For a while I ran a bed and breakfast in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. We were in the hills above the main town, and we rarely got any drive-by traffic, even in summer season when people drove through town instead of booking a ski vacation in advance.

As general manager, I made it my rule that every single phone call would be answered by a live person. The previous manager had taken breaks and put the phone to the answering machine. I kept the phone strapped to my hip from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. and my (now ex-) husband would carry it until 10.

It’s not really about customer service. It’s about the idea that your potential customer is probably sitting there with a list of three or four people or places he could contact that would meet his needs. If you don’t answer, he’s not likely to leave a message and wait for you to call back. He is in the mood to solve this issue he has, and if you aren’t there to help, others are.

I’ve set up my home phone to ring four times then to flip to my cell, which is forever attached to my side. With this setup, I’ll rarely miss a call.

I’m working on an email nurture campaign for a new client, and one of the first things we have to do is come up with a great name for the campaign. I’m frequently finding myself these days brainstorming on clever names for things. I want to create smart names that are memorable, that convey the idea of the product in a millisecond. I want to reflect a tone, a brand, a philosophy, an attitude, and I have to resist being too clever or too cutesy.

It’s tough. This morning for inspiration I browsed sites related to the client’s products, looking for fun key words that could inspire a title. I also looked at the titles of best-selling business books for inspiration… some of those titles, like "The One-Minute Manager," have become catch phrases that may inspire memorable knockoffs.

Here’s a short list of some of the places I get inspiration:

1. Key words from the client’s site itself.
2. Words on a site in the client’s industry — such as a professional association for the industry.
3. Titles of similar products from a competitors site — not so much to copy but to avoid copying.
4. Buzz words from books, movies and other popular culture media.
5. I’ve tried the Virtual Thesaurus several times — even subscribed for a while. But I could never make it work for me. It’s fun to play with, though.

This morning I awoke to the acrid, smoky smell of the unwashed flannel shirt you wore to last weekend’s camping trip. Outside the smell of smoke was much worse, and I walked quickly to and from the coffee shop to get back into the house. Today is the first day the smell and smoke have been so overwhelming in my neighborhood, which is very close to downtown San Diego.

The fires are north and south of the city, but they are everywhere. I heard rumblings of the fires over the weekend, but I didn’t realize the seriousness of the problem until I reported to teach a class Monday morning. “Is the class canceled?” the first woman asked as soon as she got off the elevator. The workshop coordinator hadn’t arrived, and students were arriving quickly, literally buzzing about the closed highways, the views of the fires from the road, the thickness of the air up north, the threats to their families and homes. When the other instructor arrived to teach his class, he had all of his belongings with him. He had been asked to evacuate, along with about 500,000 other San Diego locals by today (Wednesday).

Monday night I went door to door to collect blankets, bottled drinks, sunscreen and more for evacuees who ended up in Qualcomm Stadium, where the San Diego Chargers play. I dropped everything off Tuesday morning, and the scene was quite calm. I walked around for a while in the hallways where people slept. Everywhere you looked, people were watching televisions, listening to radios, glued to all media for news of their homes.

I took these pictures of the stadium with my cell phone. They’re not so good, but you get the idea of the piles of donations, mountains of information, daily life and relative calm.

Servers at breakfast

Piles of newspapers for Qualcomm residents

Sleeping in the corridors

Breakfast at Qualcomm

Diaper donations

Sunrise over the Qualcomm parking lot. The glow is the sun, but you can see the black smoke to the right of the sun over the mountains.

I’m fine, and where I am is fine. But I don’t know anyone who is not affected by this natural disaster. Both of my former bosses had to evacuate with their
families, and one of them had a close friend whose house burned to the ground. When I went door to door, many people said they had evacuees staying with them, or they were fostering pets, or they were going down to volunteer the next day. I think I heard 1500 homes had been destroyed so far. Some parts of the fire are better, and some are not. All the schools in the area are closed for the week. All the courts are closed. We’re supposed to stay off the highways and off our cell phones as much as possible.Sorry I’ve been so quiet this week. I didn’t mean to leave the blog on Sunday with such a downer post, and I had planned to write a list of the things that had been going right here at Avenue Z as a follow up. (Lots of things are going right, by the way.) But the fires have stolen my attention, and it’s hard to concentrate. Today I’m back on track.

By the way, every single volunteer agency here has a waiting list. The Red Cross says the best thing anyone can do now is to DONATE MONEY. Thousands have lost their homes and businesses, and, once the fires are out (which they aren’t), the real work will begin.

CLICK HERE TO HELP!

Man but it’s been a rough week. As I work through the afternoon on this gloriously beautiful Sunday in San Diego, I feel lonely and depressed by the isolation that is intrinsic to writing for a living. I’ve been sitting here in a very quiet apartment for hours, days, a week at a time, trying hard not to dwell on recent personal upheavals and the ever-present worries about whether I can pay the rent. Even if I get out like I have been making the effort to do lately — coffee with friends, a bottle of wine with a neighbor — I still face 12, 14, 20 hours a day in the thick, smothering silence of this quiet apartment where those self-defeating thoughts fester and spread.

My family in Colorado keeps encouraging me to get a job or to move back to the Denver area so I’m not so isolated. And there have been some hours this week when I’m very, very tempted to put together a resume and pass it around.

What keeps me going, keeps me dedicated to pursuing my dream of writing for a living on my own terms, is that at a moment’s notice I have the ability to throw in the towel. Today, tomorrow. Next week. Next year. I can quit. I’m not trapped by the road I’ve taken. I have options at any time.

When I was in Peace Corps in Mali, West Africa, I adopted the same philosophy. The first few months in my little village were very rough… I didn’t know the language very well; it was unbearably hot every night and every day; I stayed sick almost all the time. My parents recognized that I was close to the end of my rope, and they purchased a ticket for me to return to the States for Christmas.

I had been away since February — almost a year — and the first thing I recognized was that nothing at all had changed. I had grown as a person, developed new language and coping skills, seen things no one I knew had seen before. But the US was exactly the same. I recognized right then that if I quit that Christmas or the next Christmas or if I served the full 27 months, I could slip back into my cultural mainstream with no problem, no ripple, no explanation needed.

So, despite the fact that owning my own business and making my own living and sitting alone in this apartment is really, really tough at times, I know this is making me stronger, smarter and ultimately more fulfilled. And I know that I can change things and slip back into a mainstream life the moment I decide I’m really, really done.

I’m just not done yet.

In light of the recent demise of my love life, I’ve decided that I will treat every day of the week as Tuesday. That means that this Saturday morning started off just like a Tuesday would: I splurged on coffee at my favorite coffee shop, then I returned here to my computer to get some work done. Tonight I’ll go to the gym and spend two hours working out, luxuriating in the whirlpool and sitting in the sauna.

Today’s tasks include getting my blog back in shape. After Wordpress decided I was an evil marketer and I moved to TypePad, I have been horribly neglectful of my blog duties. Today I’m creating my blogroll again and visiting my favorite blogs.

Let me introduce them here:

• BROOD — A clever, witty, sassy commentary on life
• David Castle Art — A Colorado artist who creates amazing abstracts with deep jewel tones
• HappyKatie — The inspiring woman who encouraged me to start this blog
• Idea Jump! — Another clever, witty female writer
• Ingrid in England — My brave auditor friend who moved to England for an amazing adventure
• lifehack.org — Smart tips on productivity
• Living the Gluten
  Free Life — Another Colorado blogger with a great sense of humor
• Seth Godin — The bestselling writer and marketing guru who visited this blog TWICE! No really.
• TSTC Publishing’s
  Book Business Blog — A great insider’s look at the publishing business
• Whisper — An insightful writer with beautiful photography and quirky pets
• Moonbeam McQueen — Hilarity and clever commentary from a fellow writer
• Life with Buck — It doesn’t get much funnier than this woman’s account of life with her husband (the famous Buck) and their dog, Stella

I know I’m forgetting some blogs that I enjoy. Please don’t be offended. I’ll remember soon — I have a lot more time on my hands these days.