Strangely enough, the move comes almost four years to the day since I quit my sales job in a tearful phone call to my boss. “I can’t do this anymore!” I wailed. And when I got off the phone, I said, “Uh oh. Now what?” I was daunted by the idea of looking for a real job (even before the economy tanked), so I decided the easiest thing to do would be to start my own writing business.

It was very, very tough to make the phone calls to those clients, many of whom I’ve had almost since the beginning. It took me several months to finish all the work in progress, and when I pushed the send button on Sunday, there were a couple of tears.

So, here I am again starting completely from scratch on a new career I know very little about. That’s not exactly true because I’ve been booking speaking gigs for about three years, plus the first book is in the bag (and on the shelf — check it out!). But I have to create new marketing techniques, new online strategies, new connections — really a whole new identity.

So before I begin a new chapter, I thought I’d share a pictorial look back at the last four years of Avenue Z:

Now… on to the future as Your Nerdy Best Friend!

Butterflies in the stomach. My publisher is sending out what they call the Mondo Press Kits with advance review copies of my book, cupcake magnets and marketing material to about 60 people today, including THE Seth Godin, who not only has stopped by this blog a couple of times but who also contributed to the book and is generally an awesome, authentic guy.

It’s amazing that bestselling authors like Seth Godin, Chris Brogan and Dan Pink plus 57 more people will soon hold my work in their hands, and more amazing that they even agreed to review it.

But it’s that word that’s killing me: review. They are going to judge the book by its cover, its contents, its layout — everything. They’re going to catch typos (we spelled “charitable” wrong on Seth Godin’s page, and he caught it in the screenshot. Horrors!), examine my headshot (why is she with a piggy bank and a cupcake?), question my choice of tools…. whatever. Or they may flip through in a second, find it uninteresting and ignore it.

For whatever reason, I chose two professions with major exposure… author and speaker. An author prints thousands of copies of his heart and soul and spreads it around the world, completely open to criticism and perhaps praise. And a speaker puts herself on display in front of dozens or hundreds or thousands, has the job of entertaining people for an hour or so, then frequently gets immediate feedback in the form of evaluations about how she did. In both cases, there’s no shrinking away from how people feel about you. You’re putting yourself out there for them to tell you.

When I worked at McDonald’s in high school, the only person who really criticized your work was your manager during a quarterly review. I remember one time they said I was really good with the French fry machine but my uniform was too dingy so I wouldn’t get the full 15-cent raise I was due. I went home crying, and I started drycleaning my polyester uniform once every two weeks to keep it more spiffy. I ended up winning an award for my French fry prowess, but I still worried about the uniform.

After a presentation when I get my evaluations, I frequently read comments like, “Bring Beth back!” and “Most practical session I’ve been to in years!” But there’s always someone who writes something like, “Nice chick, but she talks about her ex-boyfriends too much” or “Session wasn’t what I expected.” And instead of focusing on the good stuff, I read and re-read the bad — obsess over them, even.

So now the books are out of my hands, and I’m inviting true scrutiny. There’s a chance that I won’t get unending praise from all 60 people. But perhaps a few people may really like the book, and a couple of people won’t. I have to remember to look at the big picture and not get hung up on a couple of bad reviews. And I also have to remember that Seth and Brian and Dan and the other 57 people are not judging me… they’re judging a book. And I am much more than this one book.

I couldn’t for the life of me remember what I had been stressed about the last time I sat in her chair, in part because I’m worried about a whole host of other upcoming Things this month. There’s the book launch, the logo change, the potential speaking gigs I need to nail down.

Oh, and then there’s this little change I’ve made lately — I’m officially shutting down my copywriting biz and formally making the switch to being an author/speaker. Oh yeah. This is a Big Thing.*

When my stylist asked me about the Big Thing, I had two revelations:

1. Whatever I had been stressed about had come and gone, and the sun was still rising in the mornings and setting in the evenings. If you’re like me, you tend to see a Big Thing as almost insurmountable. It will come and consume you, and when it looms, it’s giant and all encompassing and it’s all you think about. But when it passes, it is over, and you forget about it.
2. My business life is a roller coaster with one Big Thing after another. This is an exhausting way to live. I get bunched up about the enormity of upcoming events and tasks without stopping to breathe, without stopping to plan. What if I planned ahead a little more to see those Big Things coming then recognized the tasks that would make those Big Things less big? I’d probably sleep better, stress less and be more pleasant to be around.

People tend to think other people think like they do and process information in the same way. So, in my opinion, all you guys are living on the same roller coasters with Big Thing obsessions and post-event forgetfulness. But I bet that’s not true. How do you handle the changes in your professional life? Do you live from peak to peak or coast along on a straight road, understanding that the Big Things you pass will come and go? What wisdom can you pass along to those of us who are getting a little dizzy from the ups and downs?

*More on the new career: I have been wanting to launch the author/speaker stuff for a while, but making a living as a copywriter was eating up my work energy. So I took the leap by taking a part-time temporary job with The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, which forces me to wind down my copywriting and let it go. When the part-time job ends, the book should be in full swing, and the transition should be complete. Mixed feelings. Tough transitions. And a few tears and sleepless nights. But change is good. Here’s the new site for the new career: AskBethZ.com.

So I have all these little efficient things in place that are no longer efficient. This has produced a series of complicated little workarounds that are just downright annoying and time consuming. I’m using a wired keyboard and mouse, and I have to plug them into a USB hub that I use for a thousand things. So I’m forever unplugging one and replugging. And don’t get me started on the printer issues. Because we lost the wireless set up for one of our printers, I pretty much have to go to Kinkos to print something in color from the house.

I’d bet money that you have situations like this in your business…. little roadblocks that you’ve learned to work around instead of fixing. It would probably take half an hour to fix the Live Mesh thing, but instead I take an extra 5 minutes to wrangle files from computer to computer each time I need to sync something. If you add up the time I’m spending, it would be 30 minutes several times over.

Broken technology and little roadblocks are annoying, time-wasting and inefficient. So why don’t we feel like we can take the time to fix this stuff? When I go to print something, I sigh and get grumpy. I do my little workaround and promise myself I’ll fix the problem “soon.” Yet “soon” doesn’t come, and I keep cussing and dealing.

What’s on your business get-around-to-it list? I propose we all set aside Thursday, May 26, as Fix-It Day. Add a comment with a list of the little things you need to fix, and we’ll all commit to setting aside time May 26 (or before) to resolving those little irritations.

Who’s with me?

My friend Sam dropped me a quick note on Facebook this morning: “How did it go?”

I read the question via email without logging into Facebook. Immediately I assumed that the “it” she was referring to was my run last night, which, quite frankly, was pretty pathetic. Four miles total, but at least a mile of that was walking. Damn plantar fasciitis! It was so pathetic that I whined last night to D.J. that perhaps I wasn’t assistant coach material for my upcoming marathon season, where I’m supposed to help 40-60 people get to the finish line in a marathon or half marathon. Perhaps I should drop out because I was completely out of shape and plagued by nagging injuries. Oh, poor me.

But the ever level-headed D.J. kinda scoffed at my self pity. “Babe,” he said, “today you had a fabulous presentation where everybody loved you, and now you’re all down about your running instead of thinking about the great career win you had today. Come on!”

Deej had a great point. I completely rocked a speaking gig yesterday. In fact, the speaker who was scheduled after me delayed her presentation because she ran over to hand me her card and ask me if I could come to speak to her group. It was a win all around. And the run last night was not as bad as I was making it out to be either. I was out there, after all, making the effort to work through a rough patch. And I have several weeks before the coaching season begins — plenty of time to get back to regular running form.

Yet this morning my first thought with Sam’s email was about yesterday’s down moment, not my high. The two events yesterday were completely independent of one another, yet my focus was on the mediocre run.

I think learning how to focus on the positive takes conscious practice. I think I have to learn to recognize that I’m giving energy to the negative and forgetting the positive. And I’m going to put some effort toward that to see how much more positive each day can be.

Your turn… what do you dwell on when you have a good/bad day? When you receive feedback about something from ten people, and nine of them love it and one person hates it, do you spend your energy celebrating the nine or obsessing over the one?

PS… To write this blog post I logged into Facebook to get Sam’s actual words. Turns out she was asking a mutual friend how her eyelash-dying appointment went. It wasn’t about me after all….

For the last two weeks, I’ve been trying to find a way to relate what’s been happening in my personal life to a lesson about running your own business, being a freelance writer, growing a career… all the topics I’ve tried to cover in this blog. After all, I’ve managed to relate hair color to self awareness, skinned knees to moving past your fears, purple socks to visualizing success, bad haircuts to customer service and pedicures to being a salesperson. So you’d think my BIG NEWS would somehow relate back to my business.

But I got nuthin’. Or at least right now I can’t think of anything because the only thing on my mind is the BIG NEWS itself.*

So here we go… The BIG NEWS: I’m getting married! After almost three years of dating (and a year and a half under one roof), D.J. popped the question. I’m wearing a beautiful, amazing diamond ring, and I’m picking out ribbon colors and trying to find the perfect shoes for our Thanksgiving week wedding. I’m gloriously happy, overwhelmingly busy and completely in love.

*The only possible business lesson is that when your boyfriend proposes, your work life may come to a screeching halt. Try to manage the situation by limiting your Google searches of “unique wedding favors” to two a day.

Drum roll, please! The OFFICIAL name of the upcoming book is:

Upgrade to Free

The Guide to the Best Free (and Low-Cost) Tools and Apps

The jacket design is next, and we have three finalists. It’s tough picking a cover. I know what I like, but I showed it to some peers last night, and they preferred the one I disliked the most. Just goes to show you that it’s no longer about me. This blog, my promotions and basically my business model thus far has been built on the things that I like, and now I need to think beyond myself.

It’s all a learning process.

More updates coming soon!

I don’t know if you heard, but I wrote a book. It’s going to be out in October, and my publisher plans a 1st run of 3,000 books.

To me, this is BIG. The publisher thinks he may be able to package the book with another in their library, which means I should sell 1,500 books right off the bat. So I’ve been worrying and thinking and overthinking about how to sell the other 1,500. Wow — finding 1,500 people who find value in what I wrote is BIG, right? Well, I guess I only need to find about 1,499 people, because my parents are obliged to buy a copy.

And then this weekend I spent 9 hours in a car on a trip back from Tahoe with the amazing Mark Rosenberger, a cancer survivor, speaker, author and all-around superstar. He’s written three books, and I was picking his brain for the best ideas to market my book and get more speaking gigs. I told him about the plans I had to find those 1,499 people. And he told me about the tens and tens and tens of thousands he had found to buy his books.

Wow. That’s BIG. That’s beyond BIG. That’s COLOSSAL! He told me how he personalized books for corporations. How he worked to get his book into the top 50 best sellers on Amazon, a move that earned him tens of thousands of sales in a week. He gave me idea after idea after idea of ways I could increase my sales and get my name out there.

And all the while, my little inner voice was chanting, “You could never do that — that’s far beyond your capabilities.”

Do you have this little voice, the one who immediately puts you in the “not worthy enough” category? Mark’s an amazing guy for sure, but why did I instantly decide he can do things that I can’t? Where does that self limitation come from, and how the hell can we squash it?

I bet each reader of Life on Avenue Z battles with self-imposed barriers — ones that don’t really have a basis in reality. We’ve established these false ceilings based on our self images, right? So can’t we change our opinions of ourselves and reach further, go farther and truly reach our dreams?

In May I crafted an Avenue Z success plan that included my steps to find those 1,499 people. But after talking to Mark and realizing how limiting my plans are, I think my July plans should be more about evaluating my views of success and blowing up the barriers that keep me from thinking BIG.

Who’s with me? Share your self-limiting thoughts below and write about how you plan to think BIG.

Friends, it wasn’t pretty. I began with a fairly regular schedule: 54 minutes of work every hour, I planned. My alarm would go off (an old-fashioned car horn courtesy of my iPhone), and I’d run around the condo (like a ninny, if you want to know the truth), stretching my legs, getting my blood flowing, keeping the brain cells firing. The first couple of days, I worked diligently until about 6, then I’d change into workout clothes, take an orderly stroll down to the gym, and workout for an hour while watching very bad television. It was working exactly the way I had planned.

But I kept measuring my progress with a frown. Why was I not making my daily goals of 6,000 words? What was taking so long? This part of the book was supposed to be just cleaning up the database that my assistant and I have been working on for weeks. It was supposed to go so smoothly. Before I left I even told D.J. that I thought I could finish early.

As the days wore on, I felt more and more stressed. And more. And more. I had banned D.J. from calling, but I would call him in tears. I’d switch from a breakthrough to a breakdown in an hour’s time. I started talking to myself, pacing. I ceased wearing proper undergarments, except for super fuzzy hot pink socks that I wore everywhere, even to the lobby. I ate lots of cake (cupcakes weren’t enough) and drank 64-ounce Diet Cokes that I could buy for $.89 from a convenience store a block away. And time kept passing, and it felt like the book just wasn’t going anywhere.

And then, all of a sudden, I saw the end. Before I left, I had organized the book into 10 chapters. As I wrote, I kept breaking out sections of chapters into smaller groups and rearranging things. It took me days to get through one of the monster chapters, and when so many untouched chapters loomed, it seemed like the task was impossible. But I discovered that when I opened up the new chapters, they either had finished pieces and parts, or they were much shorter than I imagined.

I ended up pushing and pushing and pushing through, and I ended up staying an extra 30 hours to finish the job.

And finish I did. And I put it in the mail a week before the deadline. And two weeks later, my publisher wrote with his official acceptance. He also added something like, “I have to admit I thought your timeline was a little ambitious, and I was very pleasantly surprised to discover how polished it is.” Now the book is pretty much in his hands, and we’re going to move to the copyeditor and the designers and the other people who do things with books.

I did it. I wrote a book. In two months. Boy does that feel good.

Believe it or not, I am ready. I am prepared. I am exactly where I want to be. This weekend, I synthesized four complicated databases into one, categorized (and subcategorized) more than 200 free and bargain online tools, created a mail merge template, sorted the tools by category, then merged the data into 9 chapters.

Now I need to calmly, coolly, methodically work through the tools in each chapter to produce the nuts and bolts of the book. As I write, I’m going to keep a running list of the tasks that need to be completed in the 2 weeks after I return from the trip, and my assistant and I are on track to click through them to turn the thing in before the deadline.

Holy crap. It’s working.

When I say “believe it or not,” I expect many of you may not believe it. My mother is amazed I didn’t just rush into this and get overwhelmed. I am pretty sure my father has a pool going at his work on whether or not I’ll pull this off. And I’m kind of flabbergasted that I’ve made a plan and am sticking to it.

I expect the next week to be a bitch. It’ll be boring, grinding, exhausting. There’s nothing inherently fun about pounding out page after page after page with a concrete deadline staring at you.

I’m probably not going to dress much. I’m going to sit in a dark condo with just the computer screen glowing. I’m going to keep weird hours, eat unappetizing food, panic that I’m not going to finish, take for granted that I will and waste some time. Oh, and there will be chocolate. You can bet on that. And as soon as I get there, I’ll use Layar, a free tool that people recommended, to map out the location of the nearest cupcakes.

The reason I’m escaping is so that I don’t have to be a girlfriend, a runner, a copywriter, a daughter, a friend or even a friendly human being for the week. I’m going to morph into a moody, intense writer with a sole purpose: finish. the. book.

Although I am dreading the grind somewhat, I’m so excited I can hardly wait for my adventure to begin. I’ve never done anything like this before, and I think it’s going to work. Everything else about my plan to write this book in three months has gone well, and I have no reason to doubt that I can pull this off. Ok, I actually have a THOUSAND doubts, but no real logic behind them!

Woohoo! Off I go….