The gift of the magi

Part I
Years ago I sorted through my godmother's effects.  I found one sheet of manuscript written in Russian.  The only word I could comprehend was "prayer."  The next time I visited my grandmother I showed her the prayer.  Her eyes rolled to heaven.

"My mother wrote this!"  She explained that Prababushka had written out prayers for people going through difficult times.  She had evidently written this one for my godmother, her daughter-in-law.

My grandmother was grateful to have this new memento of her mother, now dead thirty years.


Part II
Yesterday I sorted through the coat closet, including the old fur coat.  With its seams splitting it's unwearable, but the fur is so fine to stroke!  My sister and I used to sneak into the closet just to rub our palms on it.

I tried offering the coat to my sister but for some reason she didn't want it.  Maybe because she lives in Texas.

Then I remembered that one of my mother's dear friends had given the coat to my mother.  The friend had died.  So I called her daughter, my own friend with whom I had been out of touch for years.

"You may not want your mother's old coat, but perhaps your daughter would, for the memory of her grandmother."

I couldn't understand my friend's joy until she explained to me that all her mother's possessions had been caught up in probate,  My friend had nothing except a few pieces of jewelry.

I wasted no time in shipping the coat to her.  I only wish I had called her earlier so that the coat would be there by Christmas.

Who would ever dream that possessions one respects and appreciates could be, to the right person, treasures?  Being able to send that coat was the best Christmas present possible--to me.

Merry Christmas and best wishes for a healthy and peaceful new year.

Contains historical facts and conjectures!

This is why you should avoid committee meetings:

I showed up at a committee meeting for my church last spring.  “Gee,” said the chair, “it would be great if we published a cookbook.  Katharine, would you be interested in taking it on?”

Actually, I was and am interested.  I assembled a formidable committee; we’re making great strides.  The problem is that we know that most people who want recipes look on the internet.  Who needs another cookbook?

So we decided to intersperse lots of commentary among the recipes.  We also decided that focusing on the community might make the book appeal to more buyers than those within our church.

I started assembling the commentary, a decade-by-decade retrospective of cooking in Summit, New Jersey, over the last hundred years.  Now I find that because I’ve begun the task, no one else is inclined to take it over.

Historical research is more difficult than I thought.  You find snippets here and there.  You try to knit them together, even if the connection is tenuous.  Then you find another nubbin that throws off your entire storyline.  Or you find that you have far too much information about one era, so much that it makes the other sections look scant.

Clearly, you then have to discard some of the information.  But what?

I’ve always wanted to write a book, but I never dreamed that it would be one so far out of my field.  Wish me luck, please.

That's so much better!

Please visit the new and improved KatharineHadow.com

What was so hard about that?

My Cringeworthy Website

Please don’t visit KatharineHadow.com. 

Whenever I visit it I tell myself that it looks disorganized and unprofessional.  Then I do what anyone else would do.  I close the tab.

I started my site for two reasons:

1. as a portfolio for my print work, so I could send URLs instead of attachments
2. to show that I could produce and maintain a website

 It serves those purposes, but it’s unwieldy now.

It needs to portray a bold, confident marketer who can size up customers and bang out compelling copy on tight deadlines.  It, well, doesn’t.

But, ugh, the thought of rewriting all that copy from scratch, finding the perfect USP and call to action feels so overwhelming.

And yet, I do it daily in my pitch letters.  Pitch letters are easier, probably because I can tell myself that no one reads them anyway.

My project for today is to cull the best lines from my pitch letters and refashion them into exciting web copy for KatharineHadow.com.

About perfection—It’s actually good if the web copy isn’t perfect.  If the site were perfect, I’d never change it.  Then the search engines would assume that I’d abandoned the site, and eventually my rankings would slip.

So, in web copy, as in life, the goal is

Progress, not perfection.

Writing tightly

I had problem meeting word requirements for college essays.  I didn’t like writing bloated prose, though I did it when I had to.

Fortunately, tight writing is a virtue when preparing ads and direct mail.  If a few more words bump you up from a postcard stamp (.28) to a large postcard stamp (.44), you ruthlessly slash a few words from somewhere.

Newspaper experience teaches you a) to make your words fit in the allotted space and b) to get it in on time.

But before you write for the newsletterpaper, you’ve probably written poetry.  And, boy, is that good practice!  Not only do you have to keep down the word count, the words also have to scan and rhyme. 

I only write poetry occasionally now, but it’s a good exercise in forcing yourself to write economically.  Even writing a few couplets for a Burma-Shave style ad disciplines you to justify the use of every word.

I recommend poetry to every budding writer, especially those with no intention of publishing.  Just as musicians play scales but don’t perform them, writing poetry strengthens all your other writing.

PS Don’t forget that postage rates go up on January 1.

Another office supply I can't show you a picture of

I try many office products because I'm always looking for ways to organize my work better.  Some are great, like the Post-It Weekly Planner.  Some work well but they're too cute--as if the designer would rather make the page pretty than present a more logical way for me to store my information.

I recently bought an Organizher budget planner from Mead Westvaco, mostly because I like Flex binders and because who doesn't feel that they could have a better handle on their expenses?

The pages are attractive, all right, but they didn't seem to fit my needs.  The packaging said I could visit the Mead website for more downloadable pages. 

When I went online, the extra pages weren't available, so I shot them a little email.  I was surprised and pleased today when they sent me back their templates.

I can't show them to you here, because I can't figure out how to display PDFs.  Let me describe the expense sheet to you.  It has five charming columns headed in lovely feminine scripts:

expense/amount/date paid/check no./confirmation no 

It's a handwritten log of expenses sorted by date, like my check register.

Darn!  I was hoping for something that would help me organize my finances.  The appealing page design was just supposed to help me get in the mood.

So I sent them these helpful suggestions:

 

The templates you sent are pretty, but I assume that an Organizher customer is buying the book to put her budget in order.  These templates seem to assume that the customer already has a budget and is merely tracking expenses. 

Selling a beginner a pretty book doesn’t help her.  She throws up her hands and says, “I spent $15 on this book and it looks like so much work.  I knew I couldn’t do this budget thing.”

What you want her to say is “Gosh, this book is really helping me get my budget on track.  I should tell all my friends about it.”

And it does look like a lot of work.  I assume that the buyer isn’t paying cash, but is using a credit card at Target—the only place you sell it.   That’s where I got my planner, and on the same trip I bought gifts and laundry detergent.  This makes it more work to track expenses by category.  If she’s paying by check, why would she want to record the purchase both on your budget sheets and in the check register?

Suggestions:

I suggest one or two pages at the beginning of the book explaining how to draw up a budget, the way the Franklin Covey planners do.  If she doesn’t need them, she’ll throw them out.  Be encouraging so the beginner will feel that she can do it.

“Congratulations on buying this book to put your budget in order. Don’t be intimidated by planning a budget.  It doesn’t have to be perfect, although you’ll get better with practice.  Use rough numbers.  All you need is an idea of how much money you have, so you’ll be better prepared for unexpected things that may affect your spending.”

Use the next page to plan your overall expenses for the year. 

The budget plan should have a large and inviting space at the top for the buyer to record her financial goals, i.e., pay off MasterCard balance, take family to Disneyland, buy a new car.  Asking her to dream first is an invitation to step into the budget process.

Then she records her expenses.  Fixed expenses (mortgage/rent, commuting, utilities) are usually easy, but variable expenses are rougher.

“Don’t know how much you spend on gas, utilities, groceries?  Carry this book with you for one month and write down every purchase.”  Carrying the book around for the whole year sounds like a lot of work.  A month sounds doable.

After getting a rough idea of expenses, and multiplying by 12, the customer can go back to trying to make a budget plan for the year.

“Subtract expenses from income to get an idea of where your budget is heading.  Now figure out roughly how much your financial goals will cost and divide by the number of months until you want to achieve them.”

When the budget goals are set, the purpose of the receipt folders becomes clearer.  Stuff all the receipts in the folder and figure out where the money went at the end of the week or the end of the month.  After lugging the book around for a month, this’ll seem like a huge time saver. 

The folders could also have spaces for writing in purchases without receipts, i.e., tolls, vending machine purchases, etc.  Note that if she writes on the folders she can’t reuse them next year.  She has to buy a new budget planner or at least new folders.

Every year at tax time at my house, we scramble to figure out our deductible expenses.  A sheet to track these (there usually aren’t that many)—and maybe an extra folder for those receipts--would probably be a big help.  I would certainly use it.

The websites sheet is just plain silly.  Who wants to keep a written list and then retype URLs into their browser every time except people on public computers?  It would be better to write two lines about learning how to bookmark, and then send her online to find budget templates that fit her situation.   

Don’t assume that everyone has internet access, of course; tell her that there are perfectly fine books at the library.  The basics of budgeting don’t change.

Internet users might want to see Microsoft’s budget templates at

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/CL102207099.aspx (must use IE to download) and I’m sure there are other good ones as well.

See also http://www.iseek.org/iseek/static/Budgeting_10.pdf

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I'm sure Mead will appreciate my help just as much as all the other consumer products manufacturers I  send suggestions to...  But, really, just because I'm a woman doesn't mean I want to sacrifice function for form.