I could not come up with a single interesting word to say Sunday night or last night (Monday night I was very busy watching TV), but now all of a sudden there are about different five posts floating around in my head. Hopefully they won’t come out at once in some sort of mutated jumbled mess.
Writing has always been a part of my job, no matter what I was doing for my company. In my new role writing accounts for a large portion of my responsibilities. The timing couldn’t be better because it is so easy to write about stocks and the stock markets right now. Ha! Actually, I have plenty of my own opinions about the stock market, investing and the state of the national and global economy, but no one is paying me to write about that. Mostly, I’m responsible for taking the opinions of experts and parsing them in interesting and accessible ways so that people will want to buy our products. Generally people want to hear about how you are going to make them money, but in the current climate, no one actually seems to believe that is going to happen. Right now they want advice on protecting what money they have left, and encouraging words about when this is all going to get better. The problem being, of course, that even the experts don’t know exactly when that will happen.
I spend a lot of time staring at my computer these days, waiting for inspiration to strike. I write outlines and come up with themes, and then I look at Yahoo Finance and the market has completely changed direction. Even today, I knew the numbers weren’t great, but I didn’t see any horrific losses. Then I checked at 4 to see where the indices closed and just about fell out of my chair. Not that this massive drop was unexpected. Anyone who was all “oh, everything’s going to be fine now” after Monday’s rally is a moron and shouldn’t be allowed to trade stocks. Look at the fundamental problems with our economy. It’s going to take a while to sort this all out, and even then, there’s no guarantee that things will turn around and shoot back up.
Sorry, I digress. That was just a really long way of saying that I’ve been struggling to feel productive at work these days. I read, a lot, and when I get stuck I go play free mahjong online while the ideas swirl in the back of my head. Sometimes that helps jar an idea loose, but I’m not sure my boss would actually buy that as an explanation, so I try not to do it too much. I write stuff and discard it, and then I write more copy and rearrange it a bunch of times, and then I Frankenstein in bits of other people’s copy and hope for the best. I’m good at what I do, (really, I am!) so I know it will be fine in the end. Hopefully five different ideas for work copy will strike soon.
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