Erin Passons's Blog, page 14

MadCap Sends the Best Customer Service Reply Ever

This is for all of you tech writers out there who love MadCap Flare in the same way you love that guy in college who seemed perfect on the surface but secretly had a serious drinking problem.

'Cause, see, as you probably already know, the spellcheck in MadCap Flare is a skitzo. It's sort of like the preoccupied agent at airport security-it may catch the 80 oz shampoo bottle hidden under the bag of cocaine, or it may not. Therefore, if you're actually writing anything longer than a sentence in MadCap Flare without first screening it through MS Word security, you run the risk of putting our country at danger.

So, frustrated one day, I shot them a "product request." I may have even tweeted it. Weeks later, I get this in my email--which just goes to show, companies need/want your feedback, no matter how ridiculous it is:

  

The Perils of Dating a Crazy Cat Lady

This week I agreed to housesit for my friend while she went on a road trip with her husband and her kids, ages eight and two (I'd rather get whacked in the head by a meat cleaver, but to each their own).

While I was away, I had one continual request of my boyfriend...

You'll Never Interview in This Town Again - Available Now!

Dear Readers,

You’ll Never Interview in This Town Again is Now Available on Amazon

I give you my lovely little ditty about interviewing in Austin—the pain, the humiliation, the obscenity, the ping-pong tables, the chaos, the bloodshed.

As most of you know, I promised her about six months ago, but stuff happened, so I kept moving the date back and back again until I finally set an ironclad date on February 23rd. Only, that didn’t happen either. I have my reasons.

So how did she come to be now? It’s simple: I couldn’t sleep last night. My next book, Rest In Me, is set (among other times and places) during the Crimean War. I was burning the candle at both ends doing research and fell asleep just after reading an ungodly description of a battle scene from which I will spare you the details. Suffice to say, I had nightmares. I woke up feeling the story in my bones like I never had before. I knew it was ready. But I also knew this—I was in the thick of this book now, and if I ever hoped to finish You’ll Never Interview in This Town Again, I had to do it immediately, before the jaws of Rest In Me sank their teeth down all the way.

So now, here she is.

Listen, I’ll admit this—it’s not the best edited book in the world. This fact more prevalent in some areas more than others. There was one part that I had been waiting on writing because I didn’t feel her, we just weren’t connecting, but I wanted her to be told nonetheless, so this morning I sort of took her by the throat and told her it was now or never (Can you guess which part? I wonder if you can. Hint: I never write in order.) I flushed her out at the eighteenth hour, and she didn’t turn out exactly what I wanted her to be, but I realized she would do as-is. It made no sense to keep the rest of the chorus in the rehearsal room because of one soprano with stage fright.

And as it always is with these things, I made some changes at the last minute. Shuffled the topics around, gave them new dresses. Some ribbons might have been torn during the scuffle. You’ll get over it.

Please enjoy. It’s highly likely Rest In Me will take a long time to write, so this might be the last book you’ll get from me in a while.

Always,

e.p.

"This Sick Little Heart of Mine" Fun Fact

Little known fact: "This Sick Little Heart of Mine" was originally titled "Take My Hand Across the Dark," which is a line from Zbigneiw Hebert's famous poem, "To Marcus Aurelius." I don't know why, but the first time I ever read this poem (1999, at the Monash University library, waiting for my boyfriend to finish his computer science class), it moved me, and I thought of that line years later when trying to come up with a title for my book. I thought about how depression wants so badly to be recognized. Ultimately, however, the title wasn't as buzzworthy as "TSLHOM," so it was cast aside. Here's the poem:

Good night Marcus put out the light
and shut the book For overhead
is raised a gold alarm of stars
heaven is talking some foreign tongue
this the barbarian cry of fear
your Latin cannot understand
Terror continuous dark terror
against the fragile human land

begins to beat It's winning Hear
its roar The unrelenting stream
of elements will drown your prose
until the world's four walls go down
As for us? – to tremble in the air
blow in the ashes stir the ether
gnaw our fingers seek vain words
drag off the fallen shades behind us

Well Marcus better hang up your peace
Take my hand across the dark
Let it tremble when the blind world beats
on senses five like a failing lyre
Traitors – universe and astronomy
reckoning of stars wisdom of grass
and your greatness too immense
and Marcus my defenceless tears

My Youngest Fan Sings A Song Inspired By "This Sick Little Heart of Mine"

NEW EXCERPT, "You'll Never Interview in This Town Again"

ONE WEEK FROM RELEASE, PEOPLE!
And in honor of the upcoming release, here's s little snippet titled, "Sometimes You Are Your Own Worst Enemy."
Remember when I confessed that I fell in the gray area of being “detail-oriented?” Here’s the perfect example: a top company in Austin needed a technical writer. After reading about the position, my heart went into excitement overdrive. Cool company, awesome product, great location. I meticulously filled out the online forms and attached my resume. I spent hours working on the Cover Letter to End All Cover Letters, revising it over and over until it was a perfect blend of professionalism and wit.

It was only after I pressed “send” that I realized I had misspelled the company’s name.

I’m sorry, good people at Spredfest (not Spreadfest). It would have been really fun working for you. But I promise, no hard feelings. Your instant rejection was well-deserved.

Other factors outside of the random typo might have crippled my chances too. Like attitude. Not on the surface (I could schmooze with the best of them), but perhaps a hint of my true feelings leaked out from underneath the strategic alignment of my words; appeasing answers betrayed by the subliminal wanderings of subconscious gestures. A blink. The nervous crossing and uncrossing of legs. The clearing of the throat. Alone they were nothing; combined, they held up a mirror to my interviewer's probing eyes, exposing my lies.

Not that I lied about anything big. I certainly never lied about my work experience (although in hindsight, maybe I should have). It was other things. My feelings about Austin, for example.

“How do you like Austin?” was a popular question, and one, I came to realize, that was not only aimed at discovering how well I would fit into a company's "culture" (more on that later) but also helped the interviewer determine my longevity in the city, and by proxy, with them.

I tried being diplomatic with my answer. “I liked it better ten years ago,” was my standard reply, and sometimes I expanded on that and sometimes I didn’t need to. If the interviewer was over thirty (and occasionally they were), he or she would usually agree with me and we'd become engaged in a long discussion, airing out the usual grievances: population overflow, the closing of historic landmarks to make way for skyscrapers, the untimely death of Leslie Cochran, and of course, the traffic.

The younger interviewers would greet my answer with a raised brow or a flippant laugh, as if saying, "Yeah, that's what all you old-timers say," and move on to the next question.

But I wondered if, on more than one occasion, my answer, although acceptable (if not necessarily preferred), had been the only proof they needed to hold me back from advancing further—that the interviewers, even the youngsters, could somehow sense the true extent for which I had fallen out of love with our adored city, sense my detached joylessness at its mention, and thought to themselves, no way.

She's over it. She's looking to leave. Flight risk!

I wasn't looking to leave. I couldn’t. I shared custody of my children with my ex-husband, and he wasn’t going anywhere. Still, I dreamed about it: a place with four seasons and a decent transportation system. Intersections where I could stare straight ahead without being confronted with my unwillingness to feed a hungry person. Grocery stores where I could ask for plastic bags without feeling like a nihilist. Events I could attend without wearing a wristband or 800-SPF sunblock.

Logically I knew that within a week of living anywhere else, I'd probably kick a nun in the teeth for a P. Terry's veggie burger, but on some days in my private "grass is always greener," world, I swear I would have traded the moon just to see my children play in the snow or thrash about in vibrantly colored leaves.

In some ways Austin suited me. I was, after all, a left-leaning, vegetarian white person who listened to Band of Horses. But in other ways it didn't. I wasn't what you called outdoorsy, for one, and concerts weren't my thing. I didn't enjoy listening to music around others mainly because I had terrible taste in music. I only listened to half of the songs on my iPod. The rest I added as if they were conditions in a provisional peace treaty, sacrifices for the hipster gods to keep my Austin zip code. The White Stripes’ complete discography, for example, existed merely as a sort of weighted equation, negotiating the existence of the "Best of" Whitney Houston tracks listed just beneath.

I currently rented a place in SoCo, in a tiny shotgun house nestled between a McMansion and a meth lab. The location was ideal but it had its drawbacks. Grocery shopping, for instance, was a scary experience, being that it was mostly done at the HEB circus freakshow freakfest at the corner of Congress and Oltorf (which was only outdone by its freakier freakshow freakfest cousin on Riverside). Also, the increasing crime rate meant my kids couldn’t play in the front yard. Shittier people kept moving in, and yet the rent kept rising. And there were cockroaches. Tons and tons. Every morning, I’d wake to find a new cockroach on the rug, face-up, shell-down, antennae still moving like flags waving their final farewell to friends waiting inside the walls.

SoCo never felt right to me, but neither did anywhere else. Each time I found myself driving around a residential area in a different part of Austin, I tried to picture myself living there, but my imagination refused to follow. Nothing fit. Even if I could afford buying a decent home in the gentrified inner-city neighborhoods, I’d have to pick between a maimed fixer-upper or one of those modern-wannabe abominations with their hexagon windows and wire staircases, their trendy minimalist designs regurgitated from other cities.

I could move east, but it depressed me, how cemented the poverty seemed to be, unfolding in all directions.

I could move to the northwestern suburbs, with their Edward-Scissorhands neighborhoods of a thousand houses and only five floor plans, but they depressed me too. Sure, they had safety appeal and blue-ribbon schools, but I have lived in them before, had been sucked into their regime of fresh-cut grass worship and wine therapy preambles, a meta heaven soundtracked by the high pitch voices young mothers used to correct their children, and had learned the hard way that crime was not the only form of violence. Downtown and the East Side were dangerous, but the suburbs wielded their own violence too—more subtle, more gradual. Both could can harm you in different ways, I think. Guns and knives were deadly, sure, but barbeques and playdates, book clubs and carpools—maybe those could kill you too.

Perhaps that was why I was having a hard time finding a job. I wanted too much in my workplace the same way I wanted too much in my neighborhood. I longed for a neighborhood in a great location where I could shop at a non-scary HEB; a little slice of heaven devoid of cockroaches and crime, where my children could play outside, but where the quality of their childhoods didn’t hinge on how well I got along with their friends’ mothers, just like I wanted a workplace that was traditional but innovative and fresh but not pretentious. I wanted the best parts of different places to come together and join into one utopia. I wanted it all, and so I had nothing.

Here's Some Pussy For Your Valentine's Day

Post by Erin Passons.

Dear Dougie Wougie, Here Are a Hundred Reasons Why I Love You.....

(all poorly written and not edited in the slightest, mind you) 
Here's we go...1. Your crooked teeth.
2. Your sweet laughter
3. Your lopsided grin
4. Your loyalty
5. Your kindness
6. Your generosity
7. Your character
8. Your soft skin
9. Your gentle kisses
10. The Junk in your trunk
11. Your Back rubs
12. The Way You Treat my Kids
13. Your selflessness
14. That you're a human dictionary
15. That you're a human spellcheck
16. That you're a human thesaurus
17. That you're one hell of an editor
18. The way you correct my naïve racism without giving me too much grief about it
19. The way you (sometimes) watch murder porn with me
20. The way you feed and water my cats without me having to ask
21. That you always unload the dishwasher
22. Our inside jokes
23. The way you don’t kill my cats when they wake you up every morning
24. How you let Charlotte sleep on your chest
25. The way you check up on me during the work day
26. That you never make fun of me when I mispronounce something
27. That you never mention my scar
28. That you're okay with not having a dog
29. The way you take care of me when I'm sick
30. The way I feel when you speak to my parents
31. The way you encourage me but never let me get too full of myself
32. That you tell me how beautiful I am every day (even when I'm clearly not!)
33. The way you put me to bed every night
34. The way you'll get me chocolate late at night when I'm feeling fatty-pants
35. Your just-the-right touch of jealousy
36. The way you watch me walk from my car at night in case someone tries to mug me
37. That you never ask me to cook
38. The way you always ask me if I'm hungry
39. The way you play with Kaya
40. How good you are at everything! (although sometimes frustrating :) )
41. The authoritative way you order for me at restaurants
42. The way you give me plenty of "Erin" time
43. The intensity for which you love the people in your life (even if they don’t deserve it, me included)
44. The tingles I get when you say my name.
45. Your head rubs
46. Your scent (!!!!!!)47. How often you tell me that you love me48. How you always remember "no onions"
49. That you feel comfortable enough to be vulnerable in front of me
50. That you didn't laugh when I told you about how I cry when I hear that Lyle, Lyle Crocodile song
51. That you know my ugliest secrets but you still love me anyway
52. That you help the kids with their homework
53. That you're just as much of a homebody as I am
54. That you never criticize my spending habits
55. That you never make me feel small even when I probably deserve it
56. That you get along with my friends
57. That my friends and family love you almost as much as I do
58. Your patience when I'm rambling on about one of my "subjects" (ie WWII, serial killers, politics)
59. The way you blame your flatulence on my cat
60. Your simplistic dietary needs
61. Your attempts to lower your meat intake so we can kiss more
62. The way you pull my hair during "business time"
63. That you're as dirty in bed as I am :P
64. That you didn't yell at me that time I farted on your foot
65. The way we sleep together
66. How warm your body feels beside mine
67. The way you look in the color red
68. How I always feel safe around you
69. The way you always have my back
70. How intuitive you are
71. Your big, ginormous, insanely huge, worthy-enough-to-be-a-black-man's...heart ;P
72. The way you scorn the justifiably scornable
73. That you want the same things that I do
74. The way you moved back to America to be with me
75. The dignified way you carry your brilliance
76. Your humor
77. Your compassion
78. The way my head feels in the crook of your arm
79. The stories you tell me that you've never told anyone else
80. The way you greet me when I come home (like you haven't seen me in years)
81. That our childhoods share the same people and places
82. Your singing voice (esp. when you sang "Street Where You Live")
83. That I never feel ashamed to cry in front of you
84. That we share the same politics
85. That you think my white pasty skin is attractive
86. That you let me take over your Kindle Fire
87. The way you bury your face in my neck during…
88. That all I have to do is smell a whiff of you and my hormones (STILL!) go nuts.
89. That we share similar wounds
90. That you're the most amazing man I've ever met
91. That you took a chance
92. That you're the bestest best friend I've ever had
93. That you're the hottest moral compass in town
94. That you don't whistle annoyingly like my dad
95. That sometimes you let the other person win (even when it pains you to do so) because you know you have nothing to prove
96. The way you can turn anything into a song
97. The way you hold me when the monsters appear
98. That you never call me names like "bitch" (unless it's during "business time" :) which I like )
99. You make me feel worthy of being loved by someone as magical as you
100. You don’t complain about my crappy back rubs
I love you, boo! Happy Valentine's Day!

Which Austin Business Journal's "Best Place to Work" is Right for You?

In celebration of the upcoming launch of "You'll Never Interview In This Town Again," (February 23, better recognize!), I've created a little quiz on Buzzfeed. Which Austin Business Journal "Best Place to Work?" is right for you? If you're job hunting or if you're just bored, this is the quiz for you!

Kaya Sings Spongebob Squareparents *This Post Is For Grandparents Only*

Post by Erin Passons.