Mind if I rant for a minute? That cool? Great – thanks. You’re a pal.

Just on the off chance any of you out there are running your own small businesses, or are considering doing it, and you need to assemble some professional quality marketing documents and don’t have the talent/skills/ability to do it yourself, and you’re considering outsourcing the job.. mind if I offer some advice?

One, don’t try to get it on the cheap. If you can’t afford it, wait until you can. In this business, cheap is very expensive: you’ll pay less, but you’ll get a lot less per dollar in terms of value. Expect to pay well for quality work.

Two, if you’re shopping around, let people know that. Don’t ask for a contract until you’re ready to sign one.

Three, if you are shopping around, don’t try to play them off each other in an effort to create some sort of bidding war for your business. It won’t work: that you’re even doing it at all already tells them that you’re going to be a bad client. Anyone worth their salt has enough good clients not to want any more bad ones.

Four, never, never, EVER ask them to do free work for you. Don’t go all “aw shucks”, calling it an “audition”, “sample” or “money back guarantee”. In the business, it’s called “on spec” work: doing work for free, on the hope that the client will deem it worthy of payment. And any professional will be insulted by the pitch. Even if you still end up working with them at that point, I promise you, you’ll pay the absolute most you possibly can for the final job.

Five, if you do end up hiring someone, don’t nickel and dime them. Many of us have an informal billing practice called “asshole tax”. Not overcharging, per se – but if a client starts getting to be trouble, we sure don’t cut them any slack on billing. Most good clients get time shaved off their invoices at some point, deals cut, offers extended. With bad clients, you go by-the-rules and they get billed for absolutely every minute. If you don’t want to get hammered with asshole tax, don’t start nickel and diming – you’ll spend a fortune trying to save a few bucks.

Finally, for the love of God, don’t get a freakin’ “.tv” domain name. Are we clear on that? Good. Get a .com like everyone else. I’ve yet to run into a .tv businessperson who didn’t turn out to be a fly-by-nighter, or a flat out con artist, or at the very least a penny ante client that wanted everything for nothing. Have some class: go .com.

A prospect yesterday did all of the above. I’m still fuming.

You know what should have set me off right away? When he sketched out the Grand Master Plan For World Domination. Why is it always the budget misers that try to sell you on how they’re going to be next year’s global industry powerhouse? It’s like, dude, you’re giving me crap over a three hundred dollar job. You’re soliciting free work from my competitors, then coming attempting to use its low quality to leverage me into giving you free work myself. You’ve had me revise the damned contract three times and you still can’t make a decision – over $300! Somehow I suspect becoming tomorrow’s Richard Branson isn’t exactly in your near term future. Legit businesses don’t peddle the magic beans.

Okay, I’m done. I just needed to get that off my chest. Thanks for listening.

Every morning, it takes up to two or three hours for me to get my head into game. I need at least one cup of coffee. Maybe watch a movie, or the season premiere of Lost that we taped but never had a chance to see. Fifteen or twenty minutes of Tomb Raider. Maybe, if I’m feeling particularly ambitious, write an R&K entry. Putzing and goofing and slouching and just generally making lazy.

Sooner or later it’s time to drag my ass to my desk, punch up today’s work schedule and figure out what has to be written today. I have a highly weird occupation – you never hear an accountant say that he can’t do math until he’s warmed up. Plumbers and bricklayers just go and do the job. But until I’m mentally in that creative space and clear of mind, I can’t get a damned bit of work done: I stare at the blank screen, can’t come up with an idea to save my life, and then put on a movie. Or go goof off on Facebook. And then another hour is lost.

The only way to break that is just to sit and start writing. Random crap, if necessary – one trick that’s worked for me over the years is to write a first draft in obscenity-laden 70’s jive, and then going back and cleaning it up. Another is to use an Ipsum generator to produce a set number of filler words, and then go back and springboard English-sounding sentences from the Latin words. Whatever it takes. Ultimately what’s important isn’t that first draft; the first draft is nothing, nonsense, mental static, warming up. It’s supposed to be crap. What matters is getting past the first draft and moving on to the editing process, because that’s where the real mental jazz kicks in – reflecting, thinking about thoughts, abstracting about abstractions, playing around and surprising yourself and finally getting the damned thing done.

But first you have to find the will to sit and be meaningless. Empty; lazy; scrambled; messy; open; silent. In Taoist philosophy, the state is called wu wei, loosely translated as “doing nothing” but more aptly meaning, “natural action”. You have to get back to the first nothing before getting on to the next act, if you get my meaning.

Like I said, it’s a weird job. And you’d think that it would get easier with time. But I can tell you that after almost ten years of getting up every day and facing that blank screen and trying to get the creative juices flowing, the thousandth time is just as hard as the first. But maybe it’s supposed to be that way; otherwise, it wouldn’t be doing nothing. And I’d just be hacking out the same derivative crap, day after day.

I have a GPS brochure to write today, as well as an instruction manual for a flat screen TV hydraulic lift system. I haven’t even started on the GPS; the manual is partly written but needs a lot of work. Still hacking up copper snot from my lungs, blowing yellow mucus into Kleenex, and not yet fully awake. Watching Raiders of the Lost Ark and writing a somewhat pretentious R&K entry rather than just sitting down and laying brick.

Warming up. Gonna be a long day.