A n n a r c h y

I’m interrupting this personal blog to bring you a message from my business world: I’m writing a book!

Planned for early December release, Content Rules is a how-to guide to creating compelling content for the Web. The talented and fun CC Chapman is co-author (David Meerman Scott is writing the foreword), and together we’ll answer questions like, How can you create so-called bold stories and videos and blog posts that will inspire people? How do you develop ideas that will arouse passion for your products or services? How can you cultivate fans? How can your ideas ignite your business?

Any organization with a website is a publisher, right? So Content Rules applies to organizations of all sizes and stripes, whether you are a Fortune 500 corporation or a mom-and-pop on the corner, or anything in between: hospital, entrepreneur, nonprofit, sole practitioner or consultant, artist, government agency, church, school, political candidate, sports team, community group, marching band, butcher, baker or candlestick maker.

I’m excited about this project, because for me it represents a mashup of so many things that thrill me: Creating stuff people love. Building a community around an organization. Online tools. Good writing. (And, by the way, it also allows me to slay (or at least shame!) some demons that have long plagued my world: Like corporate Frankenspeak. Uninspired blogs. Boring craptastical content. Stuff that sucks.)

I’d be thrilled if you pre-order Content Rules now, or wait until it’s out this December.

Also, check out our brand-spanking-new blog and site, and (bonus!) watch me embarrass myself in the video.

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Dear Motion Picture Association of America:

I’m freshly back from the theater after seeing Toy Story 3, which prompts me to ask: A G-rating? Seriously? I haven’t been this disturbed since the Turkish prison scenes in Midnight Express (which was rated R, by the way).

The first two Toy Story movies centered on the happy relationship between a young boy named Andy and his toys. In Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 3, Andy is packing for college, and the story leaves the toys to fend for themselves in a world where there’s no longer anyone to care for them.

It’s not that the movie was mis-rated. Devoid of sex or gore, it is a kid’s movie. Technically.

But what it stirs up in movie-goers is anything but juvenile: Essentially abandoned by a grown-up Andy, it’s up to the desperate, panicked toys to find not just a new home, but a way to recapture their raison d’etre : The simple joy and richness of being loved best by a child.

The unspoken premise is this: Nothing lasts forever, and in the end you’re either the deserted or the one deserting. (Also: because this is a kid’s movie, Pixar tosses us a bone: Don’t fret too much; you’ll eventually find someone else who is almost as good as the original. But it’ll be hell – hell! — getting there.)

So, Motion Picture Association, you could have warned me. Toy Story 3 is tragically under-rated — in the sense of sketchily explained, resulting in a whole audience of popcorn-munching Americans who will suddenly be caught off guard for that scene when Woody, Buzz, Ham, and the rest of the toys — trapped on a garbage incinerator’s conveyor belt — hold hands in heartbreaking resignation as they brave a certain fiery death, and in that moment you forget that they are not just toys but cartoon toys, and you bawl like a baby at the desperate humanity laid bare on their digital faces. [Read more →]

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My little dog Abby lost her right eye yesterday.

“Lost” is a funny term for it—implying that she misplaced it somewhere and can’t for the life of her remember where, like you might car keys. Maybe, in time, “lost” will be enough to define the visceral brutality of what happened. But not quite yet.

Then again, I’m not entirely sure what happened, exactly. I do know this much, in the way that your mind tills over and over the details leading up to a terrible thing, as if to search for clues that things were about to be altered forever: My daughter Caroline and I were in the backyard. I was combing the surface of a new garden with a steel rake. Abby and her canine sister, Maisy, were with us, too, roaming—as they often do—amid a thick bed of flowers and ferns some 50 feet away. Abby stands only about a foot tall from her shoulder to her paws: When she’s in the garden it swallows her whole. Rabbits and chipmunks and voles and other small creatures take refuge in that garden, and Abby and Maisy track their punky smells, noses to the ground. [Read more →]

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Yesterday I sat in the stands at my son’s graduation, smack at what would be the face-off line of the covered ice hockey rink, counting the rows of chairs on the floor below and trying to work out which mortarboard was his in a royal blue sea of 440 graduates. All of us parents standing shoulder-to-shoulder were doing the same thing, of course: Each of us seeking out our own kid, each of our hearts swollen within our chests to the point of bursting. (We parents are impossibly foolish, aren’t we? It’s easy to mock this brand of sappy sentimentality -– I want to mock myself right now –- but still you are powerless to resist the thing that makes you so happy, so joyful, so full of love that you are full to the brim, and overflowing, and all your bones are loose and floating in the syrupy liquid somewhere, bobbing on the surface.)

The Chinese family with the camcorder in front of me put a good face on it. But I knew that, like me, they were boneless, too, even if it’s not immediately apparent when you looked at them or at any other family in the stands. What you see instead is all of us passively bearing witness to the usual stuff: the amazingly brilliant class valedictorian turns to face the class of 2010 and the whole place roars at once for him; the principal says a few words; someone sings a big number with meaningful lyrics to befit a momentous occasion like this one. Like most of the canned stuff, this girl sings well enough, but the whole thing still comes off a little lame and overdone. One of the students lets fly an inflated beach ball that his classmates keep randomly alight. [Read more →]

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My 17-year-old will be in college next year, and right now he and I are deep in the process of applications and school visits and talks that spring up suddenly at dinner or in the car and begin with, “Maybe I should think about…?” or “Have you considered…?” It’s a process that feels very much how I once heard a writer describe the process of writing: Like feeling your way, a foot or two at a time, along a very long and very dark tunnel; you can’t fathom where it ends up.

Sometimes it’s my son who starts the conversation, and sometimes I do. But either way, it’s clear that this is less a new topic than it is a thread of a conversation we’ve been having for many months, and probably years. It’s the same conversation every parent has first with a spouse and then later with the child himself, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I know I’ll miss him next year, and I know that will feel right. My friend Andy has a son who is several years older than mine, and when his went off to college Andy told me that little boys evolve into teenage boys so that you are more than happy to help them pack when the time comes.

In fact, I missed my son when he was away for six weeks this past summer. (I didn’t realize quite how much I missed him until suddenly there he was, grinning at me in the kitchen, and as I wrapped my arms around him I thought of that line in the poem by Walter Dean Myers, “Love that boy, like a rabbit loves to run.”)

When I told people then how he was loving the long hours he spent in the school’s clay studio and how he went back after dinner, and when I tell them now how he wants to study Ceramics in college, people often nod in a vague way about how wonderful that is before they ask something along the lines of, “So how’s he going to make a living at that?” [Read more →]

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It’s alarming to talk with someone on the phone and realize they suspect you are a liar. This past week I received, via FTD, a belated birthday package—a gourmet basket with some of my favorite things. Like tea, biscotti, and dried apricots. There was a warm message on the card accompanying it, wishing me lots of post-celebration, feet-on-the-ottoman relaxation this autumn… but there was no signature. No name. In effect, I got a thoughtful gift from someone I couldn’t thank for their thoughtfulness. Weird.

I called the customer service number in the packaging, and someone named Danielle answered. (On a Saturday afternoon… Kudos, FTD!) I explained the predicament, and Danielle said she understood but couldn’t tell me who sent the package.

“You mean you can’t tell me, as in you don’t know?” I asked.

“Oh, I know who sent it,” Danielle said. “But it’s just that I can’t reveal it to you.” When I asked why, she said, “Well, it’s our policy. A precaution, you know, in case they don’t want you to know who sent it.”

But why would someone who sent me a birthday gift want to remain anonymous? This was a gift basket, not a wing at the Met. Danielle paused for a minute before replying, matter-of-factly, “Because maybe you aren’t supposed to know.”

Danielle emphasized the “you” in a manner that implied that I might not be, in fact, who I said I was. Maybe I wasn’t, her tone suggested, the recipient of the gift, the one who would be sipping hot tea by a roaring fire, dipping almond biscotti. Instead I was some person who was inquiring about a gift given to someone else. [Read more →]

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