That became clear this morning, as I was reading a popular business book by a popular business author. Given the buzz, I had been excited to read the book, and so I dove in with gusto.

I read 20 pages, 30 pages – and at about page 40, my mind began to wander. I looked through the table of contents, skimmed the rest of the book, and by the time my morning-reading-time-at-Crave was over, I had gotten everything I was going to get out of that book.

That is sadly not unusual.  I have read dozens of business and “nonprofit” books. And more often than not, I do just what I did this morning – read in a little way, get the gist, skim the rest, and never go back to it again.

But it was the thought that came after I shut the book that was indeed unusual:

I am about to start writing a pretty monumental book.

I don’t want people to do with my book what I do with most business books.

So what is it, then, that turns a “standard business book” into a page-turner?

As I go back through the books I have loved, seeking the answer, it would be really helpful to hear your own thoughts.

Is there a business / nonprofit book you have loved – that you didn’t want to put down, and were perhaps even sad when it was over?

And if so, what was it about that book that turned it from a “business book” to a “page turner?”

Photo credit: A seriously small percentage of the books in my house.

After hitting send, it occurred to me that that was the first I had informed myself of this plan. But there it was, in text on my screen, so it must be true!

I accomplished a lot in what turned out to be six weeks of exploration and reflection (with the exception of journaling and poetry (some of which I shared on Posterous here), very little writing occurred during this “writing time”). Given my early summer posts on taking time to just “be,” I thought I would take a moment to share what I learned from that six weeks – and to begin to introduce the results of that thinking-and-exploring time.

You Can’t Plan a Sabbatical in 2 Weeks
I kept laughing at the fact that I was calling this time a “sabbatical.” During that six weeks, we had our colleague, Christine Egger, fly in from Detroit to brainstorm together for three days. Lizzie came home for 4 days during which we celebrated my birthday and continued the seemingly endless effort to clear boxes out of her childhood room. I got our corporate taxes done and began work with our former Office Manager, Erin Tierney, who has come back to assist Dimitri and me as a virtual assistant (and very real friend).

I had both foot surgery and oral surgery. We created a new video for our home page – the one featured in this week’s Rock Out.  I planned and prepared for two workshops, a salon, and several other functions that became the jam-packed week we spent in Los Angeles just 6 days after my “sabbatical” ended. And I am sure there is more that I am forgetting, that would look to a normal outsider simply like “work.”

When I sarcastically shared with my friend and colleague RuthAnn Harnisch – who has been blogging her own year-long sabbatical – that I learned one cannot plan a sabbatical in two weeks, she chuckled. “You can’t plan it in a year, either,” she told me. “And no matter how long the sabbatical lasts, everyone I talk to tells me that when their sabbatical is over, they felt as if they are just getting going.”

As my 25 year-old daughter would say, true dat.

You CAN Plan a Sabbatical in 2 Weeks
Yes, I was busy with a lot of “regular work.” But I also hung an out-of-office message on my email and my voice mail. I gave myself permission to ignore the world. I put “responding” on hold.

And I learned what a gift that is.

On the days when I didn’t have other obligations, no one expected anything of me, including me. That took some doing, I won’t lie. During that six weeks, I smiled at how good I was at chastising myself for what I was not accomplishing in that time, rather than celebrating that I had given myself permission to take that time at all.

I read. I sat in meditation. I filled 4 sections of a notebook with notes about the work we are doing at Creating the Future. I explored – got piles of books from the library, returned them, got more piles. Then I read some more, sat again in meditation, and scribbled more madly about what I was finding.

Through all that, I sculpted the shape of the programs Creating the Future will offer in the next 5 years. I came to realization after realization about how this movement will indeed change how work is done across this whole sector, around the world. I plastered that thinking across a wall-sized spreadsheet made of post-it notes attached to the sliding glass doors to the back yard, until my living room resembled a scene from A Beautiful Mind.  

The Plan
Because people have been asking, I will share briefly here that the result will be programs aimed at everyone working in this sector, however loosely one defines that work OR the sector. Those programs will be crafted to meet people wherever they are in their thinking about our mutual ability to build a more humane world, and to move each and every one of us towards our potential for creating that world.

Skeptics and bodhisattvas and everyone in between; board members and funders and social entrepreneurs and college professors… each and every one of us has two things in common:
1) We all want life to be more humane on this planet, for all beings.
2) We all have the potential to make that a reality.

Our work will be to tap the potential in each and every one of us, in a way that makes that visionary change a reality. And the entirety of that program, across all players in the sector, across all degrees from “I don’t need this” to “I want to teach this” and everything in between – all that was carved during this time away.

What Else
Over the past several months, I’ve been blogging a lot about the fact that we simply do not take time to be and think. I am just as much a victim of that as anyone else. And so, without practice in “being” and a personality prone to do-do-do and then do some more, what exactly does one “do” when given time to just “be?”

I am fortunate that I have a history of escaping to write at a friend’s condo in Southern California – the place where I finished the final draft of FriendRaising and both the very first and very last drafts of The Pollyanna Principles. I’ve never taken longer than 2 weeks there, but at least I know a bit about what to expect – how long it takes me to even begin to decompress, as well as some activities that help me speed up that decompression process, to get the most out of that time on the beach.

This mini-sabbatical gave me 3 times that timeframe – six whole weeks. And unlike those trips to California, I had no real goal – no single book that needed to be worked on. What freedom!

Without those parameters, however, I found I chastised myself often, wondering what I should be doing. It took perhaps four of those weeks to realize I was doing precisely what I needed to be doing – that I had already generated some amazing thinking, and that really, Hildy, could you stop “shoulding” on yourself for just a moment?

In the last 2 weeks, I was finally able to let go. I gardened. I painted on the walls. I read and cooked and spent hours every day moving from deep meditation to intentionally letting my mind wander wherever it wanted to go.

As I re-entered the real world, I left projects to be completed – some to be painted, some to be written, some to be dug into the soil. Six days later, I was in Los Angeles, creating even more new thinking, more projects to complete.

Over the next few weeks, I will share all of it – including the reading list that helped expand my mind in more directions than I thought possible.

For now, though, I am chuckling. What started as an email suggesting I was taking time off to write resulted in everything but writing. It may take me as much as two years (or more) to produce everything I conceived of during that time of being, exploring, reflecting.

And the guest blog for my colleague – the one that started this whole thing? It’s coming, Pamela. I promise.

Today I had the good fortune to provide the luncheon keynote address for the School Leaders awards lunch, sponsored by the American School Board Journal – part of the National School Boards Association huge annual conference.

I was going to share with you what I talked about today, which was energizing.  And I was going to share with you information about the group, which is also energizing – winners of the Magna Awards for innovation in school district leadership.

Instead, I find I keep writing the words, “Thank you.”

And so here’s what I’ll do.  I will link you to a recording of my talk here. It’s the whole 20 minute keynote, fresh out of the oven.

And for the rest of this post, I will tell the tale of how I happened to be speaking here today, and how I happen to have an article in this month’s American School Boards Journal.  And most importantly, I will give thanks.

It all started two years ago. It was then that I learned that, through no fault of their own, the ASBJ had published an article of mine (Why Boards Micromanage) that had been plagiarized by someone else.  The article had been taken word-for-word from our site – including a story that happened to me.  The plagiarist simply plastered his name on the piece, changed MY story to HIS story, and signed a statement swearing the work was his.

Those were the circumstances under which I met Glenn Cook, editor-in-chief of the American School Board Journal.

Rather than let the lawyers rule what happened next, Glenn did something few people do anymore – something that created the future that has become the present for me, for Glenn, and for the 200 school leaders I encouraged to create the future of their communities today.

Glenn picked up the phone and called me.

After the initial shock wore off for us both, Glenn was gracious beyond my wildest imaginings, offering to do all the heavy lifting.  “Let me go after this guy,” he said.  “Then let me write an editorial, telling our readers what happened. I’ll link to your site.  I’ll tell people to read your stuff.  And when this is all over, I want you to write for us – this time under your own name!”

From that very first phone call – a phone call that could have been adversarial and ugly – something unexpected happened for us both.  Glenn and I became friends.  Since that day, just hearing his Texas lilt on the phone, I prepare myself to laugh at stories of his family’s adventures.

When we finally met in person last fall during Dimitri and my first Community-Driven tour, the three of us spent over 3 hours at lunch.  It was then that Glenn suggested that I address the school leaders during today’s event.

And so, to the gentleman who plagiarized my work in the first place, I want to thank you.

If it weren’t for you, I would not have spoken today to some of the most inspired leaders a community can wish to have.  I would not have an article on “School Boards as Catalysts for Community Change” in the latest edition of the American School Board Journal.

And most of all, I would not have met my friend Glenn.

You can hear my keynote for the Magna Awards here - “Your School Board as a Catalyst for Success.”  Please let me know if you would like me to keynote your event next!

(In honor of Martin Luther King’s birthday and the inauguration of Barack Obama, we’ll take a rest from The Pollyanna Principles for the next day or so. I’ll publish more excerpts later this week, so stay tuned.)

Midnight

It is midnight.  I am jumping out of bed, suddenly compelled to email my friend Elizabeth Sadlon, to thank her for the book she gave me for Christmas, The Soloist. Elizabeth is one of the wisest strategy consultants I know, a member of our advisory team at the Community-Driven Institute. The card she wrote to me, accompanying the book, is my bookmark, and I re-read it every time I take a break to breathe between chapters.

“While I was working with Lamp Community, a mental health organization in Skid Row, Steve Lopez wrote a series of columns for the LA Times about a friendship he made with a Skid Row resident. This book shares ths story in a way that reminds me why I do this work.”

That Skid Row resident is Nathaniel Anthony Ayers. Nathaniel is a supremely gifted, Julliard-trained musician living with the demons of schizophrenia. Spending his nights in the dumping ground that is Skid Row, he passes each day in the 2nd Street Tunnel, majestically playing a violin that is missing 2 strings.

I have been devouring The Soloist. Almost from the first pages, I am in awe of Steve Lopez’s storytelling artistry, his ability to share his own conflicting emotions so honestly that I have inhaled them and made them my own. My singular purpose for the past several days has been to get through the day, so I can come home and find out what happens next in both Nathaniel’s and Steve’s lives. Every concert Nathaniel attends, every bit of music he creates, every friend he makes, every piece of sheet music Steve purchases for him and everything Steve learns about his life… this story has me held captive.

Dimitri and I have been through Skid Row, touring at the invitation of Amy Sterling Casil from Beyond Shelter, an organization working to get homeless people into permanent housing. Shortly after that visit several years ago, 60 Minutes caught drivers from Kaiser Permanente Hospital on video, dumping mentally ill patients at the curb in Skid Row wearing only a hospital gown. The image stings my eyes even now as I type these words, making the images in Steve Lopez’s tale that much more poignant.

The tale is instantly recognizable to those who are familiar with mental illness. The cast of characters includes a misunderstood disease, a healthcare system that punishes those with such illness, and a legal system that often precludes family members from helping. While it is only one component of Steve Lopez’s intricately woven story, his descriptions show vividly the systemic lack of compassion of the US Healthcare system.

Reading this book, the call to problem-solve is strong. What to do? As Steve Lopez learns, the answer seems insurmountably complex when considered from the problem-solving perspective of “helping each individual.”

But my mind instinctively heads in the other direction, pushing me to consider not what is wrong, but what is possible, and not just for each individual, but for whole communities, everywhere. I smile to think that this has become reflexive, through the work Dimitri and I have been doing this past 10+ years – the work that is at the core of the Pollyanna Principles (which you all have been so kind to read this past few days) and of all the work we are doing at the Community-Driven Institute.

What would our communities look like if people were well in all ways? What would life be like for all of us if instead of solely treating illness (individual or societal), we lived lives that were healthy and vibrant in communities that were resilient, humane?  What conditions would have to be present in our communities, for that vision to become reality?  What values would have to be our expectation, to undergird such change?

The Soloist has me trying to answer these questions at midnight on a “school night.”  At this late hour, my top-of-mind response is only this: Success would be an end result steeped in compassion and wisdom.

Compassion for each individual who lives with mental illness, for each family that is living with the effects of such illness.  Compassion for each neighborhood, each school, each community affected by the interwoven issues related to “illness” and “health.”

And wisdom.  Wisdom that understands and addresses (rather than ignores or stigmatizes) the realities of mental illness and mental health. Wisdom that seeks to learn rather than seeking to avoid. Wisdom that builds upon the strength of our interconnectedness, rather than avoiding connections to those who remind us of what we fear about ourselves.

Can we create a community rooted in such compassion and wisdom – such humanity? We have created a world that is, in  many ways, so defiantly inhumane that we celebrate a story like Steve Lopez’s as an exception to the norm.  But if we created this inhumane world, we can also uncreate it. We can re-create it. We can create something entirely different, entirely new.

We can start right now.

8:00 am
Fell asleep, book in hand, 40 pages left. Finished reading this morning, and then sobbed so long and so loud, realizing I had barely taken a breath since sleepily picking up the book upon waking.

I send Elizabeth another note, telling her that her gift has moved me to motionlessness. I ask her, please, oh please – I have finished the book, and I must know: “You were working with Lamp Community when this story broke. Do you know how Nathaniel is doing now?”

Here is the note she sent me:

“When I finished the book, I broke into deep, deep sobs. Actually, it was reading the Acknowledgments that really got me.

I spoke with Casey Horan from Lamp a couple of weeks ago. She said Nathaniel is still with them, still in the apartment, and has ‘good days and bad days.’ I was so aware while she shared the update that his is just one of many hundreds of lives she touches, all with their own stories and collections of ‘good days and bad days.’

She said they’d had a party to celebrate Beethoven’s birthday, and that all his musician friends came and it was wonderful.

I had heard recently that Steve did another column on Nathaniel, so when you asked, I searched the LA Times website. There I found this beautiful video narrated by Steve, showing Nathaniel playing at Disney, answering just your question. All the previous columns are there too.”

Then my quietly wise friend Elizabeth wrote the sentence that, even now as I type this into this blog days later, sets me to tears:

Doesn’t this show just how right Margaret Mead was? Not only has this friendship changed Steve’s and Nathaniel’s lives, Steve’s columns have changed perceptions and beliefs and even public policy in LA — no small feat!

We all have that power. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world,” Margaret Mead famously told us. “Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

And so, on this birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., and on this eve of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States of America, I share with you this story of possibility. In my mind, that is perhaps the most important gift Dr. King gave to the spirit of our country and to the world – the sense that if we can imagine a promised land, we can create it – that it is possible, simply because it is not impossible.

I cannot urge you enough to read The Soloist. But more than that, I cannot urge you enough to dream of what is possible, and to vow to begin walking in that direction, right now.

Photo credit: Rick Loomis, Los Angeles Times

]]> http://hildygottlieb.com/2009/01/18/as-our-nation-celebrates-what-is-possible/feed/ 0 http://hildygottlieb.com/2009/01/08/its-your-blog-you-tell-me/ http://hildygottlieb.com/2009/01/08/its-your-blog-you-tell-me/#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:13:26 +0000 Hildy http://hildygottlieb.com/?p=209 When I first realized The Pollyanna Principles was becoming a reality on paper and not just in my head, I promised to publish the first few chapters here at Creating the Future. Now that the book will be out in the next week or so, I am wondering – how exactly will I do that? This is the first book I have written since starting this blog, so this is all new to me!

Because this blog doesn’t belong to me near as much as it belongs to the people who read it, I thought I would just ask you. Here’s what I’m wondering:

1) How much of the book do you want to see at one time? The equivalent of 2-3 pages of a book? More? Less?
2) Would you prefer that the blog halt its normal posts, posting only those chapters for a week or so, then resuming “regular programming”? Or would you prefer that I break things up, posting a bit of the book, a bit of my normal ramblings, a bit more of the book, etc.?
3) What else? What am I missing re: how you want to read these first chapters?
4) If you have seen other authors successfully publish their first chapters online, would you point me to those good examples?

We are so excited about all of this – not just the publication of The Pollyanna Principles, but our more important goal this year: Having 100 Learning Communities in communities across the continent, supporting each other in putting The Pollyanna Principles into practice. (If you’re interested in having your community be one of those, send me a note here.) This is more fun and excitement than I ever conceived one could have in their “day job” and we are so pleased you all are part of the journey!

Thanks for any and all suggestions, gang. I look forward to introducing you to The Pollyanna Principles right here.

A funny thing happened on the way to finishing The Pollyanna Principles: I got a personal lesson in how well those principles work, not just for our organizations and communities, but for our personal lives as well.

First, some back story.
This past summer, I thought the book was done. As the last step before layout, the manuscript went to about a dozen proofreaders. That is when I learned that the book was not done at all.

Each of those individuals, completely independent of each other, found a HUGE flaw in the book. To the person, they all agreed on precisely what the problem was. It was not the logic or the content of the book. It was a flaw in the writing.

I completely agreed with them. The problem was precisely what they said it was.

And I had no idea how to fix it.

Some more back story, this time about the Pollyanna Principles.
The Pollyanna Principles provide a path for reinventing the way Community Benefit Organizations do their work, to aim at creating more significant, visionary community change. It is based on the work Dimitri and I have done for the past 10 years, taking a Community-Driven, Vision-Based approach to internal organizational systems such as governance, planning, program development and resource development.

What we have found in doing vision-based work is that problem-solving cannot solve entrenched, complex, systemic problems. Whether it is a community problem (poverty, homelessness) or an internal problem (board issues, money issues), it is not that any particular solution is failing to work. And it is not that we simply haven’t hit upon the correct solution.

It is that problem-solving itself does not work for addressing entrenched, complex, systemic problems. That is because problem-solving aims squarely at what we do NOT want. And we cannot accomplish what we DO want by focusing on what we do NOT want.

When we aim at what we DO want, however, we solve those problems on the way to creating that visionary change.

For proof, consider the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on terror. The “war” on board problems, the “war” on funding problems. Are we any better off in any of those areas than we were before we aimed at those problems?

On the other hand, though, we can point to huge strides in a very short time, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. sought NOT to simply eliminate segregation, but to create an equitable and just world. “I have a dream” is not a problem-solving statement focused on what Dr. King did NOT want; it is a statement of the positive vision for what he DID want.

We need look no further than the election of Barack Obama for the results of such a vision-based approach. Vision-based work solves our problems – in this case segregation – on the way to creating something extraordinary.

So back to the book. Here’s what happened:
One of the proofreaders who had been stopped cold by the book’s glaring problem took a different approach with me. Instead of telling me what was wrong, she talked about what the book would look like if the book was RIGHT.

She did that in one sentence. I’m serious. No long problem-solving conversation of “what if you did this or that?” It was one sentence: “Make the book be X.”

That one sentence was like magic. After literally months of not knowing how to fix the book’s problem – after finally resigning myself that I would have to just publish the book as is (rationalizing to myself, “It couldn’t be THAT bad, could it?”) – after all that struggle, I knew INSTANTLY and PRECISELY how to fix it at the moment she uttered that one sentence.

From there, while we were on the road, in addition to all the other work that comprised the Community-Driven Tour, I wrote feverishly. I eliminated 100 pages – yup, 100 pages. (You lucky readers – a quicker read for you!) And I did so joyfully. The writing was fun, because I knew what I wanted each page to accomplish.

The manuscript is now done. It is in the hands of proofreaders again, and their comments are GOOD! I am so excited to know that this is finally the book I wanted it to be. I am so energized to see what it will accomplish!

But to me, the best part is that the very writing of the book became proof of the Pollyanna Principles in action. When I was trying to solve the book’s problem, I could not figure out how to do it. When I aimed for what it would look like if it were right, the pieces fell easily into place. The end result is truly a celebration of what is possible – for our communities, for our organizations, and for our world.

On our way to creating something great, we solve our problems. But the goal is not the problem – the goal is the GREAT stuff on the other side of the problem.

The Pollyanna Principles will have a special pre-release announcement soon! Sign up for the Community-Driven Institute’s newsletter to receive that pre-release info!

]]> http://hildygottlieb.com/2008/12/10/the-power-of-vision/feed/ 0 http://hildygottlieb.com/2007/07/23/plagiarism-update/ http://hildygottlieb.com/2007/07/23/plagiarism-update/#comments Tue, 24 Jul 2007 03:31:59 +0000 Hildy http://hildygottlieb.com/2007/07/23/plagiarism-update/ Some of you may recall that a few months back I wrote about our Help 4 NonProfits site being plagiarized. Now that the issue has been resolved, I wanted to share the whole story, which I had not been able to do previously.

For those of you with original content on the web, please read this now, and protect yourself this updated article will be helpful to you.  (Also, to protect yourself, head to CopyScape.com - great service!)

Good news is the book will be out in the next few months. Much like this blog, its purpose is to answer the question: Why has this sector not changed the world, and how can we? I am hoping to publish at least the first few chapters here on the blog, as soon as it is released.

I’ll be back to regular blogging soon. Till then, please check out some of the Tools to Use Now posts and start encouraging people to use those tools, ok? Making visionary change practical does not have to be as hard as folks think it is!

See you all in August – have a great few weeks! (Oh, and any and all words of encouragement, both private and public, are more than welcome as I face the home stretch…)

Read Hildy’s Healthcare Manifesto here.

First, the writing is going really well – amazingly well. This is the 3rd or 4th time I am writing this book, and with each previous version, I had known as I wrote that it wasn’t quite there. This time, the book outlined itself in my head; I knew from the moment I started, this is it. So that feels amazing. The book is scheduled for editing by the end of June, and we are still aiming at releasing it this fall. So the pressure is on!

As for the topic, it is the focus of this blog, the focus of the Institute, the focus of everything we are doing these days: How can we leverage the tremendous potential of this sector to create a better future for our communities and our world? As you can probably tell from just the few months I have been blogging, the answer is huge. Exciting, but huge.

Now for the more writerly questions: Finding time to write, sitting down and doing it, and then the worst of all – what to do when The Book becomes, as my friend, author Renata Rafferty commiserates in calling it, The $!&# Book. I can answer that one first – it hasn’t happened yet, not for this book. I know it will happen, because it has happened with all my others. When it does, the only thing I’ve found that works is a deadline, which I’ve got. So when I check back in with you all and I’m whining, you will know the book has become The $!&# Book, which is a good sign that the end is near!

As for finding time to write, it’s been helpful to have a deadline. I started with 2 weeks away from the world, thanks to a dear and generous friend who encourages me to use his family’s second home – a condo in Coronado, off San Diego – to write. As Dimitri and I learned when we spent 6 months working along the Mexican coast and 2 years along the Grand Canyon with the Hualapai Tribe, “If we’ve got to work somewhere…”

While being sequestered is a writer’s dream, having a place that allowed me to write all day, and then clear my head with a 2 hour walk along the beach – well it was a blessing, and the book would not be where it is without that.

Now for the question I am asked all the time (including by my own mother). “How can you just spend all day writing?” And the simple answer is, I’m a writer. If you are a writer, this isn’t a chore; it is who you are. Kurt Vonnegut once told an interviewer that you know you are a writer if you have no choice but to write. I have a lighted pad in my bed, and a waterproof diver’s slate in my shower. Yes, it’s probably more than a bit compulsive, but I have no choice. I am a writer.

I do have to confess, though, that finding time and focus to write back home here in Tucson has been another story. I tried to write every morning, but I quickly gave up in awe (ok perhaps more in disbelief) of those writers who say they have written entire books in 2 hour chunks each day. I would just be getting going, and it would be time to get to the office!

So now I’ve blocked entire weeks from my calendar – like this one – to just stay home and write. The dog and cat are WAY happy about that.

Which leads to the question about distractions. Unlike being away, home is loaded with distraction. Here, there are bills to pay and emails to answer and the garden and the animals, and, well, everything. Having a week at a time to just stay home lets me find some rhythm, but it’s not like being alone and away, which is a blessing beyond anything I can describe.

Keeping focused here is easier some days than others. Today was not such an easy one, so I took 4 walks. It’s 97 degrees out, and I am quite sure the neighbors cannot imagine what’s up with the nutbar in the sunflower leggings and baseball cap, heading around the block again – but yes, I took 4 walks.

I took reading breaks, too – Noam Chomsky always gets me fired up, and that makes me want to finish the book. And I’m reading The Chalice and the Blade, by Riane Eisler, which is life affirming and powerful – the story of our origins, from a far more nurturing perspective. I am wishing I had the 2nd book in Taylor Branch’s amazing civil rights / MLK trilogy, as I just finished the first one and was unable to put it down. On second thought, it’s just as well – I would just want to keep reading that one.

So while I’m not as productive as I was when I had 2 weeks to do nothing but write, the book is getting done, and that is more exciting than I can say.

Now my own question: Some folks have suggested I publish the first portions of the book here on the blog. What do you think? Have you seen that done before? How might it work? And is that something you all would like? Let me know. As I’ve said before, this blogging thing is new to me, and it is exciting to consider the possibilities.

Thanks to all of you for the encouragement you’re giving me to get the book done. I hope the weekend is good to you.

Me – I’ll be writing!

So go now and check to see that your stuff is still your stuff!