An old friendship
(school years are like dog years)
You gave me a transfusion of music
Donating good taste across
A dozen tape cassettes
In a single first-year term.

I moved, we maintained.
Summers here and there,
Hanging out,
Books, short stories,
Musical remixes,
Endless talk about girls.
The typical teenage stuff.

I thought
We'd share our stories
Forever.

A sudden silence.
A sudden distance.
No explanation.
Decades of mystery,
A sense that I betrayed...
Something.

Still rejected, even today.
Attempts to reconnect
Rebuffed.

I'll never know
(unless I ask)
I'll never ask.

The reason it's so ironic (indeed, most ironic) is because I've decided to write about how hard it is for me to focus on my writing projects.

Literally anything can distract me from sitting down and getting some much-overdue writing done. My various projects, including The Nearside Project RPG, are way way behind. Sure, I've published TNP before (a couple of times) but this is a rewrite, expansion and improvement. Or it's intended to be.

Instead, I'm writing a blog entry about not being able to write. 

It's more than just being easily distracted. It's a kind of super-procrastination. I could be writing about paleovirology, something I'm using as a "world killer" for The Nearside Project (one of the various parallel Earth's is going to suffer this tasty consequence). Instead I'm writing here, in a blog. 

It's clearly nothing to do with not being able to write. These words are flowing like water. Water with bad grammar, maybe. Water, nonetheless.

I even find myself making excuses. "I need a Macbook," I think to myself, "in order to really get comfortable with writing." It's clearly a self-delusion. I have my Hackintosh, which is really a tiny Macbook that is completely as good as a Macbook, with the additional benefit of being tiny and portable, allowing me to avoid writing almost anywhere.

There are clearly many subconscious reasons for all of this. Perhaps I'll spend an hour or some contemplating what those reasons may be.

Then I'll be able to write. About things I need to write about. 

You can see my problem.

I would like to hear from anyone reading this blog. I would like to know what you do to get past this kind of thing. I'll be very happy to spend several hours reading responses. 

Five years old,
Wide-eyed in the city.
Wrapped up against the drab grey cold,
My mother's hand pulls me through
The dreary sullen streets.
Boarded-up shop windows
Await new glass.
Metal gates block the streets
From everything but the buses.

Getting into the city center
Means walking a gauntlet
Of English accents, uniforms, guns.
I'm patted down, like my mum.
The man tousles my hair with genuine affection.
He might be dead a week from now.

Grey things growl past,
Followed by armoured things.
Metal, wire and glass
I watch, impressed,
Missing the point.

A pause as we enter the shop.
Waiting for another uniformed man
To search my mother's handbag.
A line of other mothers waiting.
For more of the same.

A sense of urgency,
A surgical strike
No messing around.
In and out, get what's needed
And go home.
Just in case.

A childhood less ordinary,
But better than most.
They kept me safe,
Kept the distant thunder
Distant.

You may be familiar with the word "cadence" - at least, I'm sure you've heard of it in some context or another. Basically it comes down to meaning "rhythm" or "tone" when you come across it often enough.

I'm quite interested in email marketing. I've been involved in such things for a number of years now, from designing them (and providing copy) to developing email strategy for entire brands.

Recently, the term "cadence" came up in a discussion, and I was both amused and impressed. Initially, it sounds like just another marketing buzzword, but upon deeper consideration, it's actually a fairly descriptive term for some aspects of email marketing. It makes you think of rythmn and tone again, something that's very important when using email to communicate with customers.

In my opinion, cadence in this context can be broken down into the following considerations: what you say, when you say it, how you say it and who you say it to.

Depending upon who you're talking to, pulling out the most important part of (my definition of) cadence is either simple or hard. For those of us concerned with CAN SPAM, "when you say it" and "how you say it" are equally critical. "When" is also "How often" as well as trying to find the most effective timing to send the right message to the right person. Also important, from a technical point of view, is "how you say it" as this can make the difference between an email that's blocked by the email service provider and one that actually gets opened by a real person. That's where good copywriting comes into play, along with good coding. Ineffective writing and code can make an email score poorly in SPAM rating systems.

Almost equally important to "When" is "When not." With a complicated array of triggered and scheduled emails, a consumer could behave in such a way as to activate a number of automatic emails, possibly resulting in several arriving over a few hours. In the case of transactional emails, this is to be expected, but in the case of marketing pieces, it's important to set limits around the maximum number of emails a consumer can receive in the space of a day... or week.

The great thing about email strategy is that you can constantly test all of these things. No two emails ever need to be the same, and if you're clever (and have the right technology platform) you can test multiple emails across your customer base simultaneously. Even something as simple as changing a subject line can make a difference, the results of which can almost be viewed in real time.

I've had the good fortune to work with real geniuses in the email field, and don't claim to be in their league at all. But I'm learning.