Invisible Design. Temporary Creations. Stories that Connect and Endure.

There are million reasons that an entrepreneur stays up too late. At least 99 of those are actually related to doing the real work that brings in business and enables you to serve more people and make the world a better place. And so, this weekend, my former Online Empowerment partner, Corinna Rake, who is still my website angel, stayed up entirely too late last night to work on my site. The night before, I had pushed myself well past bedtime in order to get her everything she needed to do her tech magic.

This morning, any observant website visitor would spot new sidebars with clearer email opt-in invitations and streamlined categories. Soon, you’ll copy about my approach to making connections and building your online presence through storytelling in a new text area on my homepage.

Thing is, no one is really going to notice.

This isn’t a “poor me” statement. It’s experience speaking. And it’s me taking a deep breath and assuring both Corinna and myself that all of our hard work was important even if no one seems to see it.

The need to be seen and recognized

Raised to make a difference in the world and to always be at the top of class, being invisible seems like utter failure. Working hard on something that no one is meant to notice seems like a bad joke come true.

I know this isn’t the only way to look at the world - it’s the limited perspective of an American perfectionist born in the last quarter of the 20th century. It’s the lament of the individual snowflake who can’t believe she might get lost in a great white sea of sameness.

If I weren’t so tired after all the website-related sleep deprivation, I might be able to call to mind an Eastern parable about the value of work that goes unrecognized or at least temper these statements as a woman who has grown past that competitive ethos of high school.

Right now, all I can do is picture the sand art scene from last season’s House of Cards. I’m feeling just as baffled as the type A White House residents who couldn’t imagine toiling so hard on something that would just get swept away.

But that’s a different story about a different kind of work.

The website work that we did is easy to see, though it’s invisible to most. The web is a volatile realm, but those coding changes were not necessarily transitory. Corinna’s redesigns will help support my message and my work for the next few years until some shift in design and accessibility trends means “that site looks so 2016” becomes an insult.

It’s OK that some good work is invisible.

It’s also OK to writer and create arts that wants to be seen.

After years helping to build websites and write copy that gets a point across and makes people act, I understand the value of work that fades into the background. I understand it, but I can never love it. That’s why I have dedicated myself to storytelling and mentoring other writers, not to churning out sales pages.

This April I am launching a new course called Tell Stories that Matter: Write Online Content that Your Readers Care About. We’re going to explore how to craft stories that connect - not just copy that converts.

This online course will launch in April and I would love to have you with me from the start. Please join the interest list to receiving VIP updates and special pricing. Learn more about the storytelling course

Tell Stories that Matter (Mompreneur Outtake)

Rehearsal for the new course promo video was hijacked by a two year-old.  In the spirit of authenticity and because these 44 seconds tell the universal story of what it means to be a mom entrepreneur, I'm posting it as today's #365StrongStories post.

Plus, I'm pretty sure I said it best in this version. The Tell Stories that Matter: Write Online Content that Your Readers Care About course is for the emerging thought leader who wants to connect to their own stories and to their creativity. It's for you if you want to connect to your readers and build your business by becoming a stronger storyteller. This online course will launch in April and I would love to have you with me from the start. Please join the interest list to receiving VIP updates and special pricing. Tell me more

The imbalance of passion. The recalibration of the scales.

Once upon a time, there was a woman, a woman who was also a writer and a business owner and a healer and a mother and wife. She had wandered in the hinterlands between her various identities trying to root into her most essential, creative self. It was a sweet journey, albeit a scattered one. Most nights she fell restlessly into bed, feeling she’d run a dozen races and sure that she hadn’t finished a single one of them.

But then, in the darkest time of the year, the time we hang with lights and soak with champagne, she heard a call. She was invited to step deliberately into the new year. It was time to bring all the threads together. It was time to embrace a truth she’d long known but often forgotten:

She is a storyteller.

And so, if you happen to have this woman in your digital circles, you have seen the floodgates open. Sixty stories and more have poured from her heart, sprung from her mind, and flowed through frantic fingers. She has dozens of beginnings, middles, and ends to show for herself in 2016.

This writer has never felt so creatively alive.

She is proud. She is weary. She is also afraid.

Though she began this project almost on a whim, she’s not having a casual affair with these #365StrongStories of hers. This project matters and it will endure, she swears it. But at what cost?

It’s time to reevaluate the big project

Ok, enough of the third person (a handy tool to hide behind when emotions threaten to drown out the narrative, but a way to hide nonetheless). I’m standing before you, my generous and supportive community, to say I won’t quit, but I will change.

The #365 project is vital to my mission - walking the talk and showing that it is possible to tell stories that connect with confidence and ease. And yet, flexibility and transformation are just as vital so I can survive and fulfill that mission.

And so, I am further redefining the parameters of this #365StrongStories project.

Not all stories require spell check and copyediting

In this media driven age, it’s obvious that stories do not need to come in written form. Think about it - storytelling thrived long, long humans could write and story will continue to be an engine of the human experience when we start communicating via telepathy.

I’m giving myself to break my stories out of their sentences and paragraphs (and the sizeable time commitment that comes with editing the written word). More than half of the entries in the #365StrongStories projects will continue to be good old stories that you can read with your eyes, but the rest will be video, image, and even art.

In doing this, I am giving myself some creative breathing room. Now, I am liberated to develop the stories and ideas that refuse to be bound by word limits and midnight deadlines. I can go deep and tell the bigger Story when I need to.

I am also being realistic about what it takes to develop a readership for all this stuff. Yes, it really is true that content marketing is 20% content and 80% marketing. I certainly do not have four hours a day to devote to promoting this content, especially when I have a writing coaching business to run.

Tell me what kind of stories fill you up and help you along

In my creative flurry, I think I have occasionally lost track of one of the fundamentals of story: connect with the reader and invite that reader to be the hero.

As I revise the shape of the #365StrongStories project, I am also reconnecting with what matters: you. Please help me do that.

• What kind of stories light you up?
• How do you feel about video storytelling?
• Would writing prompts inspire you to write your own stories (and even submit them to the project?)
• What can't I see about what's working and what isn't about this project that you, dear reader, can see clearly?

Leave  your thoughts and ideas in the comments or post them over on the Facebook page.

This project matters to me, and I know that it matters to many readers too. With your help, Strong Stories will fulfill its mission: to inspire a great circle of people to tell stories that matter.

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When Elder Becomes Child by Guest Storyteller Tania Pryputniewicz

Once my father played guitar in a trio. Once he carried me on his shoulders, paired rotors of elm leaves spiraling to land in my hair. He spun with his hands the playground carousel as I gripped silver rails, metronome wand of his body reappearing each pass where I left it. I fell asleep anchored to the rhythm of his voice reading me book after book from The Hobbit to The Song of Hiawatha to The Chronicles of Narnia.

Once he waved goodbye as I rode off to college on the back of a motorcycle. To the trill of Hermit Thrush, the day I wed, he walked me down a cotton-lined path strewn with rose petals. Once he came every Friday to care for my children when they were infants, then toddlers, just so I could write poems at the coffee shop until we moved 600 miles away along the coast.

 

The days have turned their pages to the part in the story where it is my turn to play guitar for him. My turn to read, record poems, send sound files, so that where eyes fail to see, his ears may hear the family voice he once midwifed as nightly he drifts dreamward in sleep. If I could, I would carry him on my shoulders so he might catch the falling stars. 

Tania Pryputniewicz, author of November Butterfly (Saddle Road Press, 2014), teaches Wheel of Archetypal Selves Tarot Writing classes and is using the Tarot cards to finish writing her second poetry manuscript about an Illinois commune she lived on as a child.

Never miss a story. Subscribe to the weekly #365StrongStories Digest.  Click Here to Subscribe

On Mentorship, Evolution, and a Book We Were Destined to Write

Some stories become so well lived that forget that how you got there is a story worth telling. That is how I feel about my relationship with my mentor and teacher, Eleanora Amendolara. More than a decade ago a Lyme disease diagnosis brought me to a local healer Sue Fick’s table. Within two years I remembered that I wanted to be a healer too and I decided to join Sue at class. After all, I had become a Reiki master in college and I had long yearned for those superpowers to become real in my life.

That was when the Sacred Center was first woven into my life. Though I followed the signs and made the choice to show up, it all seemed meant.

And that’s the way it’s been as healing trainings evolved to become a Mystery School, as those stones that Eleanora uses became the sacred tools behind Chumpi Illumination. Because I was there at the heart of this organic transformation, I barely noticed that the work was sitting at the core of my life.

In the middle of this journey I gave birth to two babies. I clung to the couch fighting morning sickness, I dozed during my third trimester, I brought along infants to class. There were two growing reasons to say "I'll be back when the kids are older," but the decision to make it work seemed as predestined as all the rest.

Becoming Eleanora’s go-to writing and marketing person seemed natural. Writing a book together seemed like the logical extension of our work together. After all, she had evolved from being a teacher to being someone I knew would be one of the surest guides in my life.

Today, however, it’s time to pause and notice how far this work has come. Please take two minutes to watch this gorgeous trailer for our book, Chumpi Illumination: Gateways to Healing and Transformation.