of his addiction, he was never publicly mean (as some actors and actresses have torpedoed their careers - Hi, Mel).  He was always kind to those interviewing him and to anyone, child or adult, he met.  He gave of his time and energy to make others happy, to see others smile.

Robin Williams suffered depression, a disease that impacts the lives of millions around the world, to a greater or lesser degree; you could see it in his eyes, even when he was laughing.  I, personally, think we all suffer from a little depression, a fact borne out by studies.  There are several types of depression but each type has the same trait - it lies.

Depression tells you you're not worth it.  It tells you you're stupid, or no one cares.  At its depths, it tells you life isn't worth living because, after all, what's the use?  It brings down a black, see-through curtain between you and the rest of the world.  The world can see you, you can see the world, but the "you" the world sees is as if there is no curtain, while you see everything swathed in a black overtone, coloring everything.

Despite the best efforts of those around you, when you're battling the worst of depression, no one can reach you behind the curtain.  You hear the muffled sounds of the world going on around you, but the joys the world has to give can't penetrate the curtain.  You can only hear the sound of depression, telling you over and over how hopeless it is.  You feel totally alone under that curtain, even when you're surrounded by those who love you.  The joys and achievements of life can't reach your heart, even if you're blessed with the things most people yearn for their whole lives; fame, fortune, achievement, loving family, prestige, reputation - all these things are meaningless behind the curtain.

Depression often leaves those around you feeling frustrated and angry.  It drives people away because, after all, you're not worth anyone's attention, so why are they still here.  Family and friends try to reach you behind the curtain, but you either can't hear them or they can't break through.  They don't understand, though, so they back away, believing the lie depression has told them, too:  you're just unsociable ... you don't love them enough to come out from behind the curtain, not realizing you just can't.

Meanwhile, from behind the curtain, you grasp at anything that helps you feel in control, but that grasp can feel like steel fingers to those outside the curtain; it feels like you're clinging, hanging on desperately because you are.  The problem is, no one else can see the curtain, so they don't understand ... they merely think you're being unreasonably clingy, meddling in their affairs or unduly frantic.  They don't know that depression makes you frantic on the inside and sometimes, it comes out.

Why am I talking about this?  Because, for the most part, depression is still extremely misunderstood.  It's still colored by old preconceptions, that depression is a personality weakness, that you can merely "get over" being depressed if you just "buck up."  I remember, when I was the middle of the worst of it, being told I was no longer welcome around certain family members if I didn't stop being depressed.  Because, yeah - that works well.  Of course, at the time, I didn't know I was depressed; I just felt frantic, not recognizing the curtain until it was too late.

There is hope, though.  There are ways to take the curtain down.  But, for the depressed person, it means recognizing the curtain and fighting through it to get help.  And there is a ton of help available.  Not every treatment works for every person.  For some, a combination of medication and therapy works.  For others, it means continually adjusting and changing medications to ensure stability; for those with severe clinical depression, one medication might work for a time only to have a tolerance build, at which time another medication needs to be added or changed altogether.  It takes time.  It takes patience.  It takes love.

If you or someone you know is dealing with depression, even just a little, get help.  Regardless of your financial status, help is available in every community around the country.  Just call.

And know you are loved.  There is no person in this world who is not loved by at least one person, no matter what depression tells you.  You might not know the person who loves you; they may have been someone you opened the door for or helped when they dropped their groceries outside their car.  It might be the woman you held the elevator for, or the child you picked up after they fell.  It might even be the person sitting next to you at breakfast in your own home.  Regardless, there is always at least one person who loves you and cares for you.

Believe that.  Don't believe the lies.