Making the Most of Down Time

We are just barely into September and I’m sitting on my deck as I write this. Summer goes by way too fast in Wisconsin, and I refuse to squander even one day of warm weather and sunshine by sitting in my cave chained to my desk.

I also refuse to squander my down time. When work is a little scarce (as it is with many of us in the current economy) I need to get creative with how I spend my time. I’m one of those people who work best under deadlines – the more I have to do the more I get done. But when I have less to do it seems that my pace slows and I don’t accomplish as much. So, I make up or find additional things to do. Like take a class. Read about industry trends. Experiment with my little prosumer HD camcorder. Write more short stories and poetry. Etc.

Right now I’m reading a book by Wisconsinite Stephen Woessner called “Search Engine Optimization: Increase Your Google Rankings, Double Your Site Traffic.” My business partner and I went to one of his workshops at UW La Crosse on search engine optimization and learned a lot. The book is a great recap of the presentation and I’m sure I’ll refer to it often as we plan the re-design of our website. And I am happy to tell you that Stephen will be presenting for our chapter of the Media Communications Association - International this spring on SEO and marketing.

At the end of last year I bought a nice little Canon Vixio HD camcorder. I’ve done a little shooting with it, but haven’t had a chance to try edting any of it. So, within the next month I plan to write, shoot and edit a short story. My main stumbling block is finding the right method for digitizing the footage. (Yes, I went with tape for a variety of reasons.) Even though I have no aspirations to shoot and edit for my clients (I'll stick to writing, directing and producing), it would be fun to learn how to do it for myself or my family, and may help me as I write shot descriptions in scripts.

Some writer-friends and I started a writing group a few months ago. We are having a blast exploring screenplay, short story, poetry, and creative nonfiction formats. I believe that working in other genres reenergizes my scriptwriting, making for fresher concepts and crisper narration. Who knows, maybe I’ll even try my hand at writing a book some day. Whether it would be a work of fiction or industry related I can’t say, but the general idea is intriguing.

Of course, marketing is also a very good thing to do when you have time between projects. My business partner and I are developing a marketing plan that includes our main target markets, what message to tailor to each market, and how to reach the most people with investing the least amount of cash. We’d rather go heavy on the time investment and save the cash for the highest return ventures only.

So, what are you doing when work gets a little slow? How do you make the most of down time? Send me your response and I’ll post a compilation of answers.

Thanks for reading!

Keeping Up

There are strange terms permeating everyday conversation. I recently joined Twitter and have been making a conscious effort to be more active on Facebook and LinkedIn. But I swear, some of the other folks on these social networking sites speak a completely foreign language.

One posting on a LinkedIn group which focuses on content creation was asking for connections to people who own or create video content. Well, I know a few people who do that, so I replied and said so. The woman who posted invited me to check out her website and send my contact info so we could talk off line.

I went to her website, which indicated that they provide “mashup” software to clients via the web. I had to Google mashup and learned that it’s just a fancy word for repurposing video, text, audio, etc to create derivative materials. OK, but how do the owners of the original materials get paid? Still not sure on that.

The first few times I heard people reference SEO I thought they really meant to say CEO and were just misspeaking. I’m glad I kept my mouth shut for once and did not politely correct them. It finally sunk in that they were talking about Search Engine Optimization.

Last week my business partner and I went to an SEO workshop where we learned that we have to pick key words for each page of a website and then use those same key words in the copy of each page a bunch of times in hopes that search engines will be impressed with our redundancy, index our pages, and give us a high ranking. It poses an interesting problem for people who make their living by providing clean writing to a variety of customers. We decided to simply find a balance.

I guess the bottom line is that our world is constantly changing and there are always tons of new things to learn. We can’t tackle them all, but if we can at least take a closer look at a few here and there, we not only learn a little bit, but we might also have some fun. Think of it as making life mashable.

See you on Twitter!

Interview with International Author Tess Onwueme

Creativity and Possession: Synopsis of a Nigerian Author

Tess Onwueme was raised by her grandparents in a small Nigerian village. A self proclaimed peasant girl, she never dreamed that she would become a writer, yet has achieved major recognition within the drama community, and has established a writing career that spans continents.

“Now, let me say that writing found me. It’s an odd statement, but that seems to capture the whole circumstance around what I call my epiphany in the whole business of writing.”

As a girl of modest means attending an exclusive all girls’ boarding school, where classmates were the children of wealthy and influential parents, Onwueme had to work hard. She found herself excelling at academics and athletics and surrounded by friends. However, when she was recognized as one of the top ten students in the entire state, jealousy and backbiting erupted. The once popular girl found herself pushed out of the circle of peers who had once embraced and celebrated her, crushed by her feelings of isolation.

One evening, as she was thinking about the situation, she began to writing about her feelings, eventually developing a poem called “The Stinging Tongue.”

“Once I wrote that it was like exhaling. It was so therapeutic. And I had found a certain power, a certain community within that circumscribed space that I had created. From then on, anything, be it joyful, be it sorrowful, be it whatever I felt, I wrote it down.”

By the time Onwueme finished high school she had completed five booklets of poetry. She became a continuous writer. She didn’t stop when she married – or had her five children – or when she worked on and completed her Masters and PhD – or taught in university classrooms. She did begin sensing distinct characters in her inspirations, however, and had to move beyond the expression of poetry to plays.

“There were other voices like a community just pushing to be heard. That’s how I wrote my first play. And I continued. It was like my private, secret encounters with the world and my own conversations with the world around me. When I wrote that first play, it lifted me into a new scope and gave me a new landscape to perform.”

The first play she submitted to a publisher, A Hen Too Soon, was rejected. But she persisted. She sent it to a small press, who published it in 1983. Onwueme immediately sent two more plays which were not only published, but were also adopted in high school curriculums. But the icing on the cake came when she won her first literary award, the 1985 Association of Nigerian Authors Award for Drama. Several other major awards and offers from large publishers followed.

By 1988 three of her works had been staged in the U.S. She was invited to attend a performance of her play The Broken Calabash in Detroit. As luck would have it, she was also invited to attend a conference on women playwrights in Buffalo at about the same time. But she knew it was meant to be when she learned that her expenses would be covered by various cultural embassies in addition to a stipend. The play went on to win the Martin Luther King Writer’s Award – which came with a one year fellowship at Wayne State University. So she moved with her five children to the U.S.

“It was extremely liberating. For once I had space of my own. But I had children ranging from 4 to 12. I came to this new world with a lot of challenges, but I was also quite invigorated.”

Onwueme has succeeded both as an educator, and as an author. Currently UW Eau Claire’s Distinguished Professor of Cultural Diversity and Professor of English, she has been awarded two Ford Foundation grants, published a total of 18 books, and received numerous literary awards. Her work has aired on the BBC, and is staged and studied in classrooms around the world. She recently completed a novel, What I Cannot Tell My Father, which she refers to as a fictional biography.

Many of her works deal with the lives of women in rural Africa, the good and the bad. Some of her plays discuss the effects of oil production on local economies and cultures. Others focus on family issues or social structures. But they are all written with passion.

“The words, the action, the narrative, the dialogue I want to engage society in lives in me as I work with people and the world around me. Each work has its own gestation period, and, when ripe, will burst open. When ideas are ready to be born and they burst open, like labor, you can’t hold them back.

“In the Igbo language of the Nigerian delta, the word agwu means creativity, but it also means madness or lunacy. You see, you cannot control lunacy or creativity. It can possess you; it can grip you, at any moment. And when it does, you must yield.”

Additional information about Onwueme can be found at http://www.writertess.com.

You can find Tess Onwueme’s books at many librarires, and through Michigan State University Press, Africa Heritage Press, or Amazon.com.

They include:

No Vacancy (a play), 2005
What Mama Said (an epic drama), 2003
The Missing Face, 2002
Then She Said It! (a play), 2002
Why the Elephant Has No Butt (a novel), 2000
Shakara: Dance-Hall Queen (a play), 2000
Tell It To Women (an epic drama), 1997
Riot in Heaven (a play) 1996
Three Plays: An Anthology of Three Plays, 1993
Parables for a Season (a play), 1991
Legacies (a play), 1989
The Reign of Wazobia and Other Plays (1988)
Mirror For Campus (a play), 1987
Ban Empty Barn and Other Plays (1986)
A Scent of Onions (a play), 1986
The Desert Encroaches (a play), 1985
The Broken Calabash (a play), 1984
A Hen Too Soon (a play), 1983

In-demand documentary: Example of a news release

NOTE: This news release generated a response in less than an hour. The documentary, howevery, took two years to complete. We did pre-interviews with over a dozen people and narrowed it nine for filmed interviews. We had to cut four interviews for length, and plan to create a second film utilizing the interviews from the original piece. All interviewees were from families where numerous drugs - including Meth - were used, sold or manufactured. It was an interesting yet heartbreaking project. I hope you'll take the time to view the first documentary on line. Sue



FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Susan Reetz, Writer/Producer
715-355-9159 (office)
715-212-6239 (mobile)
Reetz@RucinskiReetz.com


LOCALLY PRODUCED DOCUMENTARY IN DEMAND AROUND THE COUNTRY

Living in Shadows, a documentary about growing up with addicted parents



Living in Shadows - a documentary about drug endangered children who live or have lived in homes where drugs were used, sold, or manufactured - is in high demand across the U.S. The film was produced by Rucinski & Reetz Communication (Mosinee) and funded by Ministry Healthcare, the U.S. Attorney’s Office – Western District of Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Alliance for Drug Endangered Children. Since its release in September of 2008, more than 2000 DVD copies have been given away, and it is a frequent download on the Wisconsin Alliance for Drug Endangered Children website. Living in Shadows has also recently been listed on the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCIRS) resource page.


The documentary incorporates the reflections of individuals ranging from 11 years old to mid-thirties. Some talk about witnessing or being subjected to violence. Others talk about emotional and physical neglect, and sexual abuse. One man talked about growing up in a home where both parents used and dealt drugs. He began using pot himself at age 9, and by age 12 had advanced to Meth. He himself became a parent whose children suffered because of his addiction. A Native American woman talks about helping raise over a dozen nieces, nephews, and grandchildren because the drug addicted parents were unable to care for the children properly. A parent talks about numerous treatment attempts, and the struggle to regain her family.

The documentary is used in trainings for law enforcement, social service providers, medical professionals, attorneys, law makers, and others. It’s also used to raise awareness among the general public of the need to help drug endangered children. The video can be viewed free of charge by going to http://www.wisconsindec.org/, clicking on the resources button, and selecting Living in Shadows. DVD copies are also available free of charge by calling 1-888-415-9821.

Why is this important? Because kids who grow up in homes where drugs are used, sold, or manufactured not only face physical, psychological, and social trauma, but are also more likely to grow up to repeat their parents’ behavior. The best way for professionals and other community members to help interrupt the generational pattern of drug abuse is to understand the signs of adult addiction and recognize when children are at risk because of a caregiver’s drug activity. An educated population is better prepared to effectively intervene, thus reducing crime rates and individual suffering.
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