I was talking the other day with some friends on the HubSpot UX team about how much we try to find new ways to listen to our users and then act on what we hear, and it got me thinking about how many more of our senses we rely on in our pursuit of good UX design at HubSpot.
It’s one of my favorite complaints to say that the village I grew up in on Cape Cod was utterly bereft of kids of my age. And it’s true, more or less. For most of my youth, there were maybe two or three kids who lived within a mile or so of my house who were roughly my age. Of course we all understand that the degree of forgiveness for what counts as “my age” when you’re young is very, very small. You’d have to be no more than one or two grades above or below me to qualify. Hey, I don’t make the rules.
I'll be speaking at INBOUND about how to refine your content strategy and strengthen your brand voice, based on what I learned in my glamorous past life as a romance novel editor. True story.
Just the other day I was lamenting with a friend -- on his podcast, no less -- that the personal blog has all but disappeared. That there's just not so much slow, rambling storytelling online, at least not in that old bloggy way. I actually miss reading your long, aimless posts about how you felt when you woke up today. Or about what you had for lunch yesterday. Or about that thing you almost said to that boy when you were twelve, and how the thought of that day has haunted you ever since.
From the latest edition of the Mount Holyoke College alumnae magazine, where I chatted a bit about how to establish a daily writing habit.
It’s been said that writing is easy; you just sit down at your typewriter and bleed. Sounds pretty untidy, fairly painful, and frankly more than a little unsanitary to me. But writing—whether you’re working on a novel or polishing an email to your boss—is an increasingly important skill in today’s hyperconnected world. We all need to write and write well.
A reader emailed me the other day, asking me if I'm still running or not. He'd just seen my talk from last summer's Inbound conference (the somewhat misleadingly titled How to be a Writing God), and I realized that now might be as good a time as any to give y'all an update on all of that. You know, one year later and whatnot.