Today I Felt Indebted

April 15, 2009 By 20 Comments

“If you don’t think every day is a good day, just try missing one.”
~Cavett Robert

2787499964_4feaf741c5Today will one day gild my memory in bold type, sprinkled as it was with moments of gratitude, justifying our family’s direction, rewarded our patience and promised to pull us toward a truly awesome mañana.

There was no singular bolt of lightning to pierce our sky, the day instead flocked with flashes and rays. It is spring break for the children and the loss of shuffling through hours of our day is not one I will spare a minute to mourn. My non working moments over the last three days have been instead spent on adventures; playing with Max and Mia while making eyes at Cindy.

Even amid all the helter skelter, our lives are often filled with such moments; even the worst of days can burn with brilliance if you take the time to gaze, at least with a passing glance, at a bit of what is both above and below you. Yesterday was one of those where those moments seemed to arrive in multiplicity and then arrange themselves with the wonder of a constellation.

I’ve been climbing toward a peak for some time now, and can smell the air at the top as it gently slaps the side of my face, but that doesn’t mean the climb hasn’t at times been like ascending the side of a chalkboard landscape with two handfuls of nails. Cindy and I have laid claim to high risk this past half year; a small part of the fair purchase price for promise. Climbing that mountain, today we arrived at an aperture in the side; an asylum from the altitude where the air was crisp and even the colors of our simple stew seemed to stand bold against the white of unfiltered sky.

The day itself was odd, with rolling waves of thunder punctuating the wind from midday sun to nighttime moon. Threatening rain, the sky hung pregnant but never delivered moisture or menace. Behind the ugly gray, our interior was cerulean. Taxes were paid, and thanks to our accountant Cindy and I sent every cent due, but not a nickle more. The in-box at Ghostwriter Dad wore a grin for most of the day as pleasant, appreciative people paid and praised my delivered work. The Collective Inkwell launch has been a long time coming and outstanding once here, and I love the contest David Wright and I cooked up together. It promises to be fun for the two of us and our readers alike.

Life is a constant climb, the amount of steps we choose to ascend is up to us as individuals. I want to spend my years in motion, covering as much distance as I can before before my mind will finally move me no further. Some of those steps will be difficult and I’ll feel the weight of iron chains shackling every forward inch. Other steps will see me gliding forward with the ease of a man waltzing across lunar soil.

It is impossible to fully appreciate one without sinking deep into the other. I am grateful for every struggle, for it is only the scuffles, mental or otherwise, that train me to think smarter or faster or at least more in tune with the best way forward. It is only the difficulties that allow my children to see me earning answers to the same lessons I must never forget to teach them.

I’m a writer and so appreciate the trials.  Today, surrounded by my family and momentum,  I felt indebted.

Writer Dad

The contest I mentioned earlier is awesome. Dave and I are giving away the premium WordPress theme Thesis, along with a custom header (and that’s just for starters). If there’s a writer inside you (and that means everyone!) then head to the Inkwell, read the contest details, and drop your entry.

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Welcome to the Inkwell

April 13, 2009 By 20 Comments

ci-ad-box-125x125I may be a ghostwriter, but today I’m just a guy in an orange vest pointing you in a different direction.

My long awaited custom copy and design studio co-owned with cartoonist and journalist David Wright is now live. It’s called Collective Inkwell, where we do ink…well.

Anyone who reads Blogger Dad already knows Dave writes with wit and wonderful heart, and for those who appreciate constant change, he also tweaks the look of his theme on a semi-weekly basis. This is a testament to both his constant search for perfection and unending need to coax the creative inside him.

Jump on over and subscribe. If you are a blogger, writer, or creator of anything, you will love it. Though we have built it to service the needs of a client base who desire crystal clear copy and squeaky clean themes, we have designed it to inspire the artist inside us all.

Please hop on over, say hello, and grab the feed.

Writer Dad

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The Best Posts I Ever Wrote!

April 10, 2009 By 15 Comments

best posts everIn many ways, it was this site that taught me to write. Now I’m a writer by trade and believe it safe to say I certainly wouldn’t be a ghostwriter carving a living by writing great copy without my experiences here. Though I had already been writing for a bit before starting Writer Dad, it was only here, late at night lying next to Cindy with the notebook in my lap that I learned to bring the best of my immediate self to the surface.

I could never hope to compile a definitive list of favorite posts as many of them were truly significant to their moment in time.

About two weeks back I went through the archives in an effort to simplify my rather scattered categories. As I was browsing through the backlog, these were the titles that most caused me to make a break in my rhythm.

I love each and every one of these. If you are a newer reader, you may have missed one, many, or most. Please take the time, if not now then perhaps later, to pick one from the pile and place your eyes upon it.

Let me know what you think by comment or email any time. I’d love to know. If you do have an old favorite and it is on this list, please Tweet or Stumble.

Thank you much, I appreciate it. Please enjoy!

Mia’s uniform, the one that dropped just below her knees before vacation, now grazes the skin just above them.  It’s less than half an inch, apparently the precise measurement needed to moisten my eyes…

Bunny!

We cannot stop life from happening.  It goes on every day, with or without us.  It follows us everywhere, surrounding us everywhere we go, no different from the air we breathe…

Finding My Friday

Billy slid his finger across the glass, then pulled manual control from the on board computer. He dragged his thumb in a neat line across the bar of green dashes until the glass was a straight line of crimson, each dash darkening beneath his drifting thumb. A few nearly silent words fell from the side of Billy’s mouth, and the Skyler soared into a full throttle; launching upward in a single straight shot, fifteen seconds into the sky. It teetered for a single second, with barely a mislaid milisecond of momentum, then hovered into a perfect horizontal…

RedBook: An Excerpt

Each of us is the sum of an infinity of thinly sliced seconds, where each one matters, at least to some degree.  How could we ever hope to pinpoint that decisive second when things forever changed; the instant the axis of our world shifted and began to orbit in a different direction?

Sliding Doors

If I can carve out a living for myself, and my loved ones, by letting my fingers dance across these keys, then I’ll bow down and count myself as one of the lucky ones.  But I can’t stand the idea of pouring over piles of syllables, belaboring every single page and paragraph of a novel that might take another year, and designing rhymes that no one will ever enunciate, when there’s a stack of bills that need to be paid (and quickly).

No, no, no! I Said I Didn’t Want to be a Chooch!

I believe in my neighborhood (always have), but the mothers and fathers of today should be paying more attention to the mothers and fathers of tomorrow…

STOP!

They were both wise, to indeed understand:
all life is exciting, though all life can’t be planned.
It can be prepared for, and so that’s what they’d do.
I know this story’s fantastic, but I swear it’s all true…

The 8th Wonder of the World

Mia was a million miles over the moon; maybe more.  Max just stared past us, toward the passerby on the sidewalk, as if they might be able to tell him whether or not he would see his friends the following summer…

Pancake Wednesday

The derelict nurse enters fifteen minutes later, wielding a needle while expounding, “Sorry guys, this is my first day.”  He then approaches Max with the self assurance of a tourist without a map in a country without vowels…

Thank You For My Shot

Empires fade from suicide.
They whither from within.
We can peer through history
to find ourselves a twin.

There are plenty parallels,
let’s take some time to see;
Roman gladiators
echoed on reality TV….

We the People

Sean Platt is a dad, creative blogger, and sometimes potty training expert. Subscribe (for free) by RSS or Email and enjoy Writer Dad two times per week!

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: , , ,

Language is Our Landscape

March 24, 2009 By 17 Comments

The original version of this post was written last October for Write to Done.

3355654120_e64957ece2Flowers feed the fire in our souls like little else, stirring several of our senses in a single swirling second. Language is the landscape, populating the white space of an otherwise empty page. Our ideas are the seeds we plant and our words are the blossoms in spring time.

I worked in a flower shop for a dozen years, back in the first few chapters of my adult autobiography. In those years, I arranged flowers one by one into the perfect bouquet; peeling petals, laying layers, and designing displays intended to halt the heartbeat of whoever happened to see them.

Now I’m a writer and so I do this with words.

I was young when I first nudged my heels into the shoes of head designer, eighteen as a matter of fact. Circumstance had set me there when everyone ahead of me fled in the middle of the night for some rather nefarious endeavors. I had no experience, but I was hungry, and had an innate belief in myself. Without training, I could only rotate my wrists according to instinct, slowly bringing every bloom into brighter focus. I ignored the rule book, following only intuition.

Within two years, wedding seasons were thriving.

Flower design is about color and texture, married in immaculate measure, not too different from writing great copy. Each of us sees the world through a different prism, the view prepared by our own million moments. Individual interpretation dictates design. Just as we all see color a little different, so do we hear the hues of language.

The way in which we string our syllables is our art to share, with no two thoughts the same. I am thankful I never sat for a class in flower design.  I would have spent countless hours in earnest study of all the things I should never ever do. Instead, I discovered there are no limits.

Again, I would argue that writing is no different.

Each of us has what it takes to be a better writer. It is already sleeping inside us, waiting for its salutation. For some, this means discarding the rules the gatekeepers have handed down and listening to the quiet whisper of our instinct. Only we know how we view the world, and it is us who best understand how to make our thoughts sing with all our soul.

I’ve been writing now for a year and a half, each day arranging my words with a better measure of color and precision.  Now I am a ghostwriter. Whether I am penning my next post or working on a novel, it is I who ties the bow around the bouquet.  Let’s close our eyes and forget what we think we know.

We do not think of the book of love when we whisper to our lover.

When we speak through our heart, as our fingers dance across the keyboard or glide across the page, then we can make every post as pretty as a bouquet, each word placed as perfect as a posy.

Writer Dad

Sean Platt is a Ghostwriter and creativity consultant who knows a thing or two about potty training help.

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Running Dialogue

February 16, 2009 By 40 Comments

gone fishingHappy belated Valentine’s to all.

This past Saturday I finished a three day shift at my family’s flower shop. It was my final stint and only a few minutes until midnight for my dad and sister. We opened in 1980. The doors will be closing in March.

The store is the childhood I ran through. The shopping center is where I played guns at eight and then stole kisses at twice that; the grounds where my sister and I would sometimes frolic and sometimes fight. “The big giant grassy mountain” (barely to my knee, but once a place to hide when not being sought) is still there, though the bookstore where I read everything from Dr. Suess to Stephen King has already been gone a while.

The store is also my story – much of it anyway. It’s where I learned to be a grown-up, met my wife, and drew curtains on the first major act of my life.

It was necessary that I work the holiday; important to say good-bye, but three days away from the web I haven’t done since back in December, well before I was a ghostwriter. Three days gone has accumulated and I need to catch my breath. I am building things that need the eye of a carpenter rather than the conveyor belt of an assembly line.

There are a couple of things I’m excited to discuss, but not eager enough to rush. I want to write, but require time to reflect. I don’t want to publish just to publish on Writer Dad, so until I catch up a bit, I need to recede.

I’m imagining this will take the rest of the week, but I’m not sure and it might bleed into the next. I do have a guest post scheduled and may pop in here and there, but until everything due is everything done, I’m hanging a Gone Fishing sign on the door.

I know Friar’s probably rolling his eyes at a blogger announcing his absence. Believe me dude, I’m with you, but I promise it relates.

Until I return to regular posting, I would like to keep a running dialogue in the comments. If you have anything to ask or add, please drop a comment and I’ll be checking in regularly.

If I am collaborating with you in any capacity, please don’t be shy. Same goes if you have anything you’d like to say specifically off comments. My inbox is still totally open, but every email takes at least a couple of minutes. For now, if you have a question you think others might like to know the answer to as well, please consider using the comments, at least until I catch up.

Thanks for everything, and I will see you soon.

Writer Dad

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: , , , ,

Hi, My Name is Sean Platt. I’m a Ghostwriter

February 10, 2009 By 42 Comments

ghostwriterI‘ve put on my apron and swept the floor a hundred times. The walls are  now spotless and the windows wiped clean enough to kill a flock of birds. I’m ready to roll out the red carpet and open for business.

For the last six months Writer Dad has been kind of like my secret identity. It started out as an actual secret, then turned into something spread online, but otherwise mute. We are still living in a world where blog is a four letter word and “You plan to do what?” a regular question.

I’m a writer, and now it’s about time for my secret identity to get a secret identity of its own.

Writer Dad is now a mild mannered blogger by day and a super powered ghostwriter by night. Okay, I actually do both during daylight. By the time my children are sleeping I crave an LCD of a much larger size.

I’ve been working on Ghost Writer Dad for a while. It would possess a fraction of its cool if wasn’t for Dave, who not only made the site look as rad as it does, but also gave me the idea for calling it Ghost Writer Dad in the first place. This is especially awesome because:

A) I’d spent a half millennium trying to come up with a good name. Turns out, writers are a clever bunch. I’ve never had a more difficult time finding a domain. After an email thread that spilled into triple digits and had me crying like a little girl who lost her lollipop (not really), Dave said, “Hmmm… Ghost Writer Dad dot com’s not taken. Why not try that?” A quick slap to the forehead and I was off to register.

B) I stole the name Writer Dad from Dave to begin with.

Ghost Writer Dad is my new baby; an awning under which I might fertilize my future. Please, if you need any copywriting services, or know someone who does (online or off) please consider me. I’m fast on the fly and easy to work with. I’ll discuss any project you can conjure, but these are my just getting started specialties:

  • SEO web copy: SEO optimized copy that will help you get to the top of Google.
  • Custom blog posts: I write engaging content on any subject, then optimize it for search engines. Posts can be booked individually or in a package.
  • Press Releases: If you have a product or service you are ready to reveal to the world, I can help lift the curtain with style.
  • Letter Writing: One of my favorite services. With a few vital pieces of information I can compose a letter to inspire weeping (the good kind).
  • Custom Speech Writing: Similar to writing a custom letter, I take a few notes then turn them into rousing oration.
  • Editing and Revision: Sometimes we just need a second set of eyes. I can be the peepers that will help your pages pop!
  • E-Book Design: Over the last few months, designing e-books has become a bit of a hobby. I would love to design yours.

If you need any writing done, please check out my ghostwriting service. If you know anyone who might need any copywriting, please forward the link. If anyone wants to hire Dave for awesome header or button work, you’ll smile every time you see your site.

Many thanks,

Writer Dad

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SEO Content? Maybe…

January 19, 2009 By 22 Comments

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

~Victor Frankl

Today’s Deja Vuesday travels back a few months to when I first discussed SEO content.   I’ve learned a lot since then, and my perspective has certainly shifted, marking this as a post definitely worth revisiting.

In the comments that day, I first met Susan Green, an excellent copywriter who has helped me on many occasions.  She first articulated the value of SEO content that day, and has continued to remind me of its value ever since.

Let’s wind back the clock and see what I once said about SEO content….

seo contentI don’t write SEO content or throw attention at keywords.  I hope I never feel the need to stray from such straightforward guidelines, at least not while writing for Writer Dad.

I can almost hear the collective gasp from the probloggers.

I’m not trying to argue, merely stating what works for me – writing SEO content isn’t it. Before starting a blog, I did my due diligence.

I read Darren’s book, and clearly understood the importance of SEO content and keywords.

During my first two weeks of posting, I stuck to those principles.  I would outline ideas, title included, draw the keywords I needed, and then scribble my thoughts around them.

It was backwards and I knew it.  I abandoned the practice of designing my drafts around SEO content by my third week.

Writing SEO content, I’ve no doubt, dulls the voice.  Now, when I pen a post, I sit at the keys with a vague idea of how I’d like to spit.  Words spill.   Only when finished, do I read the post to see what keywords I might gather.  I then decide on a title, an appropriate quote, and a picture to give all the black and white a little splash of color.

Like advertising, or pretty much anything else, I’ve no issue with SEO content.  I understand the mathematics, and am positive that the future will find me developing sites where writing for the deities of search engine optimization is entirely necessary.

When that day comes, I’ll design my words around SEO content accordingly.

The hallways of the internet blare with a billion echoes.  Like life, it takes courage to think different.  It’s hard to claim a niche when I consider myself an expert at nothing.  I don’t want to pen SEO content packed lists telling others how to live their lives when I’m still working full time on my own.

When I write,  I want someone to feel a silhouette of my thought.  Even with a full understanding that my words will be mostly forgotten within thirty-six hours of broadcast, I write them with everything I have.

My children will one day comb through my archives; I write for them, not the SEO content they will never be looking for.

If Writer Dad is my chance to touch our most local universe, then I wish to use my most genuine voice, rather than one designed to capture the attention of the Googlebots who crawl across my verbiage.

When you have language, you can skip rope.  Do I really want to skip with SEO?

Content comes first.

Writer Dad

Update: I’m now a ghostwriter who pens fantastic SEO content and blog posts for a living. Click here to hire a gifted ghostwriter.

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