Hey y'all,
Yeehaw! Did Santa surprise my stocking this year!
For somebody who has not planned squat for a book tour, things sure keep falling into my lap, and all I have to say to La Fortuna is Grazie, Senora! Grazie, grazie, grazie!!!
But I get ahead of myself...
I'm in Colorado, the state of my college alma mater, to visit a college friend, and she threw her Christmas party right after I got here.
Since Kelly is immersed in the corporate world of computer software and telecommunications, she invited many folks she knew from work.
One of them, Anne, had an organization of sixty people, if you include all the contractors - which she didn't.
With a thick Scottish accent and a blunt, fiery attitude, Anne is known as an aggressive leader that scares the shit out of most people in her company.
"She's the devil," Kelly said.
Anne is often heard yelling at the top of her lungs in her office. However, unlike a lot of slave-driving bosses, her staff has the option of yelling back, which they often do.
But to reward them for all their hard work and being such good sports about tolerating and dishing out verbal abuse, she does something to surprise her team every quarter. And this quarter, she surprised them with me.
Gotta love those holiday parties, when everybody's half drunk and networking. She and her lover showed up "in drag," in that they were dressed up for the holidays. I told her what I was doing and she suggested I come and do a storytelling with her group.
"I haven't come up with anything fun for them to do this quarter," she slurred. "But you have to make it a team-building experience. How much do you charge?"
Given that I'd been doing this for free, plus book sales, I didn't really know how to answer that. I remembered Brett telling me that beginning storytellers charge $75 and told her that.
She pssshawed that.
"You need a manager, honey," she said. "I was thinking more like $500."
To tell a story? Why sure, I would love to.
Okay, I had to get a little flexible and make it a team-building experience. And I had to set my ego aside to do it.
I told Chapter four and gave six teams their own set of questions for them to construct a story around it. In other words, a bunch of computer techies had to switch to their right brain and get creative. It wasn't about figuring out what I wrote, they had to make it up.
They did pretty damn good, too. Some of the scenarios they came up with were outrageous.
Whoever thought that being a writer and travelling storyteller could translate into being a "motivational speaker" for a corporation?
If anybody from ODS should see Sarah Carter, Jean Richey, or (I can't believe I'm actually saying this!) Kevin Krein, thank them for me because I just got paid $500 to tell a story and give away 25 books.
And the exercises we did for the Small Group Communications class helped me think up my own.
$500 to tell a story? As far as karma is concerned, I know I deserve it, but still! I definitely wanna do that again!
Merry Christmas!
Montgomery
This excerpt is from my DIY booktour roadtrip journal I emailed to my friends during 2005-2006.
Since this was the holidays, this was at the end of 2005 and I’d been on the road for almost 6 months.
I’d spent a few months in the Alaskan Interior (I lived in Alaska at the time), went back to Juneau for a couple of weeks before heading down into the lower 48, where the book tour was a very different experience.
I was riding high at this time, having a very lucky stop in Ashland right before heading to Colorado. This was every bit as auspicious as the time in Ashland.
If you’d like to read about that experience, here are Parts 1 and 2 of the Fool’s Journey HERE and HERE.
I have such great memories of that time in my life. Especially because it was one of the most challenging and difficult things I’ve ever done.
