Tony Chung: Creative Communications

Last week I mentioned my foray into the world of creative communications consulting. Here’s a sampling of the kind of sideline projects I’ve been working on lately. Many of these are classified: top secret, for-your-eyes-only kind of stuff. By reading this post you agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement: Don’t tell a soul.

[Edit: Okay, the secret is out: the main intent of this post is to provide search engine links to my colleagues' sites in order to improve their SEO traffic... ooh how I hate spilling the beans!]

Christmas time is fast approaching. Surely you have those one or two finicky family members who are just impossible to shop for. Allow me to share a secret to my Christmas shopping that has alleviated much of the pressure, and restored the sense of peace to what is often the most dreaded experience at this time of year.

My secret is found in our family’s running joke: “What do you get for the one who has everything?”

The answer:”BATTERIES!”

So I says to my wife, “you know, I’d really like to work as an independent contractor for awhile and really get to see the world.” The following day, my manager told me that they’d lost my contract as a technical writer. I wanted to say, “Would you like me to help you find it?” Instead I played it cool. “Great! Lots of time for blogging.” As I wrote my last full post on November 6, obviously I didn’t spend as much time blogging as I thought. What did I do instead? It couldn’t have been because I ran out of things to say.

Comic strips are always a great source of inspiration. At the risk of the source for this file enforcing it’s “Redistribution in whole or part prohibited” policy, I’m posting it for your enjoyment. I hope that a link back to the ArcaMax website is enough to hold off the lawyers. I mean, those who know [...]

Now that I have your attention: A fellow Tech Writer (Tina—I mean Holly Harkness) turned me onto a Wired magazine article about how blogging has lost the spontaneous, personal feel, now that there are so many of them out there. According to the writer, Paul Boutin, one would have more success being heard by contributing to the Facebook-, Twitter-, Flickr-, or YouTube-ospheres, rather than the blogosphere.

From the beginning, blogs have always been about conversation and sharing. Yes, several have advertisements on them. Yes, several have hired pro writers (for instance, Duo Consulting hired me). And yes, many do read more like online magazines than personal observations from the field. But nobody’s forcing you to read them. You can select what you want to read.

Leaving a job is hard, regardless of the one making the decision. Whether the choice was mine or the company’s didn’t stop me from the feelings of loss, and the ensuing depression that paralyzed me for a couple of days before I could move forward. Nobody prepared me to be released from a job when I was doing well, and this was the case.

It would have been easy to feel bitter at the apparent injustice of the situation, except that my faith in God, who provides every good and perfect gift, has already prepared me for my next assignment. And my next assignment for me. I know that I need to rely on His strength in my times of weakness. And there have been many times. Several times. Per day.

Tonight I was put into an unusual predicament. The local elementary school plans to host presentations to discuss sexuality and sexual health with students from Kindergarten to grade five. My kids—my little babies, will be told about “all the different holes” in their bodies, what they are and how they work. Not completely sure if I was okay with this idea, I joined my wife to listen to the speaker, Saleema Noon, give the skinny on all the ideas with which she planned to fill our kids’ heads. Apparently I was only one of the 60 concerned parents who questioned what our kids would be learning, and above all, why are kids will be learning it.

Saleema Noon is an attractive, 30-something, sexual health and family life educator with a wide range of experience working with children, teens, and adults. I lifted part of that statement right from her website. She has a B.A. in Family Sciences, and later completed a M.A. in sexual health education, a decision she says that was provoked by her counseling grade 10 boys and pregnant teenage girls with little or no factual sexual knowledge. The teenagers she counseled were vulnerable to peer pressure, due to their ignorance of sexual responsibility.