#Direct Mail Postcards Portland OR

[insyncprinting]

Union Printers: Elevating Campaign Signs and More with Precision and Integrity

When it comes to spreading messages and promoting brands or reasons, few equipment are as impactful as remarkable revealed materials. Whether you’re running a campaign, organizing a network event, or representing a commercial enterprise, you need revealed substances that stand out and align along with your values. For those in Portland, operating with a relied on union printer like InSync Printing means you get the guarantee of top-notch merchandise crafted with talent, quality, and ethics in thoughts. Here’s why deciding on Union Printers in Portland is important and how they make a distinction in generating Campaign Signs in Portland, OR.

The Significance of Choosing Union Printers in Portland

Union printing has lengthy stood for truthful labor practices, ethical treatment, and sturdy excellent requirements. Union printers are licensed to observe strict hints that protect workers' rights and guarantee regular, excessive-caliber effects. By deciding on a union printer, Portland agencies and campaign organizers can guide these values, making their messages resonate now not best through the printed materials but additionally via their dedication to responsible practices.

Union printers like InSync Printing also carry experienced experts who specialise in a big range of printing services, from marketing campaign signs and banners to pamphlets and commercial enterprise playing cards. This understanding guarantees that each mission is completed to a excessive fashionable, handing over alluring, vibrant, and sturdy consequences that capture attention and ultimate over time.

Quality Campaign Signs in Portland, OR

Campaign symptoms are crucial equipment for any political candidate, cause, or occasion. They assist increase awareness, attract support, and beef up a emblem or message. When marketing campaign signs and symptoms are produced by using a union printer, you can count on expert-grade materials designed to withstand the factors while making a memorable impression.

At InSync Printing, we apprehend the precise wishes for Campaign Signs in Portland, OR. Portland’s weather may be unpredictable, and our long lasting printing substances are designed to maintain up in diverse situations. Whether it’s heavy rain or extreme sun, our campaign signs and symptoms preserve their look and message readability. We paintings closely with our clients to ensure that the final merchandise meet their actual specifications, developing custom designs that reflect each marketing campaign’s specific voice and style.

Customization Options for Effective Campaign Signs

A incredible campaign signal doesn’t just display a name—it communicates a message. Union printers offer significant customization options that permit campaigns to bring precise branding, colorations, slogans, and values. This is particularly vital for candidates or causes that need to construct a strong visual identification throughout multiple materials, which include posters, signs, banners, and promotional merchandise.

With a number colour alternatives, materials, and sizes, union printers can create signs and symptoms tailor-made for your target market and goals. From bold, big-format signs and symptoms that seize drivers' eyes to smaller, detail-orientated designs for up-close viewing, union printers are ready to make certain every detail is best. Plus, with green alternatives available, InSync Printing gives Portland campaigns with a sustainable preference that resonates with environmentally conscious electorate.

Reliability and Timeliness for Local Campaigns

Union printers like InSync Printing are committed to delivering on time without compromising best. This reliability is mainly crucial for campaigns on tight schedules. We recognize that point is of the essence, and final-minute delays can have an effect on outreach plans and campaign visibility. By selecting a local Portland-based totally union printer, campaign organizers advantage from rapid turnaround instances and personalized guide, ensuring they’re prepared to hit the floor going for walks.

Why Portland Businesses and Campaigns Benefit from Union Printing

Working with Union Printers in Portland is going past just getting satisfactory printed materials. It’s about supporting the local people and personnel, selling moral practices, and enhancing the credibility of your marketing campaign or enterprise. When your signs undergo the union label, they inform a tale of duty, nice, and willpower—values that resonate with Portland’s diverse, engaged, and conscientious community.

By investing in union-published substances, campaigns could make a significant impact, attain new supporters, and enhance their community connections. Whether you’re running for workplace, promoting a local initiative, or building a logo, union-revealed campaign signs and symptoms expand your message in approaches that go beyond conventional advertising.

Partner with InSync Printing for Your Campaign Needs

If you’re searching out Campaign Signs in Portland OR, which can be designed and produced with care and attention to detail, InSync Printing is here to assist. As a main union printer in Portland, we deliver a dedication to satisfactory, ethics, and consumer satisfaction that aligns with the values of our clients. From campaign signs and symptoms and banners to custom apparel and promotional products, we offer a full range of printing solutions tailored to meet the needs of Portland’s dynamic network.

Choose InSync Printing on your next mission and experience the difference a union printer makes in crafting impactful, notable published materials. Contact us today to talk about how we can assist your campaign or business with expertly designed and responsibly produced printing solutions.

[urbanadventureleague]

Letter Writing Month is Back!

Hello friends! February is Letter Writing Month. What’s that? It’s simple. Here are the “official rules” from the website:

In the month of February, mail at least one item through the post every day it runs (which in the US is every day except Sundays and Washington’s Birthday on Monday February 17th- my notes.) Write a postcard, a letter, send a picture, or a cutting from a newspaper, or a fabric swatch.

Write back to everyone who writes to you. This can count as one of your mailed items.

I’ve been doing this challenge, off and on, since 2012. And this year I want to get back into it!

I generally write post cards, because they are nice and cheaper than an envelope. I already have some folks that I’m going to write, but I have twelve “wild card” slots. You can be someone I write to!

How do you get in on the action? Simple!

Be one of the first twelve people to respond. Please either email/direct message me, or leave a comment. You MUST include your mailing address in this message or comment, no “Did I get in?” If you don’t feel like your postal address going public, then contact me privately. And please note that I am posting this across three different platforms, so it’s the first twelve overall across all platforms, not just this one. And the when I write someone is random.

Promise to write back. You don’t have to do it in February, but sometime before summer would be nice. Also, you should write someone else during this month!

Consider donating to the cause. Stamps aren’t free, and neither are postcards. You can simply do this by buying me a Ko-fi.

I will also write back to anyone who writes me! See my address below.

The “list of twelve” is only open to people in the US, as International postage is triple that of sending a postcard domestically. However, if you are outside of the US and want to participate with me, I will write back to everyone who writes me.

Alright! Does this sound like fun to you? Then get in on the action! If writing old-school sounds silly in the year 2020, give it a shot.

My address is: Shawn Granton, P. O. Box 14185, Portland OR 97293-0185, USA

Read about my participation in former Letter Writing Months here.

[docholligay]

AND THAT’S THE EPISODE (I love this second ending) 

Did we enjoy? I always like hearing about it!! 

Our next episode is during Eight Days of Content, Episode 9: The Castle Said to Contain Eternity (full schedule coming soon) and then Episode 35 is December 12th. 

There’s a stream tonight on my patreon, check it for details! 

Want to do more than say nice things?

Contribute to my long-term stability at my Patreon (This is how I make my income and my Patrons are what keep this content coming!) 

Want to thank the chef? Tip me at my ko-fi! Everything from this month is going toward my Portland trip to help move Nikki back here and also maybe something from Blizz’ Black Friday Sale oops. Thank you to the handful who’ve already tipped!

New bullet point! In an effort to move away from Welfare Queen Jeff Bezos, I’ve removed the link to my Amazon wishlist. But you can still find physical gifts if you prefer! I have a wishlist right here with direct links to non-Amazon companies, and you can mail it to the address below! (it’s mostly stuff for entertaining)

Send me a letter, postcard, etc to:

Doc Holligay

PO box 1621

Billings MT 59103 

USA

[welllpthisishappening]

Contact Light (1/2)

Emma Swan has never been one for big, overwhelming...anything. And as far as she’s concerned space is both big and overwhelming and just a bit terrifying because she’s fairly certain her connection to gravity is slightly tenuous when he glances in her direction. But that’s neither here nor there because she watches all his stupid space documentaries anyway and keeps letting him glance in her direction and, at some point, she learns the first words uttered by a human being on the moon. Contact light. It’s not common knowledge. That seems, almost, oddly appropriate now.

Rating: Mature for swearing and a copious amount of making out and more swearing and eventually some angst.  AN: @onceuponaprincessworld sent the prompt: “Ok, so Killian is new in town and David is inviting him on his house for Thanksgiving where he meets Emma, David's sister, who also happens to be the one for who he moved into town in the first place, with a lot of kisses maybe secret dating or maybe it in start of their dating or whatever you feel like writing! Thanks.” This is...not entirely that and also absurdly long and I have no excuse except that’s how I live my life. They make out a lot.  Also living it up on Ao3 if that’s your jam. And if you want to read the rest of the CS prompt-a-thon.

She was going to murder him.

Or strangle him.

Which was kind of on the way to murdering him.

Semantics or whatever.

She hadn’t felt that way in a long time, actual years, and she wasn’t sure if her current murder-like tendencies were because of the smirk on his face or the way his eyes seemed to follow her around the apartment or because she just wanted to make out with him for the rest of the day.

Probably the last one. Definitely the last one.

It still caught her off guard sometimes.  

And really at the beginning she would have punched him square in the jaw if he’d even suggested it, but he also probably would have laughed at the idea of it and that probably should have a been a sign.

Something about inevitable or some other word that Emma absolutely did not believe in because this was the real world and not...a Lifetime movie. Although maybe it was if she murdered Killian. There always seemed to be a lot of murder-type plotting in Lifetime movies.  

And baby stealing.

She absolutely wasn’t stealing anyone’s baby. Except maybe Ruth Jones who was so goddamn adorable it sometimes hurt to look at her. No. Emma wasn’t stealing a baby.

And she wasn’t going to murder Killian. This was not a Lifetime movie. This was...probably a Hallmark movie or a made-for-Netflix special with lots of sentiment and feelings and lessons learned. Emma absolutely refused to learn any lessons.

“It’s going to be fine, Swan,” Killian promised, the sentiment falling out of his mouth seemingly every other minute and she kept pacing in the middle of her living room.

He caught her around the wrist, pulling her up short and eyeing her with the kind of meaning that didn’t belong in thisbecause there was no name to this, it just was and now it was going to exist in the same city for the first time ever and, maybe, exist in front of her brother.

“We have to follow the rules,” Emma said again. She’d written them down. She made Killian put them in his wallet. “To the letter. For real.” “I’ve understood the other twenty times you’ve told me already, love. Trust me, I’ve got it.” She wasn’t sure she believed him. Or, rather, she wasn’t sure she believed herself because he’d come to Portland for her, but no one else knew that and no one else could know that because David might have an actual aneurysm if he found out his little sister and his best friend had been doing...whatever –  everything – right under his nose for the better part of the last two years.

“Yeah?” Emma asked, hating how nervous her voice sounded and how Killian blinked twice before he answered.

“Yeah,” he nodded. She sighed, sagging forward slightly, but she didn’t argue when he tugged her back towards the couch, tucking her against his side and kissing the top of her hair. “Nothing’s going to go wrong, Swan. We just need to...stand at least six feet away from each other at all times. And then we tell your brother and we let the chips fall where they may.” Emma laughed, but there was a nervous edge to it, pressing her face against the button up he had on and it was a fancy eventor so David explained when he sent out the group-wide e-mail invitations a week before and Killian had spent the majority of the night making of fun of that.

“You need to be less attractive,” she accused. “It’s frustrating.” “I’ll work on it. In the meantime. Six feet and no trying to make out in that one corner of the apartment that’s almost invisible from the rest of the living room if you’re standing the right way.”

“You’re making this difficult already.” “I’m just saying.”

“I know you are. And I’m just saying that there are rules and expectations and we can’t make out in that corner you can barely see because of the weird layout in their apartment and…” He cut her off. With his mouth.

And really that was how this had all started and how it continued and, eventually, evolved into something that Emma hoped, one day, to tell the whole goddamn world about.

She was the most stubborn person in the entire history of the entire universe though and then several others because Killian, naturally, refused to accept the possibility of singular universes and one reality and she’d watched Cosmos something, like, eight-hundred times.

It freaked her out.

“Space is just so...big,” Emma said, what felt like a million and two years ago sitting on a couch in an apartment that wasn’t hers just off campus of a college she didn’t go to and wasn’t, technically, supposed to be visiting. Her brother wasn’t there.

Her brother was visiting Mary Margaret in Williamstown. For the entire weekend. And Emma was in upstate New York, with her feet draped over Killian’s legs and she wasn’t sure who suggested she drive up, but she did and he kept making her watch shows about space.

Killian quirked an eyebrow at her, glancing up over the top of the bottle in his hand and it was stupid and absolutely playing unfair because she was totally freaked out by even the concept of space and he knew it. “I think that’s kind of the general idea, yes, Swan,” he drawled, a smile tugging on the corner of his mouth.

She wanted to smack it off. Or kiss it off. It was an oddly similar feeling.

“Who came up with that idea?” she challenged and the smile was a full-blown grin or smirk and for someone who was vaguely terrified of space she certainly had a lot of questions about it. “Like...who just decided space was big? And we’re just bouncing around in it?” “We’re not bouncing anywhere, love. That’s how gravity works.” “Well, that’s stupid.” “Take it up with Sir Isaac Newton, not me.”

Emma grumbled under her breath, twisting her lips into something that was almost a scowl, but might have just been the visual representation of how much she fucking hated space. “You didn’t answer my question, though.” “To be perfectly honest, Swan, I’m a bit a loss as to what the question really is. You’re just mumbling insults about Sir Isaac Newton.” “Well, what did he ever do anyway?” “Gravity, we just did this. And an object in motion stays in motion. And proved that we weren’t at the center of the universe after all, it was the Sun. I’m sure Galileo was very excited to hear the news.” Emma rolled her eyes and he was teasing her and that might have been Killian Jones’ favorite activity. Second only to forcing her to watch documentaries about space.

She had no idea there were so many space documentaries until she started letting Killian force space documentaries at her.

And maybe, well, maybe it wasn’t nearly as much of a battle as Emma liked to pretend it was.

He’d always kind of been there, not quite in the middle of her life, but far from the edge of it – friends with David and always teasing her even when she threatened to punch him in the face.

He’d laugh and do that stupid tongue thing that Emma absolutely, positively never thought about and the blue in his eyes would get bluer somehow and he’d lean towards her and mumble take your best shot, Swan in her ear.

She’d swat at his arm.

He’d laugh some more.

And he was always there. Killian was David’s best man when he, finally, married Mary Margaret and he looked unfairly good in a tux and with a glass of champagne in his hand, waxing poetic about friendship and romance and life together and Emma didn’t think about either.

Of course not.

Killian was her brother’s best friend.

She’d known him since he was sixteen and had just moved to Storybrooke with his mother and Liam was already gone – enlisted just after college, but he sent checks home and postcards from ports with palm trees and different words for different stars in different hemispheres and when all of those things stop coming and a uniformed officer showed up on the steps of the Jones house, Emma was the one who held onto Killian until he stopped crying.

“Your shirt’s a disaster,” he mumbled into her shoulder and she couldn't really laugh, throat too scratchy and eyes too red and her left arm had gone numb from Killian’s weight resting on her side. She didn’t say that.

“That’s alright,” Emma promised and it was.

It was alright.

It was easy.

Emma stopped hating him at some point and started texting him and he answered and then started texting her and she responded in, like, point five seconds.

Easy. Totally.

He was there and she was there and he’d tease and she’d threaten and everyone kept telling them it was only a matter of timelike that was something that was even remotely normal.

It wasn’t.

A matter of time was not easy and they were...easy. They were acquaintances who were forced to dance together at David and Mary Margaret’s wedding and pose together and both of those things were a lie because there were photos of Emma wearing Killian’s tuxedo jacket just outside the reception hall with another glass of champagne in her hand and maybe she kept it on her phone.

She was smiling in the picture, calm and easy and he was leaning towards her with his hand halfway to her hip like he wanted, but couldn’t quite rationalize it and she’d clearly spent far too much time listening to Mary Margaret and even more time listening to Ruby because Emma kind of wanted too, but she absolutely did not say that out loud because they were not a movie.

Hallmark or Lifetime or whatever.

Whatever.

“Nothing happened?” Ruby asked for what felt like the eight-hundredth time and Emma resisted the urge to slide down the booth in the coffee shop they’d been going to for actual years. “Like...really, nothing?” Emma shook her head and Ruby let out a sigh that was far too distraught for how absolutely not involved she was in the situation. “I don’t know how many more times I can tell you the same thing, Rubes,” she muttered.

Ruby sighed again. Belle tried to smile. It didn’t really work.

“But, like...really, nothing?” Belle asked. Emma might have actually growled. “I’m just saying, you know, it’d make sense. And something happening at a wedding where you both look absurdly good in black tie type clothing and were, you know, maybe a little not quite sober...You guys have known each other forever and it’s…” “No.” “But...” “No,” Emma repeated and the word felt heavy on her tongue. It felt like a lie. “We...I mean we danced that one time, but that was…

“True love,” Ruby shouted, drawing a handful of stares from people just trying to enjoy lattes and overpriced scones. She glared at a table full of college kids, heads practically flying off their shoulders at the sudden noise. “Well, it was,” she muttered. “They’re...you don’t get it. They’re in love. You’ll understand some day.”

Belle held up her hands in mock-surrender, shaking her head quickly, like that would slow down the attack and Emma nearly knocked over her coffee.

Or threw it at Ruby, who, at some point, transitioned from dramatic sighs to disappointed laughter and both of them were equally annoying to an Emma who was doing her best to ignore the inevitable.

“We’re not suggesting that,” Belle said. “No one is suggesting that. We’re just saying we would understand if something did happen and maybe, eventually led to something of the true-type variety. At some point. In the distant future.”

Emma kept looking at that picture.

She looked really happy in that picture. She wondered what Killian’s hand would feel like on her waist. And...stop it.

That wasn’t easy.

Her phone buzzed on the table, like it was trying to prove a point and Ruby nearly cackled, head thrown back and Emma was going to bite her lip in half.  

“Shut up, Emma grumbled. “I’m not...you all need to find a hobby or something.” Ruby stopped laughing long enough to shrug and glance in Belle’s direction, something very specific passing between them. They’d talked about this. They’d planned. They’d plotted. God damn. Emma tried to remember all the reasons she couldn’t throw coffee at her friends.

“Give us, like, six months and we’ll start asking when Mary Margaret and David are going to move out of that tiny, little loft and buy a great, big gorgeous house with an enormous backyard,” Ruby said. “Then we won’t be concerned about why you haven't started making out with Jones at every conceivable moment.”

“Not every conceivable moment,” Belle corrected, waving her hands again and Emma’s lip was bleeding. “That’s just unreasonable.” “Oh, yeah, that’s the only thing that’s unreasonable,” Emma hissed. Her phone buzzed again. And Ruby’s eyes were going to fall out of her head.

I’ve run out of wedding leftovers.

Swan, are you ignoring me?

I have a life. I am not at your text message beck and call.

Is this your not so subtle way of telling me that I’m bothering you, love?

Stop it.

What? You know what.

I promise, love, I absolutely do not. What’s got you so busy with life things, then? You can’t be with David and Mary Margaret. They’re far too busy standing in the ocean.

Yeah...I don’t think that’s what they’re doing on their honeymoon.

He sent her back a string of emojis that didn’t really make sense, but still managed to get his point across and Emma was far too busy being vaguely charmed by the whole thing to notice whatever Ruby and Belle’s faces were doing.

That’s disgusting, Swan. I don’t want to think about that.

You brought it up.

I don’t care. Where are you?

Ruby coughed pointedly and Emma’s phone crashed back on the table, drawing a hiss of air out of Belle because only Belle would be worried about the state of Emma’s phone when her heart was threatening to hammer its way out of her chest.

“What?” Emma snapped and Ruby’s smile looked almost predatory. “God what could you possibly be grinning about?”

“Nothing,” Ruby said, shaking her head slowly as she slung an arm over Belle’s shoulders. “I have no thoughts about this whatsoever. C’mon, babe, let’s go find a hobby.”

They were gone a moment later, leaving Emma alone at a booth with just the stares of some very confused co-eds to keep her company. She sighed, grabbing her half-finished cup of coffee and downing the lukewarm liquid before she could think too much about how she hated lukewarm coffee and she texted back as soon as she stepped onto the sidewalk outside.

She called when she got home four hours later to find that her internet had just…”stopped working,” Emma sighed, staring at the phone screen in her hand and Killian widened his eyes.

It was not the first time she’d said that.

“So you’ve told me, Swan,” Killian grinned, running a hand through his hair and she didn’t even try to stop herself from rolling her eyes. “You’ve got to restart your router.” “I did that.” “We’ve been sitting here for nearly forty-five minutes love, I promise, you have not restarted your router yet.”

She ignored the endearment and whatever it did to her stomach and whatever Ruby would say about that, huffing out an exhale instead. Killian laughed at her. “Then what have we been doing?” Emma demanded, trying without much luck to slide across her floor back to whatever he promised was a router.

“Mostly just you yelling at me. Loudly.”

“That’s because you’re not helping. At all. I call in my time of need and you just sit there doing that stupid eyebrow thing and don’t help at all and…” She ran out of air. “What am I supposed to be doing with the router?” Killian tilted his head, the ends of his mouth ticking up and he was hours away, but David and Mary Margaret were somewhere doing something that absolutely was not standing in the ocean and Emma didn’t know who else to call.

She didn’t really think about calling anyone else.

“Stupid eyebrow thing,” Killian echoed, pausing between every word for dramatic effect. “Tell me something, Swan, what exactly is a stupid eyebrow thing?” “That’s not the point of this phone call! You’re an engineer! Engineer this!”

He did the eyebrow thing again. Emma fell back on the ground, holding her phone above her head and it couldn’t have been a very good angle, hair splayed out under her and bags under her eyes because she’d spent the last four nights trailing some skip and trying not to fall asleep in her car and Killian knew all about that too.

He made her text him when she got home.

“A civil engineer, Swan,” he corrected and she made a noise in the back of her throat that wasn’t particularly adult. She wanted her internet to work. She wanted to stream...something...anything, maybe even that one space show that made her fall asleep like some kind of Pavlovian experiment because she really, really wanted to sleep. Just, like, for days. “I’m not programming anything, love.” “Just building ships,” Emma muttered, closing her eyes lightly. She heard him laugh. And could picture exactly what his face looked like – eyes probably just a bit too bright and smile just a bit too enthusiastic and she wished he wasn’t several hours away.

She’d watch whatever space thing he wanted.

She’d fall asleep, but she’d watch, at least, five minutes.

“That’s not really true either, love,” Killian said softly. Her eyes snapped back open.

It wasn’t.

He’d gone to school on as many scholarships as he could apply for – Liam was gone and his mom was...not great, sick and getting sicker and the only option was government funding and a ridiculous amount of loans he was only just starting to pay off and every scholarship application he could find.

Emma knew. She helped him fill them out.

It was exhausting. She still complained about tendonitis in her wrist and Killian promised that’s not a thing, love and then, usually, twisted his own wrist as if to prove his point.

It worked, though, he got into school and graduated manga cum laude because, of course, he did and David sat next to him and Emma cheered from the back row reserved for friends or family and she was pretty certain she was both for both graduates. Mary Margaret cried.

It worked and Killian got a job because, of course he got a job, he was smart and talented and a slew of other adjectives that would probably just serve to further Ruby and Belle’s cause.

Structural analysis.

On ships. To make sure nothing went wrong. The way it had with Liam. No one talked about that. Emma knew.

Killian left Portland and he went to Boston and he fixed things and Emma missed him. More than she was ever willing to admit out loud. Or...to herself.

“Yeah, I know,” she said and his eyes lost some of that distant look that always seemed to sound like warning bells in the back of her mind. “But I feel like you should be able to will this to work anyway. Just mind meld it or something.” Killian scoffed and they were back to normal, whatever normal was for them and it might have just been this. “That doesn’t even make sense, Swan,” he sighed, rolling his eyes for good measure. She shrugged. “Did you find the paperclip? You can’t hit the button with anything thicker than a paper clip.” They went on like that for another forty-five minutes and there were more dramatic sighs, on both sides of the FaceTime call that was probably destroying her data because she still couldn’t connect to her wifi and the whole thing dissolved into muttered insults under their breath and faces that grown adults who, just a few days ago had danced in black-tie outfits, shouldn’t have made and Emma threw her phone across the room when her battery died.

“Ah, shit,” Emma sighed, pushing herself off the ground to grab her phone and the screen still wasn’t cracked. It started buzzing as soon as she connected it to the USB cord hanging off the side of her laptop.

Did you just hang up on me?

My phone died. Because this is taking several lifetimes to fix.

Yeah, I don’t think you can just restart your router anymore. There’s something wrong with your wiring or something.

And you’ve only just now figured that out? I’m not actually there, Swan. I’m trying to hypothesize based solely off your descriptions, which leave quite a bit to be desired, and an admittedly shitty FaceTime connection.

That’s rude.

She swiped her thumb across the screen, hitting the first name on her recently called list and ignoring the tiny, little seven in parenthesis next to it and she really called him all the time. He answered before the first ring had even finished ringing.

“Go to sleep,” Emma said, but it sounded more like a command and it was late and they were never going to fix this. God, she’d have to read a book or something. And call the internet people the next morning.

Killian laughed. “Swan, you called me. And you’re the one who’s gotten something like four hours of sleep in the last week.” “It’s more than that and you know it. Plus with my crappy internet, I’ll probably get to REM way before I normally do because of some scientific study I’m not willing to acknowledge in any other situation except this very specific one.” “See, you’re saying words, but I don’t think you’re realizing that they’re not making sense in that specific order. Also it is nine o’clock at night. I don’t know what kind of sleep schedule you think I have, but it’s definitely incorrect.” Emma’s shoulders sagged and she was back on the floor, leaning against the front of her couch with one leg awkwardly thrown out in front of her. “Something about the brain being active while it can still hear noise,” she mumbled. “The millennials or whatever.” “Or whatever,” Killian grinned. She assumed he grinned. She knew he did. “And maybe it’ll fix itself overnight somehow.” “You know that won’t work.” “Yeah, I do."

"You really should go to sleep,” Emma said. “It’s late and you’ve got that huge presentation thing in two days and you’ve got to do experiments.” “Analytical methods,” he corrected softly and her eyes were already starting to close again. She climbed onto the couch, propping her neck up on the arm and she’d probably regret that in the morning, but it was almost comfortable then and she didn’t want to move.

She didn’t want to hang up the phone.

God, she was going to kill Ruby.

“Evaluating logistical operations,” she mumbled, voice starting to slur. It was a good thing she caught the guy already. She’d never have lasted another day in the field.

It sounded like Killian smiled again. “I knew you were listening, love,” he said softly.

“Sometimes.” “That’s enough.”

Emma must have fallen asleep at some point because she nearly fell off the couch when she woke up, a knock on her door and her phone was dead again and maybe being thrown around most of downtown Portland that afternoon had actually done more damage than she originally thought.

There was another knock and Emma stared at the door like it was a portal to another dimension or a wormhole – which absolutely freaked her out more than space when she learned about them while being forced into a multi-city viewing party of some new hour-long special on Netflix two weeks before.

“It’s just me, Swan,” Killian called, a soft thud on the other side of the door when he, presumably, fell against it. Emma wasn’t sure she was awake. “Did your phone die again?”

She blinked twice, licking her lips and wrapping a blanket she’d kicked off at some point around her shoulders as she padded across her living room.

Killian was standing on the other side of the doorway, a knowing smile on his face and jeans that were just absolutely unfair. He held his phone up, waving it in her face and he laughed when Emma swatted at his wrist. “Is it dead?” he asked.

“Why are you asking questions you already know the answer to?” Emma countered, falling back into banter easily. He was wearing sandals.

She’d never seen him wear sandals in his entire life.

“It’s polite,” Killian reasoned. He did the eyebrow thing again, taking a step forward until Emma didn’t have any option except to move and she gasped when she nearly tripped over her own blanket.

His hand fell on her hip.

“Try not to die on me, love,” he muttered, flashing her a grin and her mind was racing, trying to sprint to Boston and back to Portland and she’d never resented the shitty battery tendencies of iPhones more in her life. “Where’s your router?”

Emma blinked. He hadn’t moved his hand. “What?”

“The router. Or just...all of your internet connectivity.” “I thought we decided it was broken. You said my descriptions left a lot to be desired. I’m going to call the internet person tomorrow.” “The fact that you’re referring to them as internet person gives me pause.” Killian squeezed his hand and grinned, moving around Emma when her legs, just, decided to stop working. She was frozen in the middle of her own living room with mascara smudged under her eyes and a blanket hanging off only one shoulder. “What…” she stammered. “What are you doing here? How did you know where to go?” He didn’t answer, already crouching on the side of her TV stand and clearly focused – the way he got when he was trying to figure something out and Emma barely gave herself a moment to consider how she knew that before her legs decided to, suddenly, work again.

She felt like she was sprinting towards him.

And he’d never been in her apartment before.

He stayed in hotels or with David and Mary Margaret when he came to Portland and he came to Portland less and less recently, building some sort of name for himself in Boston. Literally.

“Killian,” Emma said, resting her hand on his shoulder. He flinched. “How did you know where to go? Why did you even try to go?” “We really need to work on your sentence structure, Swan.” “You are avoiding my question.” He glanced over his shoulder, four different colored wires clutched in one hand. “I’m trying to save face,” he admitted, shaking a piece of hair away from his forehead. It didn’t work. Emma sat down next to him. On the floor. “And I asked Belle. Who was then sworn to secrecy because I don’t want to hear anything from Lucas about any of this.” “This?”

“You caught the guy yesterday, right?” Emma nodded slowly, still not entirely sure she understood where all of this was going or if she was even awake. “So you’ve got two days left on your mandatory recovery period and I can’t imagine what you’re going to do without internet over those forty-eight hours.”

“You’ve got a presentation in two days. There are powerpoint slides and charts to print out and laminate. You don’t have time to be fixing my internet.” “No one is laminated anything, Swan. It’s not 1995. And I have an assistant for all of those things. This is, well, I can fix this. I just needed to do it in person because your 4G is more like 2G and at some point in the next two hours we should figure out if you can upgrade your phone too because that can’t be safe.”

She was absolutely dreaming. “I don’t....you don’t have to play internet white knight for me.” Killian’s eyes flashed up towards hers and then, maybe, away from hers and, possibly, towards her lips and it was jarring. It was...like the Earth stopped rotating on its axis for a few moments and then started turning the wrong way.

She knew all about the Earth’s rotation.

“I’m not,” he promised. “I just...it wasn’t that late.” “You live two hours away.” “Eh, an hour and forty-five without traffic.” “That seems like pulling at straws,” Emma argued and that’s exactly what it was, an argument and a lifetime’s worth of everyone promising eventually and inevitable and she probably moved first. She’d argue that point as well though.

He made some kind of absurd sound when she all but launched herself towards him, throwing his hand back to make sure they didn’t crash onto the floor and his other hand found its way underneath her shirt and they both groaned when one of them moved their hips.

Emma twisted, trying to get some kind of leverage and it just ended with her straddling him in the middle of her living room, knees on either side of Killian’s hips with her fingers anchored in his hair. She pulled back, not entirely sure what she was doing or what he was doing, but he didn’t look nervous. He looked absolutely certain.

And that was enough.

She definitely kissed him first that time, ducking her head and slanting her lips across his and that thing with his tongue should be absolutely illegal when he was using it on other human beings.

Or just her.

She just wanted him to use it on her.

She didn’t say that out loud.

She kept kissing him.

“This is not fixing the internet, Swan,” Killian mumbled, but she could hear the laugh just on the edge of his voice. She was half a second away from arguing the distinct lack of kissing until the kissing moved to her neck and behind her ear and over her collarbone and she’d lost all control of her body when her hips practically bucked against him.

It worked another groan out of him that she’d probably think about twenty-six times a day.

“I’m sorry, were those actually words?” Emma asked, grinning against his jaw and her shirt was a lost cause, twisted up between them and halfway up her stomach.

They were still on the floor.

“Are you actually making fun of me right now?” Killian countered. He pulled back to gape at her, but Emma couldn't quite focus on that when his pupils were blown wide and his shoulders were moving a bit than usual. “Currently, Swan?”

“Seems pretty par for the course, doesn’t it?” “Not when I’m actively trying to undress you.” “Is that what you were trying to do? You’re being awfully subtle then, don’t you think?”

She appreciated his wide eyes more than she should have, but she didn’t have long to linger on that particular look or how it looked on Killian when his hand was still under the hem of her shirt, before his mouth crashed against hers and she was dimly aware of him trying to stand up.

“What are you doing?” Emma laughed, yelping when he finally managed to get a bit of momentum under them and her legs wrapped around his waist on instinct. “God, calm down with your feats of strength.”

Killian grunted slightly and she was fairly certain it was because of her knee and its placement in what might have actually been his spleen. “Was this part not obvious?” he asked and she pushed her face into his shoulder when she started to laugh. “Fucking hell, Swan, you can’t do that. That is...distracting.” “Distracting from what? Are we not talking about the same thing here?”

“Swan.” “I”m serious.”

“I know you are, love,” Killian said, kissing across her cheek and back towards her mouth. He pulled away before she could kiss back. She nearly punched him.

They were moving, though, stumbling slightly down the tiny hallway in her tiny apartment towards her tiny bedroom and Emma made some kind of absurd noise when she fell back on the mattress. “Did you just dump me on the bed?” she asked, but she wasn’t sure Killian heard her when his eyes traced down her body and landed on the bit of skin where her shirt had ridden up again.

Emma pushed up on her elbows, lifting her eyebrows and trying to fight off the feeling in the pit of her stomach. She saw the muscles in Killian’s throat move when he swallowed. “Still with me?” she asked and it felt like a very big question.

“Yeah,” he breathed. He took a step towards her, kicking his sandals off and he hadn’t even taken his goddamn sandals off. Fuck. “I’m...good.”

“Ok, good.” It was, easily, the lamest thing she’d ever said. Killian didn’t seem to mind. “You need to take this off,” she muttered, tugging on the bottom of his shirt. “And if you scuffed up my baseboards I’m going to kill you.” “We really need to work on this whole swooning thing, Swan. First you’re not sure if I’m trying to undress you and now you’re talking about baseboards. It’s almost insulting.” “Yeah, that seems like a you problem.”

He flashed her look – amusement lingering on the edge of his gaze, but with something else that made her whole body feel as if it were melting into the mattress and she didn’t say another word when his fingers found their way underneath the shorts she had on.

Their clothes ended up in some kind of pile on either side of her bed, kicking at blankets and knocking off pillows and trying to avoid the lamp on the night stand next to Emma’s head. “You’ve got to…” she started. “That drawer.”

He stared at her for half a moment – which she’d eventually come to consider one hell of a confidence boost – and Emma rolled her head on the one pillow that hadn’t landed on the floor. “The drawer,” she repeated and he understood that time.

“Right, right, right,” Killian stammered, trying not to fall on top of her when he tried to move as quick as light or some kind of meteor and she needed to stop making space jokes in her head. “Good, yeah, that’s...responsible.” “Yeah, that’s definitely good for the mood.” He rolled his eyes at her, pausing quick enough to kiss the edge of her mouth and she smacked at his arm when he chuckled as soon as she tried to chase after him. “I’m not going anywhere, Swan.”

And it was like something settled or maybe she just caught her breath, but Emma didn’t care about the specifics of it because he was there and he’d always kind of been there and she’d watched so many goddamn space documentaries.

It wasn’t exactly good at first, a weird rhythm they were both trying to dictate or find and there was far too much sighing for it to be anything except frustrating for the first few minutes.

Until it was suddenly...the opposite of that.

It was good and great and a slew of other words and adjectives Emma would come up with if she weren’t too busy chasing friction and that tongue thing and trying to take a deep breath. He was everywhere all at once, hands moving and hips moving and she shifted against him, trailing her fingers down his spine until he hissed softly in her ear, mumbling her name over and over again as if he couldn’t remember anything else.

Emma kissed him as soon as she felt tension coiling at the base of her spine, fingers back in his hair and she couldn’t seem to stop touching his hair. She squeezed her eyes closed at some point, fairly certain several different stars exploded just on the edge of her vision and it was another goddamn space pun.

Killian didn’t leave.

Emma didn’t ask him to leave or tell him to stay. He just didn’t move. And neither did she, curled against his side with her head on his shoulder and her arm flung over his waist.

He texted her a photo of the charts two days later.

It went from there.

She visited and he visited and there wasn’t much of a schedule, just phone calls and FaceTime and one hour and forty-five minutes, without traffic, and they didn’t spend much time worrying about definitions when they were so busy kissing the goddamn daylights out of each other.

Killian was impossibly good at kissing.

And, Emma liked to imagine, he felt the same way because he’d barely stepped into her apartment, six months after that first step, before his mouth landed on hers and his fingers danced along her spine and it was absolutely a confidence boost.

“We don’t have time for this,” Emma mumbled, but the words seemed to get stuck halfway out of her mouth and maybe they could make time.

So they were celebrating Ruby and Belle and an engagement and Killian had taken Friday off so he could get there before five o’clock, but all of those things seemed to fall by the metaphorical wayside when Emma’s arms found their way over his shoulders, like she was trying to make sure he was actually there.

And maybe she missed him when he wasn’t there or she wasn’t there, but that wasn’t part of the plan and no one had actually ever used the phrase just sex, but that was definitely what it was. Right? Sure.

No, of course it was.

They were….getting it out of their systems. For six months. With alternating weekends and dinners that sometimes felt a hell of a lot like dates and nothing had really changed, there was just a lot more kissing and a lot less clothing.

Killian hadn’t really ever stopped kissing her, just pulled away from her lips and moved towards her jaw and that one spot on her neck that made her whole body break out in goosebumps and he always seemed very pleased with himself whenever it happened.

It happened every single time.

That didn’t mean anything. At all.

“We can be a little late,” Killian argued and for half a second Emma was ready to agree, to just tug him back into her apartment and, possibly, bolt the door, but then her phone started to ring and there was a schedule and he wasn’t supposed to be there.

He was supposed to be staying in a hotel – had told David he just wanted a little more space when he had to explain why he didn’t want to stay in the guest room of the house they’d actually bought two months ago – and showing up twenty minutes late, together, would probably send Ruby into some sort of crazed I knew it fit.

She felt like she’d run into a brick wall, slamming into something she wasn’t entirely aware was there until it reached out and hit in the face and it was painful and jarring and Emma suddenly realized she wanted to be late to this stupid, forced friendship interaction because she wanted Killian to stay in her apartment without a story or an explanation and it was the single most terrifying thing she’d ever thought.

She didn’t...well, he knew about Neal and she knew about Milah and that was part of the reason she’d argued againstinevitable for so long. Emma didn’t do relationships. It didn’t work, wasn’t in the cards or the stars, jeez, but she couldn't seem to stop kissing her brother’s best friend and there wasn’t enough oxygen in the world for the deep breath she was trying to take.

Emma shook her head, pulling back slightly and it was as if she could see the understanding settle on Killian’s face, the way his eyes dimmed just a bit and she swore something landed in the pit of her stomach.

It felt a hell of a lot like regret.

She wasn’t sure what there was to regret. And that was a great, big enormous lie.

“I just…” Emma started, but words were, suddenly, rather difficult to come by. Killian didn’t say anything, just lifted his eyebrows and waited and he was always doing that. He waited on her. “Maybe we should just, you know, take a deep breath.” His eyebrows didn’t move, but he blinked twice and his hand sounded like an anvil when it pulled away from her, crashing against his thigh and Emma tried to keep staring straight ahead.

She couldn’t.

God fucking damnit.

“A deep breath,” Killian echoed and it sounded a bit like a question and a lot like disbelief and they should have done this at any other time. “And what does that mean exactly, love?” She shook her head again, mostly because she couldn’t come up with anything else to do and she’d lost control of the situation and all of her body parts. “I mean...we’ve been….it’s not…” “It’s not.” “God, stop repeating me!” “I”m trying to make sense of what you're saying, Swan,” Killian sighed, taking a step back into her space and his hand moved again, thumb brushing across the curve of her cheek like he couldn’t stop himself. “This isn’t…” He cut himself off, pressing his lips together tightly and Emma tried not to punch him. They were both horrible at finishing sentences. “Is that about what your brother will think?” “No,” Emma yelled. Killian scoffed. “Well, no, not entirely! You can't tell me that you haven’t thought about it.” “I’ve thought about several different things, love and strangely enough none of the things I think about you have anything to do with David.” “That’s insane.” “It’s insane that I haven’t considered your brother’s opinion when I think about us? How is that insane? I couldn’t care less about what David thinks. Or anyone for that matter. It wouldn’t make a difference.”

She was positive the people on the sidewalk twenty-seven blocks away could hear her heart hammering against her rib cage and Emma still didn’t know much about gravity, but she was fairly positive it had just altered when Killian’s words seemed to land at her feet. “There is no us,” Emma muttered, staring at her feet and she’d never put socks on because he’d shown up early at her apartment to make out with her.

And make proclamations.

That she was absolutely going to ignore.

God, she was an idiot.

Emma tried to pull the air in through her nose, memories of some kind of breathing exercise Mary Margaret taught her when she was freaking out about finals sophomore year, but it didn’t work and Killian took a step back. She hadn’t noticed the bag sitting in her doorway still.

“What?” he asked softly. “Emma, I….” She was positive her head had never moved so quickly in her entire life because she couldn't remember a single time in the history of the entire fucking universe that he’d called her by her actual name.

And if she were being honest with herself, she probably would have realized he’d been calling her love more than anything else.

She was not being honest with herself.

“C’mon, let’s be honest, this is, I mean this was….” Emma stumbled over the words, still not able to finish a goddamn sentence and Killian’s mouth was hanging open slightly, shoulders moving like he’d run to her apartment from Boston.

“This was what, Swan?” “A matter of time, right? That’s what they all said and we’d just eventually stumble into each other and then it’d be over. I mean this isn’t…” Killian’s mouth twisted, something that almost looked like a sneer settling on his face and Emma felt like she’d just fallen into the pile of snow outside her window. She lived on the fourth floor. “Right,” he said, crossing his arms tightly and she didn’t consider all the reasons he did that until far later. “Right. This isn’t, well, it isn’t, is it?”

“Those were a lot of words in an order I didn’t entirely understand.” He laughed, a sardonic edge to the sound that sent a chill down her spine. “Ok, well, it’s good I got here early then, huh? I’ll see you in a little while, Swan.”

Emma stood in her living room for what felt like several sunlit days after Killian closed the door behind him and she was ninety-nine percent positive she’d missed the entire engagement celebration by the time her feet managed to move, tugging on boots that felt far too tight and a scar that she was fairly positive was going to strangle her at some point and she was the last one to get to the bar.

“Hey,” Ruby cried as soon as Emma shook the snow out of her hair. She was wearing some kind of light-up headband and bright red lipstick and a smile that seemed to melt some of the ice in Emma’s heart.

She wasn’t just an idiot, she was a melodramatic idiot.

“You’re late,” Ruby continued, seemingly unaware of whatever Emma was trying to deal with. “Jones is already like three shots in and I think he and David are doing some sort of unspoken challenge thing, but it’s probably going to be pretty entertaining and…”

She blinked when Emma didn’t immediately announce she was going to join in on shots and she barely had time to think about how well her friends knew her before Ruby was tugging her towards a corner and staring at her intently. “What’s going on with you?” she asked, tapping Emma’s shoulders the saw way she had when they first met at a cramped college bookstore, each trying to buy the same overpriced textbook.

They split it and shared it for the same class and it wasn’t the most conventional friendship, but Emma really believed Ruby could read her mind.

“Nothing,” Emma lied and Ruby didn’t even bother sighing. She laughed. “Honestly. I’m just...you know it’s been a long week.” “Yuh huh.” “It has.” “Sure it has. When’s the last time you haven’t had a long week?” “Should I be offended by that?” Emma asked, trying to slink further back into the corner when she could feel the rest of the group shooting furtive, almost painfully obvious glances in their direction. Killian hadn’t moved.

Ruby shrugged. “You can do whatever you want. You’re an adult, in theory, but I’m just saying that, at some points in the last few months, you’ve been almost...good.” “Almost good.” “Ok, now you’re being rude,” Ruby muttered. “And it’s real obvious you’ve got a thing going on. So don’t bother lying. You just happen to have out-of-city stakeouts for weekends at a time? That’s not even clever, Emma.” “I have to work!” “Yuh huh. So how come during those weekends you’re less likely to answer your phone than you are during stakeouts downtown? Something doesn’t add up.” “You are not a detective,” Emma argued, defenses rising automatically and she wanted to get drunk and make out with Killian and she didn’t want him to stay in a hotel. Fucking hell.

Ruby made a noise in the affirmative and that wasn’t what Emma expected. “True,” she said. “But you know who is? Your great big, overprotective idiot of a brother, who is also very interested in what you’ve been doing on those weekends abroad.” “I’m not going overseas.” “A turn of phrase,” Ruby hissed. “God, keep up with my interesting banter. Did you screw it up? Is that what happened?” Emma made a face, holding her hands up and shaking her head, but Ruby didn’t look deterred. She just widened her stance and Emma didn’t have anywhere to run. “That was definitely rude,” she grumbled. “And, yeah, maybe.” “Maybe...definitely?” “Absolutely.” “That’s dumb.” “That’s a pointed opinion from someone who just told me they thought I’ve been going abroad for weekends.” “Fucking a, Emma, that was a joke and you are doing a piss poor job of deflecting,” Ruby growled, an intensity in her voice that left Emma reeling. She was glad there was a wall to lean against. “Are you all in on this? Is that what’s going on? You freaking out?” “You’re not a journalist either,” Emma mumbled, but the questions were almost too on point and she kept thinking about the way Killian’s voice shifted when he said her name.

God, he called her Emma.

Ruby rolled her eyes. “Another deflection. I’m going to assume that was a blanket yes, then.” Emma sighed, forcing the air out of her lungs like it had personally offended her and Ruby almost smiled when her whole body fell forward. “Ok, tell me one thing,” Ruby continued. “In this great, big secret of a whatever you’re doing, this guy, I’m assuming it’s a guy?” “It’s a guy,” Emma confirmed.

“You happy?” She considered that for a moment – memories flitting through her brain like she was watching them through a Viewfinder and it wasn’t just about the making out or the sex or inevitable and she was so goddamn happy when she was with Killian.

It was easy.

“Yeah,” Emma whispered. She really needed a drink. “Really happy.” “Then stop being stupid about it and go tell Jones he’s real good at making out.” Emma nearly fell down the wall. Ruby cackled. “Please,” she laughed. “You think I don’t know things? I know things, Em. I’ve got sixty-two senses of knowing things. And I know he showed up at your apartment six months ago and you’ve only been going on these little excursions for the last couple of moths and he’s running through PTO like that’s his actual job.” “How could you possibly know that last part?” “Ariel told Belle who told me, obviously. Because we don’t have secrets.” “That was heavy-handed,” Emma sighed. “And I...I don’t know, Rubes, I...he’s David’s best friend. We weren’t really planning on this, it just kind of happened and, like, two hours ago I told him I didn’t think there was an us.”

Ruby made a noise that sounded a bit like a gag. “Oh my God, that’s so you it’s almost scripted. No wonder he’s been trying to drown himself.” “I didn’t….”

“Think,” Ruby finished. “Yeah, I get that. If there was an Olympic sport for shooting yourself in your own foot, you would win gold at the summer and winter games.” “How long have you been waiting to use that insult?” “Actual years. Listen, I know we’ve always been about how you guys should just, you know, whatever and get it over with, but this is, well, it’s obvious this is different. And Jones came in here looking like some kind of ghost person whose sole job in the afterlife was to test as much rum as possible. Even David realized something wrong and he’s the single most obtuse person on the planet.” Emma sighed. “I really fucked up.” “Oh, I know you did, but if science is sixty-two percent reactionary, then you’ve still got time to engineer a fix here.” “You’re on a roll.” Ruby’s eyes practically lit up. They nearly matched her headband. “I know, right! Even I’m impressed. It’s because I’m all in love and love will do that to you. And don’t bother saying heavy-handed, that wasn’t my best work. But what I’m saying, Em, is that he clearly cares and he has since forever ago. Although, you know, maybe don’t start making out here because I’m not entirely sure David won’t kill him.”

“You’re a beacon of support,” Emma said, but some of the ice in her spine had thawed and maybe that was what hope felt like.

Ruby clicked her tongue, shrugging slightly and possibly winking before announcing they were all going to do shots and no one could argue with someone wearing a light-up headband.

And, really, Emma tried. She tried to talk or approach or whatever someone who, just a few hours ago, had promised her maybe-boyfriend that they were operating under labels, should do, but nothing worked and by the time six o’clock turned into one o’clock, she’d done a questionable number of shots and Killian had already left.

“Here,” Belle said, the words slurring just a bit and they’d probably put that bar in the black for the entire year just on their group’s alcohol consumption that night. She pushed a sheet of paper towards Emma and the letters weren’t quite perfect, but it was an address. To a hotel. A few blocks away. “It’s by the water,” Belle added, like Killian would stay anywhere that wasn’t by the water, and everyone knew.

Except David.

God, Emma hoped David didn’t know.

“Thanks,” Emma mumbled, squeezing her fingers around the paper and waving towards a slightly wobbly David and a vaguely entertained Mary Margaret. “I’ll uh...I’ll see you guys later.”

“Text us when you get home,” David shouted, but she barely heard him, waving a dismissive hand over her shoulder and she sprinted to the hotel. She nearly killed herself six times.

There was ice everywhere.

She was out of breath by the time she skidded to a stop in the hotel lobby, drawing a curious stare from the guy behind the desk. “Can I help you?” he asked cautiously, like she was going to rob the place.

“No, no, no,” Emma said, shaking her head and already moving towards the closest staircase. The piece of paper in her hand claimed he was staying on the ninth floor. “I, um...I’m fine, thanks.”

The guy didn’t look convinced and she didn’t blame him – she was far from fine and maybe just a little drunk and her legs were already protesting the idea of nine flights of stairs. She didn’t give herself a moment to consider that before she was climbing and trying to breathe and the romance of it all seemed to wane just a bit when she realized she was actually sweating.

“God fucking, shit, hell,” Emma breathed, trying not to pass out in an abandoned hotel hallway. The ink on the paper still clutched in her hands was starting to smear a bit, but she’d memorized the numbers on her sprint through downtown Portland and she could see the door just a few feet away like it was taunting her.

She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to knock.

She could hear footsteps behind the door, like he was pacing and her stomach clenched at the thought. She knocked. And the pacing stopped.

He didn’t say anything and that felt decidedly unfair, like the ball was in her court or something. She licked her lips before she knocked again. Still no answer. “God dammit,” she grumbled, resisting the urge to kick at the door too. “Killian, I...it’s me. Can you just open the door? For two seconds. And then I’ll…” Emma didn’t finish, nearly leaping back when the door swung open and he didn’t look drunk. He looked pissed off. “Hi,” she said softly and lamely and she didn’t know what else to say. She was having trouble breathing again. Killian crossed his arms again, narrowing his eyes slightly and Emma tried to swallow back the wad of actual emotion she could swear was lingering in the back of her throat. “I, um...Belle told me you were here.” One of his eyebrows moved. “Did you ask?” “No, I…” Emma shook her head and Killian sighed, uncrossing his arms to run one of his hands through his hair and this was not going according to plan. There was no plan. “I mean, I would have. I wanted to know where you went. I wanted to….apologize.” Killian stared at her, like he was taking stock of the words, or maybe just Emma, and she wasn’t sure which one made her more nervous. And she realized rather quickly, he wasn’t going to say anything. He was going to let her talk.

Of fucking course he was. “I’m sorry,” Emma continued. “For, well, you know, being me and pushing with both hands and that’s just how I react when I want something too much. I’m so certain it’s all going to blow up in my face, some kind of fight or flight syndrome that should probably be studied at some point. And, really, it’s all stupid because I’m really happy and this is...it’s been good, right?” Killian nodded slowly, leaning against the open doorframe with his feet crossed at the ankles and Emma tried not to growl when he didn’t use actual words. “So I guess I’m just, well, I know I fucked it up, but I’d like to fix it or we could just...go back to before and you can send all the text messages you want and I’ll let you know I don’t die on stakeouts, but I can’t…” She huffed out a breath of air, blinking quickly when she realized she was on the edge of crying and this was absurd. He was distractingly good looking.

“You can’t what, love?” Killian asked, reaching out to rest his hand on her hip and Emma’s entire body felt like it exploded into flames.

“I can’t lose you.” His eyes widened slightly, but it didn’t take long for him to react, pulling her flush against him and they fit together so goddamn well and he was always so ridiculously warm and that tongue thing was absurd.

Emma sighed against him, pressing up on her toes to reach him better and they may have stood there for days or years or the rest of theirs lives. It didn’t matter.

She was all in. In some kind of decidedly overwhelming way that made her stomach flip and her pulse pick up and Killian laughed when he kissed that spot.

“I’m not going anywhere, Emma,” he whispered and it was exactly what he’d told her the first time, with one very important distinction.

“Good,” Emma smiled, arms wrapped around his waist and face burrowed into his shoulder and she didn’t argue when he started walking them backwards into the room. “But, uh...maybe we don’t tell David just yet. I really think he’d kill you.” Killian barked out a laugh, pressing a kiss to the top of her hair. “Oh, no, he absolutely would. We’re good as is for now, right love?”

“Yeah. We are.”

[limeadestandworks]

Forget social media marketing! Like, now!

In 2017, social media marketing has become almost a cliche. People are talking today as if every business somehow has to have a Facebook page at the time when many people are leaving Facebook.

It is a bit reminiscent of 20 years ago, in 1997, every mom-and-pop business in town was on the website and domain name bandwagon. Never mind their websites mostly sucked, many of them little more than a picture, cheesy animated GIFs, street address, and phone number. At the time, saying “visit our homepage” and “dot com” made every business owner feel like they were cutting edge.

While the Internet indeed made it possible for thousands of micro-entrepreneurs to launch and grow their businesses with a low capital requirement (eBay and PayPal were instrumental!), to others, it has become a waste of time and money. Cheap websites soon gave way to the SEO fad of the mid to late 2000s, and now we have social media marketing, seen by many as the magic formula in which anyone can make it big for free. After all, it’s free to use Facebook and everyone has a Facebook, not? (Yes, I have said before that Facebook became the de facto “White Pages” of our time — people do indeed look up business contact information through Facebook search; however, as with the White Pages phone books, they have to know the exact name of your business for this to work.)

If you are even moderately interested in entrepreneurship, you must have seen various Facebook ads or direct emails touting the latest success blueprint in social media marketing. They say you can reach millions and you can make a six-figure income in a year or less.

Forget it.

In fact, if that’s what you think, forget social media marketing altogether. Get off the Internet, hit the pavement, and do your marketing the old-fashioned way like in the 1980s.*

Social media aren’t a supernatural dragnet to attract prospects and customers with little efforts and no money. What these “experts” conveniently forget to tell you is this: (1) it is pretty expensive to reach literally millions — indeed, they spend hundreds of dollars every week so you see their ads; (2) social media marketing is an engagement tool, and it works remarkably well if and only if you have a substantial following and/or brand awareness — as a new entrepreneur, you have neither (ultimately, you will have to buy a traffic to create any level of brand awareness).

A typical Facebook page post generally results in 1 to 2 percent of organic reach (meaning free exposures) — to those who are already following your page. If you have a small business Facebook page with less than 100 “likes,” it is common that many of your page posts do not even reach one person (you can check this by looking at your page statistics). For those who already know your business or brand, to reach them better, I recommend you to start a Facebook group.

Instagram and Twitter have different dynamics altogether. While you may get more “likes” it is a short-attention-span platform and each post has a very short lifespan (approximately 18 minutes for a Tweet). Getting people engaged requires you to make them click a link to your blog, website, or landing page (on Instagram, you can only do this on your biography, or must purchase advertising through Facebook to insert a “call to action” link below your photo and above your caption).

The gist of all this is this: social media marketing is not necessarily a great tool to reach complete strangers who have never heard of your business. For a locally-based micro business to reach new customers and prospects, traditional advertising media work more effectively. If you live in a small town, be sure to send press releases to your small-town newspaper regularly, attend any local chamber of commerce events, and make real-life person-to-person connections. Advertising in a neighborhood newspaper or niche-specific magazine can also be effective.

More importantly, do not ever forget this: all marketing is relationship building. Insofar as you utilize social media as an extension of relationship-building and fostering positive connections, it’s useful and can even be very powerful. But too many people mistake social media and any digital marketing efforts as something anonymous, something you can do hiding behind your computer and broadcast your sales pitch.

Social media isn’t broadcasting. If you want to broadcast, buy a radio ad.

By design, social media (and the Internet in general) are “narrow-casting” appealing to a small set of the population who shares specific affinity and interests. This is true with Facebook ads, Google AdWords, and even your own website and blogs. Reaching millions — or even 100,000 — should never be your objective. Instead, you think of your hypothetical customer prototype, and craft your message to appeal to that person.

When people respond to your social media ads or posts by commenting, reposting, or liking, be sure to engage. Answer their questions and concerns promptly. Start conversations. Let them know that there is a real living, breathing person behind your digital marketing presence, and you actually care about what they have to say.

In the early days of the popularized Internet, we spoke of “cyber-malls,” “information superhighway,” and “global villages.” We thought of the Internet as a digital incarnation (or, discarnation?) of the real world. And even with the Internet, much of real transactions took place offline. It was common back then for people to sign up online for paper newsletters, which one would mail them every month.

I reiterate: there is no such thing as “social media marketing” if not for creating and cultivating relationships.

Just because you post your sales pitch on Facebook or Twitter every day doesn’t mean you’re marketing. It’s not working for you, so just forget it, stop fooling yourself into thinking that you’re working hard by spending lots of hours on social media. Instead, use social media with genuine intentions to engage in conversations and help people.

A case study of how old-fashioned guerrilla advertising creates brand awareness for new microenterprises

Since I told readers to forget social media and hit the pavement, I’d like to present one example of how going offline could be more effective in generating brand awareness for a small, no-budget micro business.

A year ago, I lived in Southeast Portland and there was a coffee house that was my favorite hangout. This place still looks and feels like a throwback to the Portland of the 1990s. One day I saw a postcard that looked like handmade (actually it was a full-color reproduction of a handmade artwork) that featured an adorable drawing of cats and a girl-with-a-happy-face with a caption that read “PDX Cat Stalker.”

Over the following weeks, I saw the same artwork reproduced on letter-size paper (black and white) and stapled to electrical poles all over the neighborhood.

The ad was simple in its message: a veterinary technician offering cat claw clipping and cat-sitting services. The former is a big challenge for many cat lovers, while those who travel a lot always are in need for someone to feed and care for their felines.

While the business had a Gmail address and a domain name registered, brand awareness was built primarily on the ground as the owner literally hit the pavement, dropped off stacks of postcards at various high-traffic and high-visibility neighborhood haunts and stapled fliers onto poles and bulletin boards. Social media only followed after this as engagement tools (mostly featuring cat pictures, of course).

But what is the cleverest of all is the brand. You know of crazy cat ladies. But imagine a cat stalker! Just the mental imagery the phrase evokes is incredibly potent. And it happens that the owner of this feline care business is named Sophia Stalker (the “professional cat lady”).

(Originally published on May 9, 2017.)

[cnrgcommons]

OPEN POSITION: Edgefield Events Manager for Cracked Pots

Edgefield​​ Event​​Manager​​ (EEM)

Applications Due January 1st, 2018 by Midnight

Overview​:​ The​ EEM​ is​ ​responsible​ ​for​ ​managing​ ​the​ ​2018​ Edgefield​ art​ ​show​ ​for​ ​Cracked​ ​Pots (CP)  from​ ​inception​ ​through​ ​completion,​ ​under​ ​the​ ​direction​ ​of​ ​the​ ​CP​ ​Board.​ ​This​ ​includes,​ ​but​ ​is not​ ​limited​ ​to,​ ​the​ ​recruitment​ ​of​ ​artists,​ ​all​ ​communications​ ​and​ ​negotiations​ ​with​ ​artists, and managing​ ​all​ ​pre-show​ ​and​ ​post​ ​show​ ​requirements.​ ​The​ ​EEM​ ​works​ ​in​ ​coordination​ ​and cooperation​ ​with​ ​the​ ​CP​ ​Edgefield​ Team,​ ​the​ ​Communications​ ​Coordinator,​ ​and​ ​the​ ​Volunteer Coordinator​, ​and​ ​serves​ ​as​ ​the​ ​liaison​ ​with​ ​McMenamins Edgefield​.​ This​ ​position​ ​reports​ ​to​ ​the CP​ ​Board​ ​President.

Pay: The​ ​pay​ ​for​ ​this​ ​position ​is​​ ​$20​ ​per​ ​hour. 

Start Date: Mid-January 2018

Hours​: ​ ​A​ ​maximum​ ​of​ ​400​ ​total​ ​hours​ ​between​ ​January​ ​15​ ​and​ ​up​ ​to​ ​September ​15,​ ​2018.​ ​The​ ​EEM​ ​is authorized​ ​to​ ​work​ ​no​ ​more​ ​than​ ​40​ ​hours​ ​in​ ​any​ ​work​ ​week,​ ​with​ ​the​ ​single​ ​exception​ ​of​ ​the week​ ​of​ ​the​ ​2018​ ​Edgefield​ ​Art​ ​Show​ (show​ ​dates​ not finalized,​ ​but​ ​likely​ ​to​ ​be​ late​ ​July​ ​or​ ​early​ ​August​) 

Benefits​:​ No​ ​medical​ ​or​ ​vacation​ ​benefits,​ ​other​ ​than​ ​statutory​ ​unpaid​ ​sick​ ​leave.

  About Cracked Pots 

Cracked Pots is a volunteer driven non-profit devoted to waste reduction in our community. Creative reuse - reclaiming and reimagining - is at the heart of all we do. The show debuted in 1998 in a private Portland garden where eight artists were featured. Folks took notice, and in 1999 the show moved to McMenamins Kennedy School. In 2000, now becoming a wild success, the show moved to the stately and spacious grounds of McMenamins Edgefield in Troutdale where it features up to 100 reuse artists whose work consists of at least 80% recycled/reclaimed materials.

  Core​​ Functions​​ of​​ the​​ Edgefield​​ Events​​ Manager​​ Position

Recruitment​ ​of​ ​artists, ​​with​ a ​strong​ ​emphasis​ ​on ​recruiting​​ ​new​ ​artists​ ​to​ ​the​ ​show through​ ​community​ ​outreach, ​​and​ ​networking.​ The​ ​goal​ ​for​ ​the​ ​2018​ ​show​ ​is​ ​100​ ​artists.

Management​ ​of​ ​the​ ​entire​ ​artist​ ​application​ ​and​ jury​ ​​process​ ​for​ ​the​ ​CP​ Board,​​ ​including the​ ​“call​ ​to​ ​artists”,​ ​a​ ​digital​ ​presentation​ ​of​ ​artists​ ​for​ ​jury;​ ​acceptance/rejection communications.

  Coordination​ ​of​ ​Outreach,​ ​Show​ ​Publicity​, ​and​ ​Data​ ​Management

Work​ ​with​ ​the​ ​CP​ ​Communications​ ​Coordinator,​ ​in ​a​​ ​support​ ​role​ ​to​ ​manage​ ​show publicity​ ​and​ ​promotion,​ ​including​ ​both​ ​print​ ​and​ ​digital​ ​outreach

  Management​ ​of​ ​the​ ​CP​ ​electronic​ ​mailing​ list; and ​​electronic​ ​dissemination​ ​of​ ​the​ ​show postcard​ ​or​ ​other​ ​promotion​ ​materials

  Show​ ​Management,​ ​Communications,​ ​and​ ​On-site​ ​work

Management​ ​of​ ​all​ ​artist​ ​pre-show​ ​communications​ including​ ​​the​ ​initial​ ​“call​ ​to​ ​artists”; artists​ ​applications​ ​and​ ​acceptance/rejection;​  ​placement​ ​of​ ​artists​ ​at​ ​show;​ ​creation​ ​of​ ​the​ ​artists’ show​ ​packets;​ ​artists ​​placement​ ​show​ ​roster.

  Management​ ​of​ ​all​ ​aspects​ ​of​ ​the​ ​artist​ side ​​of​ ​show​ ​from​ ​set-up​ through​​ ​break-down. Including:​ ​all​ ​on​ ​site​ ​“troubleshooting​ ​“​ ​during​ ​the​ ​course​ ​of​ ​the​ ​show,​ ​and​ ​serving​ ​as liaison​ ​between​ ​McMenamins​ ​and​ ​Cracked​ ​Pots​ ​artists.

  Show​ ​Information​ ​Management

Creation​ ​of​ ​and​ ​implementation​ ​of​ ​pre-show​ CP​ ​​website​ ​materials,​ ​including​ ​an​ ​artists’ gallery​ ​and​ a​ ​​roster​ ​of​ ​2018​ ​show​ ​artists.

  Liaison​ ​with​ ​McMenamins​ ​Edgefield​ ​for​ ​site-related​ aspects​ ​​of​ ​the​ ​show,​ ​including​ ​the Memorandum​ ​of​ ​Understanding​ ​between​ ​CP​ ​and​ ​McMenamins;​ ​insurance documentation;​ ​and ​​interface​ ​with​ the​​ ​catering​ ​staff.

  Maintenance​ ​of​ ​all​ ​show​ ​records,​ including​ ​​financial​ ​recordkeeping;​ ​handling​ ​the purchase​ ​of​ ​supplies​ ​or​ ​materials​ ​needed​ ​for​ ​the​ ​operation​ ​of​ ​the​ ​show​ ​within​ ​budget.

  Teamwork

●    Work​ ​closely​ ​with​ ​the​ ​CP​ ​Edgefield​ ​Team​ and​ ​​CP​ ​Board​ ​President ​​(the​ EEM​​ supervisor) regarding​ ​all​ ​show​ ​management​ ​activities.

  Additional​ Roles, ​as​ ​needed

● ​ ​Handle​ ​additional​ ​tasks​ ​as​ ​specified​ ​by​ the​ ​​CP​ ​Board,​ ​staff​ ​or​ ​committee​ ​teams

Note:​  ​this​​ job​​description ​​is​​ subject​​ to​​ modification,​​ if​​ needed,​​ by​​ the​​ CP​​ Board.

   How To Apply 

Please send your cover letter and resume to info@crackedpots.org and include your first and last name in the body of the email.

The deadline for applications is January 1, 2018 by Midnight.

[camillekiana]

The Reason Why Everyone Love Builders.

Skills That You Can Learn In The Builders Industry.

One of the common sources of electricity in residences, offices or other establishments is the hydroelectric power plants. Some are building up nuclear power plants in order to support increasing electricity demand. There are many other sources of electricity and another source is solar energy which produces electrical energy via solar panels. As the population of the world is increasing, so are the needs of electricity everywhere. The use of solar energy in producing electricity is creating buzz in the market because it is found to be advantageous. It is in this case that passive design comes into play. Passive design handles the energy coming from the sun to improve the house’s cooling and heating in a natural way. There are actually four major principles in passive design. These are orientation, insulation and thermal mass. Orientation. The huge glass portion in the north part allows the low winter sun in. And to block the high summer sun, simple shading like eaves is applied.

No. The process really is simple with a few basic carpentry skills.

Hiring a service that helps in managing the project’s amount is always a good decision. This establishment is able to look at the total cost for any project. While taking a closer look at the designing and planning prices, they also ensure that all the documents regarding the projects are well prepared and the work would be completed on time. They find the most economical way of keeping the development of the building within a specified budget. A clear analysis of everything is important to assure the financial interest of the people who are getting the construction done therefore employing a professional and an independent cost manager is very important.

Where can I find answers and help? How do I make my desires known

Exactly what you’re paying for (they can refer back to the quote for this)

I really want this ________________in the house — how do I get exactly that

A personality that meshed with their own

I come from the field of construction and I am always surprised to learn that there are so many simple things people can do, but they prefer to rely on others. You place the Sticky tape over the flanges in this order: bottom, sides, then top and then trim as usual. No. The process really is simple with a few basic carpentry skills. As for cost, the cost of the window and supplies and, of course, your time. Thanks for reading. Hope the info helped. This actually doesn’t seem super difficult. Maybe we can get away with doing it ourselves and not having to hire a residential window installations Portland OR company.

Online printing companies often provide you quality of work at very cheap rates.

In this time when the information highway has become more developed, the world has become smaller. It seems that there is only one global business environment where doing business between a business owner in the UK or Canada is hiring the services of a company from the Philippines or India. Outsourcing is what made this possible. Most companies aiming to get the most and the best of what they spend for have become players in the outsourcing industry and they have proven this to be a successful strategy. There are a number of companies that can meet your quality expectations for direct mail marketing campaigns. So, do market research for credible companies. You can ask from your friends and family, professionals, for referrals. You can use Internet to search online printing companies. Online printing companies often provide you quality of work at very cheap rates. By following these two steps, you can increase your chances of finding right printing company for your valuable postcard. Printer’s track records When you have a short list of your prospective postcard printing companies, then next you have to check the track record of each printing company.

How to Find a #Good Builder for Your House http://goo.gl/2dxeiu

— Adelia (@adelia_555) February 7, 2014

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Take a licensed company. Due to their huge presence in the market, the establishments that sell the bonds to the building experts are facing a high competition against themselves. The competition is all about acquiring and retaining their clients. This has forced some enterprises to come up with strategies to increase their customer base. The most effective way of doing that is by reducing their rates to make it cheaper. London building contractors This lessens the likelihood of damage to the existing electrical, water, sewage, phone, and cable facilities, which could cause outages and potentially hazardous situations. During the construction of a building, the municipal building inspector inspects the building periodically to ensure that the construction adheres to the approved plans and the local building code. Once construction is complete and a final inspection has been passed, an occupancy permit may be issued. An operating building – Full Piece of writing – must remain in compliance with the fire code.

from WordPress https://premierpainting12.wordpress.com/2017/11/22/%ef%bb%bfthe-reason-why-everyone-love-builders/ from https://premierpainting12.tumblr.com/post/167781764121

[premierpainting12]

The Reason Why Everyone Love Builders.

Skills That You Can Learn In The Builders Industry.

One of the common sources of electricity in residences, offices or other establishments is the hydroelectric power plants. Some are building up nuclear power plants in order to support increasing electricity demand. There are many other sources of electricity and another source is solar energy which produces electrical energy via solar panels. As the population of the world is increasing, so are the needs of electricity everywhere. The use of solar energy in producing electricity is creating buzz in the market because it is found to be advantageous. It is in this case that passive design comes into play. Passive design handles the energy coming from the sun to improve the house’s cooling and heating in a natural way. There are actually four major principles in passive design. These are orientation, insulation and thermal mass. Orientation. The huge glass portion in the north part allows the low winter sun in. And to block the high summer sun, simple shading like eaves is applied.

No. The process really is simple with a few basic carpentry skills.

Hiring a service that helps in managing the project’s amount is always a good decision. This establishment is able to look at the total cost for any project. While taking a closer look at the designing and planning prices, they also ensure that all the documents regarding the projects are well prepared and the work would be completed on time. They find the most economical way of keeping the development of the building within a specified budget. A clear analysis of everything is important to assure the financial interest of the people who are getting the construction done therefore employing a professional and an independent cost manager is very important.

Where can I find answers and help? How do I make my desires known

Exactly what you’re paying for (they can refer back to the quote for this)

I really want this ________________in the house — how do I get exactly that

A personality that meshed with their own

I come from the field of construction and I am always surprised to learn that there are so many simple things people can do, but they prefer to rely on others. You place the Sticky tape over the flanges in this order: bottom, sides, then top and then trim as usual. No. The process really is simple with a few basic carpentry skills. As for cost, the cost of the window and supplies and, of course, your time. Thanks for reading. Hope the info helped. This actually doesn’t seem super difficult. Maybe we can get away with doing it ourselves and not having to hire a residential window installations Portland OR company.

Online printing companies often provide you quality of work at very cheap rates.

In this time when the information highway has become more developed, the world has become smaller. It seems that there is only one global business environment where doing business between a business owner in the UK or Canada is hiring the services of a company from the Philippines or India. Outsourcing is what made this possible. Most companies aiming to get the most and the best of what they spend for have become players in the outsourcing industry and they have proven this to be a successful strategy. There are a number of companies that can meet your quality expectations for direct mail marketing campaigns. So, do market research for credible companies. You can ask from your friends and family, professionals, for referrals. You can use Internet to search online printing companies. Online printing companies often provide you quality of work at very cheap rates. By following these two steps, you can increase your chances of finding right printing company for your valuable postcard. Printer’s track records When you have a short list of your prospective postcard printing companies, then next you have to check the track record of each printing company.

How to Find a #Good Builder for Your House http://goo.gl/2dxeiu

— Adelia (@adelia_555) February 7, 2014

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Take a licensed company. Due to their huge presence in the market, the establishments that sell the bonds to the building experts are facing a high competition against themselves. The competition is all about acquiring and retaining their clients. This has forced some enterprises to come up with strategies to increase their customer base. The most effective way of doing that is by reducing their rates to make it cheaper. London building contractors This lessens the likelihood of damage to the existing electrical, water, sewage, phone, and cable facilities, which could cause outages and potentially hazardous situations. During the construction of a building, the municipal building inspector inspects the building periodically to ensure that the construction adheres to the approved plans and the local building code. Once construction is complete and a final inspection has been passed, an occupancy permit may be issued. An operating building – Full Piece of writing – must remain in compliance with the fire code.

from WordPress https://premierpainting12.wordpress.com/2017/11/22/%ef%bb%bfthe-reason-why-everyone-love-builders/

[reneetessa]

The Reason Why Everyone Love Builders.

Skills That You Can Learn In The Builders Industry.

One of the common sources of electricity in residences, offices or other establishments is the hydroelectric power plants. Some are building up nuclear power plants in order to support increasing electricity demand. There are many other sources of electricity and another source is solar energy which produces electrical energy via solar panels. As the population of the world is increasing, so are the needs of electricity everywhere. The use of solar energy in producing electricity is creating buzz in the market because it is found to be advantageous. It is in this case that passive design comes into play. Passive design handles the energy coming from the sun to improve the house’s cooling and heating in a natural way. There are actually four major principles in passive design. These are orientation, insulation and thermal mass. Orientation. The huge glass portion in the north part allows the low winter sun in. And to block the high summer sun, simple shading like eaves is applied.

No. The process really is simple with a few basic carpentry skills.

Hiring a service that helps in managing the project’s amount is always a good decision. This establishment is able to look at the total cost for any project. While taking a closer look at the designing and planning prices, they also ensure that all the documents regarding the projects are well prepared and the work would be completed on time. They find the most economical way of keeping the development of the building within a specified budget. A clear analysis of everything is important to assure the financial interest of the people who are getting the construction done therefore employing a professional and an independent cost manager is very important.

Where can I find answers and help? How do I make my desires known

Exactly what you’re paying for (they can refer back to the quote for this)

I really want this ________________in the house — how do I get exactly that

A personality that meshed with their own

I come from the field of construction and I am always surprised to learn that there are so many simple things people can do, but they prefer to rely on others. You place the Sticky tape over the flanges in this order: bottom, sides, then top and then trim as usual. No. The process really is simple with a few basic carpentry skills. As for cost, the cost of the window and supplies and, of course, your time. Thanks for reading. Hope the info helped. This actually doesn’t seem super difficult. Maybe we can get away with doing it ourselves and not having to hire a residential window installations Portland OR company.

Online printing companies often provide you quality of work at very cheap rates.

In this time when the information highway has become more developed, the world has become smaller. It seems that there is only one global business environment where doing business between a business owner in the UK or Canada is hiring the services of a company from the Philippines or India. Outsourcing is what made this possible. Most companies aiming to get the most and the best of what they spend for have become players in the outsourcing industry and they have proven this to be a successful strategy. There are a number of companies that can meet your quality expectations for direct mail marketing campaigns. So, do market research for credible companies. You can ask from your friends and family, professionals, for referrals. You can use Internet to search online printing companies. Online printing companies often provide you quality of work at very cheap rates. By following these two steps, you can increase your chances of finding right printing company for your valuable postcard. Printer’s track records When you have a short list of your prospective postcard printing companies, then next you have to check the track record of each printing company.

How to Find a #Good Builder for Your House http://goo.gl/2dxeiu

— Adelia (@adelia_555) February 7, 2014

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Take a licensed company. Due to their huge presence in the market, the establishments that sell the bonds to the building experts are facing a high competition against themselves. The competition is all about acquiring and retaining their clients. This has forced some enterprises to come up with strategies to increase their customer base. The most effective way of doing that is by reducing their rates to make it cheaper. London building contractors This lessens the likelihood of damage to the existing electrical, water, sewage, phone, and cable facilities, which could cause outages and potentially hazardous situations. During the construction of a building, the municipal building inspector inspects the building periodically to ensure that the construction adheres to the approved plans and the local building code. Once construction is complete and a final inspection has been passed, an occupancy permit may be issued. An operating building – Full Piece of writing – must remain in compliance with the fire code.

from https://premierpainting12.wordpress.com/2017/11/22/%ef%bb%bfthe-reason-why-everyone-love-builders/

[thesaleswhisperer]

James Malinchak: Speak Your Way To Prosperity

http://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/topic/podcast

http://MakeEverySale.com

  Played basketball in Hawaii

Moved to LA

Had no idea or plan to speak

Was making $7/hr working at a video store in L.A.

He listened to people who said "just follow your passion but it doesn't work unless you get booked

You need to bring business processes to your passion 

Most speaker associations are a load of crap with advice like "cold call 100 and you'll get 10 interested"

Did 2-3 talks then 30-40 then he crushed it

You need to be a great marketer

The 8-ball of speaking is reaching the people who control the budgets. Nothing else matters.

Corporate speakers go after training coordinators, casino 

Colleges have budgets (student activities, Greek life, residential coordinator, youth conferences)

You have the youth market (K-12), colleges, corporate: make your speaking material unique for each of those

He has one talk that fits three themes with different titles in Corporate

Success / motivation

Sales

Leadership

This 3X's his chances of getting booked

He has five talks for colleges

Incoming

Out-going

Leadership

Success In College

College athletes

This 5X's

One talk for youth where he's paid as a keynote speaker

He does more direct mail than anyone

Event coordinators don't go to Facebook to find a speaker

No speaker shows up in the mailboxes of these decision makers

He'll validate their addresses

He has zero competition because nobody mails

He'll do 10,000 mail pieces

1,000 will be interested

100 will retain him for $20,000

Don't do postcards

His contacts tell him not to send little postcards

He sends a 6-page brochure in one big sheet

Rent the right list and drive them to a landing page where they can see a video of you as a speaker

Customize the mailout for the market

They'll call and book him

Coordinators worry if you can relate to their audience, not that you can speak well

These are for fee-paid talks

Slides should enhance your presentation not be your presentation

Your face and your hands should be your main tools

Planners will ask for local people to keep fees down

Destination planners will give them a list of the local providers

20,000 conventions per year are held in Vegas

Sales and Marketing coordinators of hotels—he got to know them and got listed as a preferred vendor (incentivize them)

15 years ago he walked into the Portland Convention Center with a bunch of big names like Michael Jordan ($150k) vs James's $5k and he was the only one  who got a standing ovation

To make more package yourself better to be perceived as being worth more

When you're starting you speak anywhere for any price

Everyone undervalues themselves

Ask for what you want

He started earning $20,000 when he decided to ask for $20,000

Check out The Sales Podcast's latest episode

[moodboardinthecloud]

Joy Williams, the Art of Fiction in the Paris Review

Joy Williams couldn’t find her glasses before a lecture some years ago and used prescription sunglasses instead. During Williams’s walk to the podium, an audience member was heard asking if the writer had gone blind; another remarked how inspiring it was for Williams to recall the lecture from memory. She had been asked to discuss craft. She did not discuss craft. She discussed Kraft cheese and the “twiddling” nature of art pursued “within a parameter of hours in prisons, nursing homes, and kindergartens,” and then she opened a valve. What would be the point, she said,

to discuss the craft of Jean Rhys, Janet Frame, Christina Stead, Malcolm Lowry, all of whose works can teach us little about technique, and whose way of touching us is simply by exploding on the lintel of our minds. It is not technique that guided them. Their craft consisted of desire.

She went on:

We are American writers, absorbing the American experience. We must absorb its heat, the recklessness and ruthlessness, the grotesqueries and cruelties. We must reflect the sprawl and smallness of America, its greedy optimism and dangerous sentimentality. And we must write with a pen—in Mark Twain’s phrase—warmed up in hell. We might have something then, worthy, necessary; a real literature instead of the Botox escapist lit told in the shiny prolix comedic style that has come to define us.

She smiled, thanked the audience, and sat. There were no questions. A student at the reception wondered aloud if tonight’s craft talk could have possibly destroyed future craft talks. “I hope so,” her friend said.

The Paris Review had already run several of the earliest, weirdest Joy Williams stories before George Plimpton agreed to publish State of Grace under the magazine’s book imprint in 1973. The novel, her first, would be nominated for the National Book Award when its author was thirty. (She lost to Gravity’s Rainbow.) She went on to write three more eerie, eccentric novels of life on the American margins as well as four renowned collections of stories, upon which her reputation solidly rests. Many have attained cult status beyond the normal anthologies—“Traveling to Pridesup,” “The Blue Men,” “Rot,” “Marabou,” “Brass”—and are frequently passed around M.F.A. departments with something like subversive glee. They are, as Williams probably hoped, unteachable as craft. The New York Times admitted more than it meant to, perhaps, when a reviewer claimed her work was “probably not for everyone.” Over the decades, wildly different stylists—Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, William Gass, Karen Russell, Bret Easton Ellis, James Salter, Ann Beattie, Tao Lin—have all expressed unqualified admiration.

Williams was married to Rust Hills, fiction editor of Esquire, for thirty-four years, until his death in 2008. Now she divides the seasons between Arizona, Florida, and New England, crisscrossing the country in an old Ford Bronco with two sable-black German shepherds, writing in motels or as the occasional guest of a college. She uses a flip phone. She types postcards in lieu of e-mail. She has never owned a computer. She continues to wear the same prescription sunglasses, indoors or out, night or day.

She was a writer-in-residence at the University of Wyoming when this interview was arranged. It was October; snow whipped between the ranges like a sandstorm, while several big rigs had jackknifed on black ice coming into Laramie. I phoned from a coffee shop, and she gave me directions: thirty miles north to a ranch where the Bureau of Land Management had relocated herds of wild mustangs. Williams was staying in a red-roofed log cabin with a porch swing and fire pit. The sun broke through like something from Doctor Zhivago. Everything about the wintry scene felt germane to this particular artist: the scope and grandeur of the natural world, the monkish quiet, two dogs with lively personalities, and—roaming everywhere—hundreds of wild horses, nervous and arrogant. Huddled in a hoodie, Williams made coffee with almond milk before sitting across from me at a pine table. She got up several times to retrieve objects or fuss with the dogs. When the talk was over, she drove us into town for a martini and we returned after dark. There was a fat moon. She cut the truck’s headlights and moved, very slowly, through the herds as they sniffed and stepped aside, hides glowing with moonlight.

“Forget the interview,” she said. “Write about this.”

Paul Winner

INTERVIEWER

What do you teach, when you’re visiting a college? Is there a philosophy you try to impart?

WILLIAMS

James Salter once taught a whole course of novels that were written when the authors were the same age as his students. Isn’t that clever? Well, it could also be intimidating. Mostly you just need to support them until they get older and sort themselves out a bit.

INTERVIEWER

What kind of child were you?

WILLIAMS

An only child, growing up in Maine. My father was a Congregational minister. He had a church in Portland. It was a big city church, a beautiful, very formal place. His father was a Welsh Baptist minister who, as a young man, won the eisteddfod in Wales. His prize was a large, ornately carved chair, the bard’s chair, which I wanted very badly as a child. The chair made it to this country but was given to my father’s older brother, who gave it to a historical society in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, from which it was washed away in a flood. Preachers and coal miners, my genealogy.

INTERVIEWER

You said you still own your father’s Bible.

WILLIAMS

Oh, yes. He had lots of Bibles. I kept them all. I’ve got my father’s notebooks, his sermons. One of these days I’ll get them organized. My mother always said she was going to throw them out. They’re not meant to be read, they’re meant to be heard, she said. But I’ve still got them.

INTERVIEWER

Were you a good student? An avid reader?

WILLIAMS

When I was a child I thought the answers to tests had to be transmitted to a person through some kind of food. Perhaps I read it in a book. In any case, it seems I was always preparing myself for tests, or thought I was. I was uneasy with my presence in life. Who was I, anyway? What was I supposed to do? Even with my obsession with preparing for the tests of the day, I was an indifferent student before I went to college. I had my heart set on Colby, in Maine, this tiny liberal-arts college, but I didn’t get in. Marietta, in Ohio, is where my father went, so I went there. I loved it. I was Phi Beta Kappa.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have your key?

WILLIAMS

I do. Do you want to see it? The first was stolen, so my husband tracked down the Phi Beta Kappa people and got me another one. They don’t give it to just anybody, apparently. As I said, I loved college. I had the guidance of an elderly, morose, chain-smoking English professor—Dr. Harold Dean. I never spoke well or argued well in class. But filling up blue books with the gleanings and gleamings of thought, which somehow became a new thought—that was very fulfilling to me. I read Donne, Dickinson, transcendentalism, Eliot, Camus, surrealism. I drank it all up. I was obsessed with Dickinson. The professor gave me her collected poems, three volumes in a box set. A lovely thing. It fared very badly in Florida, all those years, eaten by insects.

INTERVIEWER

Is it true that when you left home, your family gave you multiple copies of the same book?

WILLIAMS

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. When I was going off to college, I got two copies of this thing, this impossibly neurotic, very strange book by this woman who’d been working on it her whole life, Marguerite Young. What were they thinking? I got Berryman’s collected poems at some point for a birthday, but back then I guess my parents read a review somewhere and thought, You know, well, Joy thinks she’s going to be a writer.

INTERVIEWER

Had you already started writing? You were published quite young.

WILLIAMS

Not so young.

INTERVIEWER

Twenty-two.

WILLIAMS

A lot of those stories aren’t collected. “The Roomer,” my first published story—it was in The Carolina Quarterly and won an O. Henry—that’s never been collected. I didn’t want to. I thought it was sinister and immature. George Plimpton introduced me once at a reading in that voice of his and said that he’d discovered me, that he’d done the first published story of mine. I had to speak up, from the audience, “Uh . . . ” He laughed, charmingly.

INTERVIEWER

From college, you went to Iowa?

WILLIAMS

On graduating, I wanted to join the Peace Corps. It was the early sixties, after all. But the cadaverous Dr. Dean—really, his looks were remarkable—he convinced me otherwise. He wanted me to become a writer. He wanted me to go to the writing program at the University of Iowa and become a writer. So another two years in the Midwest, far from my heart’s home in Maine. The workshop at Iowa met in Quonset huts on the river, then—freezing.

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned that Iowa was, for you, two years of social awkwardness. A shy, Eastern daughter of a minister surrounded by all these big alpha-male writers, Andre Dubus, Raymond Carver—

WILLIAMS

Ray Carver was in the poetry classes. He was always a poet. I knew his wife Maryann better. We were waitresses together, but I was always getting fired. In the workshops I studied with R.V. Cassill and Vance Bourjaily. A more imperfect match there cannot be imagined. Richard Yates came in at some point, I think. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness had just come out in paperback. He seemed a little remote and anxious to me, though not particularly lonely. Revolutionary Road was hugely impressive, but the stories touched me not at all. They seemed old-fashioned, resolving themselves on small matters.

INTERVIEWER

Had you begun your first novel, State of Grace?

WILLIAMS

I graduated, got married, and moved to Florida, where my husband worked at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. We had a dog, a beach, a Jaguar XK150, black, which to this day I wish I still possessed. Then the husband was trans- ferred to Tallahassee. I didn’t want to live in the big city, I wanted to live in the country. We rented a trailer in the middle of tangled woods on the St. Marks River. Didn’t know a soul, husband away all day. I wrote State of Grace there. Excellent, practically morbid conditions for the writing of a first novel. We returned to Siesta Key, and I got a job working for the Navy at the Mote Marine Laboratory, researching shark attacks.

INTERVIEWER

Shark—

WILLIAMS

The only job I’ve ever had, other than teaching. Well, there was the waitressing. But I was writing, I was getting published in The Paris Review. Really, I had no idea what I was doing.

INTERVIEWER

Did you feel alone with the work? Utterly adrift?

WILLIAMS

I had no connections, no writing circle. I typed everything single-spaced so it would look as though it were already published. Looking at those manuscripts now, I’m amazed at how fluid everything was. No hesitation, no correction, no revising. What a gift! What or who had given me this gift? I mean, the stories weren’t brilliant. They might not have even been particularly good. But I wrote stories, I began and ended them. I didn’t have much experience with anything, but I had my thoughts. I believed stories should have a purity and not be about what was going on—and there was a lot going on, of course, in my life. My husband and I acquired a toucan, then we had a baby. No one knew I was going to have a baby. I was skinny, no one seemed to remark. You know, I didn’t even tell my parents, my dear, dear, supportive, loving parents. When my husband called them on April 6, the day Caitlin was born, they didn’t believe him. Why did I do that? I don’t know. It was so cruel. I suppose I was a little odd, a little secretive. I still have secrets.

INTERVIEWER

Is that what stories are to you? Secrets?

WILLIAMS

I recently received a letter from an Iowa Workshop grad—typical—seeking my participation in a “collaborative” interview. The question was, Why do short stories matter and why should we value them? What a retro question. It sounded like something out of the 1940s. I was too weary for a reply, but I think they probably don’t matter all that much. A herd of wild elephants matters more. And which stories are we talking about? There are so many of them.

INTERVIEWER

Can you define a story, if not its usefulness?

WILLIAMS

What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensi- bility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes—which is Wallace Stevens, I think. As a form, the short story is hardly divine, though all excel- lent art has its mystery, its spiritual rhythm. I think one should be able to do a lot in less than twenty pages. I read a story recently about a woman who’d been on the lam and her husband dies and she ends up getting in her pickup and driving away at the end, and it was all about fracking, damage, dust to the communities, people selling out for fifty thousand dollars. It was so boring.

INTERVIEWER

You tend to mistrust the literal. How do you conceive stories? Do you start with metaphor?

WILLIAMS

I honestly don’t know how I approach such things. That’s the frustration. You want to have your writing do more, and speak more, and yet ... Do you want more coffee?

INTERVIEWER

So back to Florida, early 1970s, holed up in a rented trailer.

WILLIAMS

This may be boring or irrelevant, but I go away to Yaddo, in the winter. I write a story called “Taking Care.” I show the story to a writer there, a sophisticated feminist from New York. She suggests I cut the final line, “Together they enter the shining rooms.” I am dismayed. I become suspicious of readers. Of course I will not cut the line. It carries the story into the celestial, where it longs to go.

INTERVIEWER

In your mind, you’ve finally written your first good story.

WILLIAMS

I send the story to The New Yorker. I receive a nice letter in return. Rather, it begins nicely and admiringly but ends on a somewhat accusatory note. The story is insincere, inorganic, labored. Only once in my career will I appear in The New Yorker. And as Ann Beattie said, the only thing worse than never appearing in The New Yorker is being accepted only once by The New Yorker. I send it to a new magazine called Audience, a hardcover, oversize, heavily illustrated magazine. Its fiction editor is Rust Hills. He loves the story. He is utterly moved by the story. In a few months I return to Yaddo—winter again—and he, quite by coincidence, is there, too.

INTERVIEWER

When was this?

WILLIAMS

I met Rust in 1972. We were both married to other people and I had a two-year-old. By 1974, we were married to each other and Rust had formally adopted Caitlin and given her his name. He had a house in Stonington, Connecticut, and I had a cypress house on a lagoon close by the beach, on Siesta Key. The only writer around was John D. MacDonald. We got to know artists through two of our dear friends, the abstract expressionist Syd Solomon and his wife, Annie. We met Philip Guston, Marca-Relli, Chamberlain, Rivers.

INTERVIEWER

The early seventies were charged with feminist consciousness—Toni Morrison, Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch. You didn’t feel a part of that? You mentioned once that you sensed female writers of that time were everywhere and were expected to be engaged and angry but ended up being terribly conformist.

WILLIAMS

God, yes. Back then you had to be a certain type of writer. You had to be one of these women writing the sort of thing that other people could, you know, find a book on.

INTERVIEWER

Speaking of feminism, I found an article from a Sarasota paper reporting on a literary festival sometime in the 1970s, attended by various luminaries. You were unknown. I believe you are described in the article as being the “tanned, leggy companion” of editor Rust Hills.

WILLIAMS

The word you seek is “sinewy.” Rust organized a writers conference at New College, in Sarasota. It was 1977, I believe. Astonishingly, he got William Gaddis and William Gass to come and actually confer with students. The conference was never repeated, and, though a modest success, I think the students were somewhat baffled. Gaddis and Gass—who were Gaddis and Gass? They sounded like a struggling law firm. Rust wasn’t at Esquire when we met, as I said. Gordon Lish was there and published several of my stories. I was not his big success. Ray Carver was his big success. Lish cut one of my stories, “The Lover,” in half and made it a very good story. He didn’t talk a lot about your stories, he didn’t explain what or why, he just cut and cut.

INTERVIEWER

Your second novel, The Changeling, came out the next year. A review in the Times used your book as a springboard to complain about the vague aims and language of the literary avant-garde. Did you think you were avant-garde?

WILLIAMS

Well, The Changeling, as you might know, is about a drunk. I was smitten with all things Lowry at the time, even though Ken Kesey told me quite firmly that Under the Volcano was “junior high.” But avant-garde? Dickinson’s avant-garde. Ashbery. Loplop. I think Don DeLillo’s avant-garde. No one’s caught up with what he’s doing yet. After reading that review, William Gaddis called and said, Oh, Joy, I’m so sorry. I can still hear his voice saying that. I hadn’t even read it yet. It was nasty, and it did succeed in shutting me up for a while. A few years ago that novel was reissued by a tiny press. I like the cover very much, with Goya’s Dog.

Now, wait. Let me ask—what do you think of the state of criticism in this country? Isn’t that a relevant question? There’s James Wood, of course, who deals only with the giants, whom he quietly, sonorously corrects. Other critics seem, I don’t know, to lurch from writer to writer, wanting to crown someone.

INTERVIEWER

I think of the Internet, the sheer volume. Cynthia Ozick wrote recently about the influence of this environment, all those Amazon customer reviews.

WILLIAMS

Who writes those?

INTERVIEWER

Anyone. People who may, in an earlier age, have written letters to the editor.

WILLIAMS

It’s one thing when it’s a restaurant. I mean, they can destroy a restaurant overnight. To do that with books?

INTERVIEWER

Your characters seem to struggle to interpret the world’s detritus, trying to make sense of ominous signs. A window opens for a moment, but then the window is shut. Is that a fair description of the writer’s consciousness as well?

WILLIAMS

I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. Receptive and responsible. If you don’t do anything with it, you lose it. You stop getting these omens. I love this little church group I go to. The other day we were talking about how God appears or doesn’t appear and how we’re nervous about seeing God, and it was all very interesting, but then somebody piped up, Well, I think God appears often during the day! We just don’t recognize it! For example, I was trying to find my name tag before the ten-thirty service. There I was with all the name tags, I just couldn’t find it, and then I looked down and it had fallen on the floor! I thought, There’s God! Telling me where it was!

You know what I told her? I said that it was really a large name tag. It was. It was huge. How could she misplace it in the first place?

INTERVIEWER

To speak of signs or interpretation suggests, at the very least, that there’s something unknowable at the heart of what you do. I asked you, before we started taping, whether you remember anything of how some of your most famous stories—“Train,” “Escapes,” “Honored Guest”—came to be written, and you looked panicked. You honestly can’t recall?

WILLIAMS

I find it so difficult to talk about what I do. There are those who are unnervingly articulate about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, which, I suppose, is what this interview is all about. I am not particularly articulate, unnervingly or otherwise. I do believe there is, in fact, a mystery to the whole enterprise that one dares to investigate at peril. The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what’s being said before the writer figures out how to say it. There’s a word in German, Sehnsucht. No English equivalent, which is often the case. It means the longing for some- thing that cannot be expressed, or inconsolable longing. There’s a word in Welsh, hwyl, for which we also have no match. Again, it is longing, a longing of the spirit. I just think many of my figures seek something that cannot be found.

INTERVIEWER

And the writer? Are you trying to resolve that longing?

WILLIAMS

There’s a story about Jung. He had a dream that puzzled him, but when he tried to go back to sleep a voice said, “You must understand the dream, and must do so at once!” When he still couldn’t comprehend its meaning, the same voice said, “If you do not understand the dream, you must shoot your- self!” Rather violently stated, certainly, but this is how Jung recollected it. He did not resort to the loaded handgun he kept in a drawer of his bedside table—and it is somewhat of a shock to think of Jung armed—but he deciphered the dream to the voice within’s satisfaction, discovering the divine irrationality of the unconscious and his life’s work in the process. The message is work, seek, understand, or you will immolate the true self. The false self doesn’t care. It feels it works quite hard enough just getting us through the day.

INTERVIEWER

Your voice in the early work is lyrical, dense. After your first few books you began to write journalism, and your fictional voice seemed to transform along with it. It became looser, blunter, more comic. Using that voice, you wrote things like “The Killing Game” and “Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp” for magazines with large, vocal readerships.

WILLIAMS

Those magazine essays did not require any stealth of execution. Unlike with the stories, where my real interest lay in illuminating something beneath or beyond the story itself, I could be forthright, headlong. I could write about real-estate developers, hunting, infertility treatments resulting in zillions of babies. It freed me so much, those nonfiction pieces. After “The Killing Game,” the NRA had everybody write to Esquire. They had a closet full of irate letters about that piece. The next editor was dealing with it years after it appeared. For one of the magazines, I wanted to write about the Unabomber, but I couldn’t get an interview, so I wrote about his cabin, from the cabin’s point of view.

INTERVIEWER

The Unabomber’s cabin, the pink Wagoneer in 99 Stories of God, the wayward fifty-dollar bill in Breaking and Entering.

WILLIAMS

The fifty-dollar bill. Plimpton hated that. I remembered being so pleased with myself, thinking, Boy, I’m really working here, it’s all coming together! He sort of frowned and said, You’re showing off.

INTERVIEWER

Around this time, you became an authority on the Florida Keys.

WILLIAMS

Random House was doing this series—Virginia, the Hamptons, the Keys. The Keys were still kind of strange and unspoiled in the eighties. I went around the state and wrote things down, but nobody talked to me. Nobody! I’d limp into these bed-and-breakfasts and people would snarl at me and not want to talk. I mean, honestly, it was terrible and I had no idea what I was doing. And it wasn’t edited, nobody edited it. Have you seen the afterword, the final edition, when I didn’t want to update it anymore? Here I am, worn out and saying how shitty everything in the Keys has become, and Random House just went ahead and put the afterword in there. Isn’t that amazing? That’s the only book I’ve ever made money from.

INTERVIEWER

Writing this nonfiction, you’d expanded your voice?

WILLIAMS

With the essays, I wanted to say, there was a lot of freedom bestowed. I felt I could address fecklessness, evil, even grief in a much more honest and emotional way than I could in stories. Which is somewhat contrary to my belief that what the short story, as a form, excels in is the depiction of solitude and isolation. Perhaps writing essays made my fictional characters more garrulous, desperate even, desperate to convey. So my stories became tighter and more restrained in style at the same time my characters became talkier, if that’s possible. Maybe it’s not possible. Maybe it’s not even true.

INTERVIEWER

Writers are desperate to convey their obsessions. They populate the subconscious. Jung and his inexplicable dream, for example.

WILLIAMS

I wonder if understanding the dream is really what must be done. Can we incorporate and treasure and be nourished by that which we do not understand? Of course. Understanding something, especially in these tech times, seems to involve ruthless appropriation and dismantlement and diminishment. I think of something I clipped from the paper and can’t lay my hands on. This peculiar aquatic creature who lives deep within the sea—it looked like a very long eel—came up to the surface, where it was immediately killed and displayed by a dozen or so grinning people on a California beach. Didn’t have a chance to evolve, that one. Curiosity by the nonhuman is not honored in this life. For many people, when confronted with the mysterious, the other, the instinct is to kill it. Then it can be examined.

INTERVIEWER

This might be a good transition into your focus on the natural world, its degradations, the lives of animals. You’ve often quoted Coetzee’s character Elizabeth Costello, who explained that her vegetarianism came out of “a desire to save my soul.” How did this part of your life begin?

WILLIAMS

I’ve been trying to think of this subject, my environmental, moral education. The philosopher Peter Singer’s book on animal rights in 1975 transformed the thinking of many people. Not enough. Now a person with a gluten allergy is honored more than a vegetarian. And these days we continue to suppress, ignore the horror, the cruelty, the evil of the slaughterhouse. Such a simple thing, to not take part in such evil, yet the carnage continues and we find it quite acceptable. We are complicit, materially preoccupied, spiritually impoverished, and technologically possessed. Look what we did to the Earth when it was green and provident. We’ll suck it to the bone with limitation’s necessities. Well, there’s always space. It’s depicted on the endpapers of our U.S. passports.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel complicit? Do you write out of a sense of guilt?

WILLIAMS

Forgive me for the things I have done and for the things I have left undone. I may very well write out of a sense of guilt. I’ve spent my entire life doing this. Why am I not better at it?

INTERVIEWER

What can writers do, politically?

WILLIAMS

Possibly not much. An environmental writer, Derrick Jensen, says salmon don’t need more books written about them. They need clean, fast water and the dams to be busted up. Anyway, environmentalism has become thoroughly co-opted. Join the big groves and you’ll be gifted with a tote bag to carry and conceal all your good intentions. I wish Earth First! would rise again, but they were branded anarchists and terrorists and harassed by the FBI.

INTERVIEWER

Perhaps only Alice, in The Quick and the Dead, explicitly voices any of your political concerns.

WILLIAMS

Yes, but she’s a crazy girl with a missing front tooth.

INTERVIEWER

How did that novel begin? It stands out from the others. The canvas is bigger, first of all.

WILLIAMS

I wanted to write about someone who cared, and who cared very much about the nonhuman world. Then it seemed right that she should be young, mouthy, and uncharismatic. Of course no one pays her any mind whatsoever, and she’s ultimately outdone by an even younger girl, Emily Bliss Pickless, whose abhorrence of the system allows her to succeed in it, in a peculiar way. I remember looking up something in the dictionary and seeing this word, Corvus, that means raven. It’s also a small constellation. A perfect name. I suppose I did have high-minded objectives. There were lots and lots of characters, living and dead, totem animals, dismemberment, senility, regret, grief, love, all set in the battered, demystified, American desert. It became a rather funny book, finding hidey-holes from complete despair, I guess. It was a journey toward a novel I still hope to write.

INTERVIEWER

How would you describe that novel?

WILLIAMS

To return to the idea of the avant-garde, real avant-garde writing today would frame and reflect our misuse of the world, our destruction of its beauties and wonders. Nobody seems to be taking this on in the literary covens. We are all just messing with ourselves, cherishing ourselves. Andrew Solomon wrote a mega-successful nonfiction book titled Far from the Tree in which he ticks off every emotional, physical, mental, social disability you could possibly imagine and yokes them to true tales of actual practitioners or victims—though Solomon would never employ such a word—which he then bathes in a golden humanist light. We are all so special, particularly the very special, whose needs must be met. We are all so different and some of us are even more different, and this difference must be cherished and celebrated. The critics were ecstatic. What a hymn to diversity! No one spoke of how claustrophobic Far from the Tree was, the tree being utterly metaphorical, how narrowly and pridefully focused, how dismissive of a world outside the human. Cultural diversity can never replace biodiversity, though we’re being prompted to think it can. We live and spawn and want—always there is this ghastly wanting—and we have done irredeemable harm to so much. Perhaps the novel will die and even the short story because we’ll become so damn sick of talking about ourselves.

INTERVIEWER

You often seek the remotest solitude to live and work. What are your typical working conditions? Notebooks? Do you pack a typewriter?

WILLIAMS

I currently own seven Smith Corona portables, if that’s at all interesting, which it probably isn’t. My favorite typewriter is a palomino-colored Sterling that Noy Holland gifted me with in Amherst, Massachusetts. At home in Arizona, I don’t have a TV or Internet or air-conditioning. I’ve never even seen how 99 Stories of God appears to others, as Byliner produced them. They are as vapor to me. My old black Bronco has almost three hundred thou- sand miles on it. It’s traversed the country dozens of times. A great vehicle! My other ride is of a much more recent vintage—a 2004 Toyota Tundra with which I have yet to truly bond. I like old things. I almost never buy anything new.

INTERVIEWER

How does writing get done on the road?

WILLIAMS

Here in Wyoming, I sit and work and walk the dogs. I watch the thrilling ravings of Max Keiser on the RT channel. This TV has cable or a satellite, one or the other. I finally saw The Tree of Life through to its end on the Sundance Channel. Have you seen the ending? I did like everyone meeting up on the beach, although the last shot, of the field packed with sunflowers, seemed a little quiet. All I could think when I saw the field was genetically modified. I missed the glory, totally.

INTERVIEWER

What about the act of writing itself? Do you ever enjoy writing?

WILLIAMS

That nice Canadian writer who recently won the Nobel—beloved, admired, prolific. Who would deny it? She said she had a “hellish good time” writing. This could be a subject for many, many panels. Get a herd of writers together and ask them, Do you have a hellish good time writing? Mostly, I believe, the answer would be no. But their going on about it could take some time.

INTERVIEWER

You’re funny. You must know this.

WILLIAMS

Occasionally I can have a little fun or am pleased with an effect. The conversations between Ginger and Carter, for example, in The Quick and the Dead, or the Lord’s interactions with the animals in 99 Stories of God. But then I hear Plimpton again—You’re showing off.

INTERVIEWER

Who are some living writers you admire?

WILLIAMS

DeLillo is first among them. A writer of tremendous integrity and presence. Mao II is an American classic. So, too, is White Noise, though it’s been taught to splinters. His later works are fierce, demanding. His work can be a little cold perhaps. And what’s wrong with that? The cold can teach us many things. Coetzee I admire very much. On a lighter note, the Russians. Vladimir Sorokin and his crazy Ice trilogy. The short-story writer Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

INTERVIEWER

Jane Bowles seems like a precedent for your voice.

WILLIAMS

Oh, I hope not. Two Serious Ladies is a confounding book. A ridiculous situation, or situations, unbelievable characters. The plot proceeds in the manner of crutches needing tips. She certainly doesn’t write in any “accepted style” of either then or now. Yet it’s a fascinating book, forever gathering up new and enthusiastic readers. It’s an unnerving book. Do we fear for this writer? The exoticism and tragedy of her life? Paul Bowles, Morocco, her unfortunate love interests, her stroke. She seems to know nothing about human nature, which may quite signify she knows a great deal. I find her refreshing, in the way that drinking vinegar is refreshing.

INTERVIEWER

You reviewed a recent Flannery O’Connor biography and noted her habit of reading theology to embolden her work. What’s the connection for you between religious thought and the writing life?

WILLIAMS

The Bible is constantly making use of image beyond words. A parable pro- vides the imagery by means of words. The meaning, however, does not lie in the words but in the imagery. What is conjured, as it were, transcends words completely and speaks in another language. This is how Kafka wrote, why we are so fascinated by him, why he speaks so universally. On the other hand, there’s Blake, who spoke of the holiness of minute particulars. That is the way as well, to give voice to those particulars. Seek and praise, fear and seek. Don’t be vapid.

INTERVIEWER

Your philosophy, your method, is to seek and praise, fear and seek, and don’t be vapid?

WILLIAMS

You think that’s too vague? Methods limit you as soon as you recognize them. Then you have to find another form to free yourself.

INTERVIEWER

Freedom—you’ve mentioned it several times. Is freedom why you spend so much of your life out in the middle of nowhere?

WILLIAMS

Yes, yes. Freedom is most desirable. Of course none of us are free. Our flaws enslave us, the things we love. And through technology we’re becoming more known to everyone but ourselves. What’s that phrase about certain writers being what the culture needs? Most writers just write about what the culture recognizes.

INTERVIEWER

Your last book, 99 Stories of God, takes the form of parables—koans, vignettes, almost poems, with forays into philosophy and theology. The Lord shows up on Earth a few times to mingle awkwardly. Was this subject or style freeing to you?

WILLIAMS

I’m going to do one more story about God. He’s really going to confide in me. Then I’m done.

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6303/joy-williams-the-art-of-fiction-no-223-joy-williams?utm_source=Jocelyn+K.+Glei%27s+newsletter&utm_campaign=6d1adb27b5-Newsletter_01_05_17&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0d0c9bd4c2-6d1adb27b5-143326949

[cnrgcommons]

Project & Design Coordinator

Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette (PPCW) is committed to providing, promoting, and protecting access to sexual and reproductive health care in Oregon and Southwest Washington. Since 1963, PPCW has provided a broad range of sexual and reproductive health care, including family planning, preventative care, and other medical services; trained and educated community members on issues of sexuality; and advocated for the protection of reproductive rights and freedom in Oregon and Southwest Washington. Each year, more than 58,000 women, men and teens visit a PPCW health center, located in NE and SE Portland, Milwaukie, Beaverton, Salem, and Bend, Oregon; and Vancouver, Washington.

We believe that we are leading a movement for reproductive health care and education, and we are looking for people who want to help us transform the world! We are seeking a Project and Design Coordinator to work with the Director of Marketing and Communications in achieving PPCW’s strategic initiatives. The primary responsibilities of this role are brand management, management of all print projects, website content, and design of marketing materials (both print and web). As a member of our marketing team, we can offer you:

–          A supportive and collaborative atmosphere

–          The opportunity to be innovative in creating new processes

–          An organizational emphasis on high-quality practices

–          The unique chance to work in a mission-driven environment

–          A culture prioritizing work/life balance, including amazing benefits!

  Position Details: This is a union-represented, non-exempt position, based at our Regional Service Center in NE Portland on MLK Jr Blvd.

Schedule: Full-time (37.5 hours/week). Monday through Friday, typically 9 – 5. Some weekends or evenings may be required

Benefits: 3.4 weeks Paid Time Off (starting rate for first 2 years), 8 paid holidays, excellent Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance, FSA, Short and Long Term Disability, Life AD&D Insurance, 403b Retirement Fund, employee assistance program.

Compensation: Starting rate of pay is $22 hourly, plus DOE.

Education and Experience Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree with a minimum of two (2) years graphic design experience, or equivalent combination of education and experience, which includes at least one (1) year experience with project management. • Excellent organizational skills and proven ability to manage multiple projects in a results oriented environment. • Demonstrated expertise in InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop. • Proficient in MS Office Suite, including Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Excel. • Strong conceptual, graphic design and production skills with print materials and marketing collateral are necessary. • Demonstrated understanding of brand management. • Experience editing or creating websites; ability to read and write HTML.

Application Instructions:

Visit www.ppcw.org/jobs to see our full list of openings. Click “Apply Now” at the bottom of the listing to begin the application process. To be considered for this position, you must upload a cover letter! This position is open until filled. Please refrain from making direct inquiries into the status of your application.

Essential Functions:

Collaborate with the director on the agency brand, which includes building and reinforcing brand internally and externally; ensuring that all design projects meet Planned Parenthood’s brand requirements and standards. Design agency-wide communications materials to ensure the quality, accuracy and consistency of message in PPCW materials. Project manage production of all print projects, seeking competitive bids to ensure cost effectiveness and ability to meet all necessary deadlines. Includes project intake, establishing a production timeline, identifying budget, and coordination of printing and delivery of materials. Establish and maintain vendor relationships for various printed materials. Maintain production calendar for all printed items. Create and design various print and web-based marketing materials including, but not limited to:Health services promotional materials (posters, outreach and recruitment flyers, coupons, postcards, fact sheets, brochures). As needed, materials to be produced in Spanish using in-house translator. PPCW newsletter distributed to donors, supporters and volunteers. PPCW agency materials, including annual report, business cards, letterhead, brochures, and website. Event invitations, posters, signage, and promotional materials Materials for Education Department programs Necessary revisions and updates to existing health center materials Fundraising materials, including brochures, folios, donation slips, reply envelopes, letterhead, and note cards Promotional materials for special projects Design and oversight of web materials, including e-mail distribution, website, intranet and more Health center signage Collaborate with the director to update and maintain PPCW’s website and social media pages/sites. Monitor and manage PPCW’s online presence. Collaborate with the director on art direction, working with outside resources, to develop print projects and materials as needed. Develop and maintain an effective filing and retrieval system for marketing materials and documents. Follow established procedures to ensure materials are error-free and top quality prior to printing and/or publishing. Create and distribute monthly employee e-newsletter using provided content. Participate in outside marketing efforts as needed. Assist Director of Marketing & Communications with other tasks as needed. Ability to meet the physical demands of sitting and repetitive movement of one or both hands up to 8 hours/day; walking, standing, bending at the neck, reaching above/below shoulder height, driving and moving items weighing up to 10 pounds up to 1 hour/day.

Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette is an Equal Opportunity Employer (EOE). Qualified applicants are considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, marital status, age, veterans’ status, genetic information, disability, pregnancy or union activity.  If you need assistance or an accommodation during the application process because of a disability, it is available upon request. The organization is pleased to provide such assistance, and no applicant will be penalized as a result of such a request.