Recommendations

It’s always nice to be recommended. It gives you a warm feeling and makes you think you might be doing something right. I get most of my work from recommendations. Recommendation is the most powerful marketing tool there is, but you won’t hear that from marketing professionals, because recommendations are free.

However, sometimes recommendations get passed down the food chain. As did the one I received whilst in Thailand. No matter, I’m not proud. At least I was recommended by someone who was recommended.

I met the Director of said company on Tuesday in the rather plush surroundings of the Marriot Hotel by Westminster Bridge. This is not my usual standard of meeting place, but he was paying for the coffee. I wore a suit and tried not to look at the price list.

The project was an interesting one. It would combine both my business consultancy and writing skills, a perfect combination. And it meant an 8-week secondment in Libya.

We got along swimmingly, had two coffees, which I calculated, cost him my train fare to London, and he offered me the work. Marvellous.

Then as he was winding things up he re-iterated how he wanted someone on this project ‘with a strategic business background and experience across a wide set of business disciplines, and I noticed from your CV that you’ve been round the block a bit.’

As soon as he uttered those words I knew I wouldn’t take the job. It irritated me all the way home. Did he expect me to have ‘experience across a wide set of business principles,’ by working in the Civil Service for thirty years?

It reminded me why I’m trying to replace my business consultancy work with writing work. I may be poorer in the interim, but at least I won’t have to deal with people who make a judgement about you from two pages of a CV.

Anyway rant over. Writing, ah yes. I’ve made a start on my manuscript, a little over 7,000 words in the last 3 days. I’m happy with the words but not sure they’re in the right order yet. Some of the sentences are so funny I have had to type them directly into a lead box so they won’t leak out and infect the world with laughter. Others I just threw in because I like the sound of them. For example, no travel book would be complete without the word ‘fungal,’ or indeed ‘squits.’

There are some stock phrases too, ‘I heard the thwack of the rubber glove a full 30 seconds before the pain really took hold and I blacked out…’ And ‘a gash in the concrete, frankly, does not constitute a toilet…’

But I better not reveal anymore, salivating on a computer screen is so unbecoming.

I appear to have arrived home with a somewhat optimistic air combined with a prodigious output, and lets face it, we all need a prodigious output. This week I’ve sent out a writing proposal to an editor every day, re-written a website for a client, quoted to re-write a clients entire customer communications portfolio and marketing material, sent off a proposal to a publisher for a book idea I have, and found a pair of trousers I forgot I owned.

There’s nothing like activity to keep you busy. Mind you I can always do with more work, so if you feel like recommending me…