Jane Genova: Speechwriter - Ghostwriter

JD, with a side of porn - soft of course

Just about the only thing which takes brains that's selling today is creating and delivering soft porn.   This is somewhat an overstatement of what Gawker's Hamilton Nolan sums up as the dismal state of making a living in journalism. Incidentally, Nolan and readers who respond note that it's gotten even more dismal since unhappy JDs stormed the field and found, no newsflash, no Eden. 

It was the mention of soft porn which set off the global storm of interest in "Christian Expressions LLC v janegenova.com." I had opined that there was now something about Communion Dresses which seemed to scream erotic. 

How I pushed back, on my three blogs as well as Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.com, when Christian Expressions rattled its legal saber has gotten me new business.  In addition, it has provided a whole new pitch formula to develop new business: Genova Writing, Coaching and More helps you, your clients push back - Low-cost, high-reach, self-replicating.  Face it, folks, coming off the era of affluence, most organizations and individuals don't know if they can and should push back and how. 

That's exactly where there's a niche for JDs, at least those with imagination and a new-economy mindset about earning a decent living [no pun intended.]  The soft porn business keeps mutating.  To stay on the right side of the law and to push back legally when cornered by The Concerned Citizens require JDs.  Some of the best and brightest, such as Ivy League students and alumni, have developed enterprises in soft porn.  You won't have an idiot for a client.

My novel sells most briskly when it's positioned not as a missionary statement anti-capitalism but as a candid exploration of weighty topics such as:

• Should rich men take the risk of requesting a sound spanking from a working-class female assistant.  No, I wasn't out-there enough to insert a male assistant into the narrative.

• Is there a correlation between childhood sexual abuse and later professional success.

• What is the symbolism of requiring four cannoli [3 vanilla, 1 chocolate] on a bad day.

When I was struggling to put together a 3rd career act in 2003, I answered a help-wanted involving soft porn.  I pitched my legal background.  Of course, I got an interview. 

The future of soft porn will be determined, as is everything else, by community standards.

Timing is everything & Kraft's may be bad

With 20 new products, my alma mater in consumer goods Kraft is betting the folks will continue to eat at home in 2010.  Bad bet, I say.

After this The Horror sort of year, there's plenty of pent-up demand to get out the house and have a waitress serve us flounder stuffed with crab at Red Lobster or pasta at Olive Garden.  It's an affordable pleasure and with a little hope in our pockets we'll take it.

In addition, the craze for 2010 is going to be dieting via fast-food restaurants.  That means eating out, only on the run and not with a waitress.  KFC got the ball rolling on that one with its under-400-calories combo plate.  Given the success of the Subway gimmick on this approach to weight loss, I anticipate obese Americans will make their way out to fast-food alley.

Me?  Personally I will use any excuse in 2010 not to eat at home.  I put in 2000 as the Year of Austerity.  Now I want to be a Woman About Town again.

Just as we thought: High expectations, high suicide rate

This is one for the plot line of "The Good Wife."  Alicia defends a client who performed emotional mercy killings on Korean Americans who were unable to off themselves.  The client is also a Korean American and did the job for no payment.  It was, well, an act of honor.  Financially strapped himself during the downturn, he couldn't economically bail out that family.  So, he did the next best thing.

In THE NEW YORK TIMES, Kirk Semple reports that suicides have been soaring among New York Koreans.  In 2009 they reached 15, up from 5 in 2007 and 6 in 2008.  The reason - what else -was financial.  They felt shame over losing their piece of the American Dream.

Semple confirms what we all thought: The higher the expectations, the higher the suicide rates.  Koreans are oriented toward outstanding achievement, be it getting admitted to the Ivy League college or making it better-than-average in their adopted country.

Perhaps the only way to stay alive in these volatile economic times is to surrender hope.  In my novel, I position hope as a dangerous substance which should be regulated.  Few can handle it, not at least right now.

"Desperate Housewives" - Lynette's babies and other plane-crash victims

This Sunday, the girls are back on Wisteria Lane.  After a brutal holiday hiatus, we find out the damage done as a result of the plane crash, right during the block Christmas party. 

Olson is probably dead.  We saw a hand peeking out of the window of the gingerbread cottage where he and Karl were settling their battle over Bree.  The tabloids had it that Olson was being written out of the script.

On the coming attractions, there was Lynette on the OB's table and there was a question about the babies. Father forgive me but I am bullish on the right to choose.  If there has been damage to the unborn twins, I opt for Lynette to have them aborted.  I have been campaigning for that since she got the bad news that she was carrying twins after already having four kids at home.  That pregnancy has put her family in financial ruin. 

The good news might be that Angie's tormentor is gonzo.  She wanted mucho dinero to keep her mouth shut about Angie's past and she was standing right in the path of the plane.

Who else got cut from the show?  We will find that out 9:00 P.M. this Sunday.

Design: Does it follow the money or make the money?

Some of the story of the Vodka bubble was the design piece.  The best in the field were called in for everything from the contours of the receptacle to the logo.  That was at a time where a bottle could retail for $100, sales grew at 40% annually, and investors wanted in, reports Amy Cortese at the DailyBeast.com.

Now, the category is flat.  That usually indicates the market is readying itself for another beverage which conveys membership in something special, elite taste, and the choice of cool.  The question is: Does the design element enter when the product is already on the way up or is a currently a necessary part of success?  In other words: Is design as key an element in the ethos of a product as designers and the media would like us to think?  Or, is design usually an after-thought to keep a product which caught on hot?

Now that losing weight via fast food is taking over as the new national craze, will the items of the menu be redesigned to symbolize the elevated status of the taco salad, hold the sour cream, or the 350-calorie KFC combo platter?  Another issue:  In this age of citizen everything, will consumers want to make their own designs for their favorites products, not just co-create them with the companies?  That would put professional designers and those iconic schools of design like Rhode Island's out of business.

Losing enemies, losing self

"Who is the enemy now?"  That's the lead question in Jesse Green's article about Larry Kramer.  It appears in the January 4 - 11, 2010 edition of NEW YORK Magazine.  

And that questions drops us down with a thump into the reality that we are defined by our enemies.  When those people, institutions, memories, or beliefs no longer dominate our lives, we can wind up without a self. 

Most blow it.  Aging, one-time counterculture leader Abby Hoffman ["Steal This Book"] settled that with suicide.  Chrysler turnaround artist Lee Iacocca tried an end run to take over the company that was doing just fine and without him.  Kramer doesn't seem to be doing any too hot.  The medical establishment saved his life with a liver transplant.  Gays aren't being clubbed like baby seals by the majority, at least not in America.  And the style of game-changing has, well, changed.

Some make a go at finding new enemies.  Among those are Jimmy Carter, Hillary Clinton, Patrick Kennedy, Steve Jobs, and Gawker's founder Nick Denton.

Perhaps when making important decisions in choosing a lover, a friend, an employee, and investor adviser, we should ask: So, who are your enemies now?  Who were they and aren't any more?  Those who can't come up with a detailed answer about the latter should be a throw-back.  

'Twas the nite after threats from Christian Expressions LLC, not a peep was coming ...

Last night, as the world knows, I received this email from Christian Expressions LLC Download Communiondress.  Today, as the world also knows, I hit a homerun. 

• I haven't heard a peep out of the bold email-writer.
• The posts associated with the incident received sustained global traffic and pick-up by media I hadn't previously broken into.
• I developed new business
• I put on the shelf whether to seek a legal remedy [see, I can wait now]
• I showed myself that human beings can change, only that it takes time, more than anyone will tell us at the deepest point of crisis.

Regarding the latter, in 2003 I was at my medical doctor's office at 8 A.M without an appointment.  Soon enough I was also, thanks to his direction, at a cognitive therapist's office, listening. She was Amy Karnilowicz [family.therapist@comcast.net, 860-216-5116] Download Geezerguts.  Flag down a cab to get to see her if you're in professional trouble.

For about 40 days, I couldn't read or write.  I could only listen to my heart pound as it adjusted to antidepressant Zoloft.  For the next 6+ years I tried on different mindsets and behaviors.  I didn't make as much money as I expected.  But, as Joseph Campbell used to say, on that journey in search of what we want we find what we need.  That was the courage to put together a 3rd act.  Those 2nd acts/comebacks are now old hat. 

This 3rd act, at age 64, is fun.  The 1st 2 were boring and well-paying.  

We Heteros really missed out, or so Larry Kramer claims in new book "The American People"

Sometimes it hurts to recognize how conventional one was/is and how much we missed out on.  Larry Kramer's epic book "The American People" will likely cause a world of pain.  It's a history of America told from a platform of gay accomplishments.

In the January 4-11 edition of NEW YORK Magazine, Jesse Green discusses that evolving tome and the equally mutating inner and outer Kramer.  Both focuses are neck-snappers, at least for us traditionals who might be edgy but have no access to queer nation.

For example, in "The American People," Kramer creates the perspective that, yeah, everyone was gay, only some gayer than others.  George Washington was romantically involved with Alexander Hamiltion, the love of his life.  But Washington also had a enduring erotic relationship with Lafayette.  Lewis loved Clark and wound up killing himself when the expedition was over and he could no longer be with Clark.  Abraham Lincoln had Joshua Speed.

Kramer's personal life has been equally shocking, at least as Green breaks it open.  So insecure and needy in his freshman year at Yale that he tried suicide, Kramer blossomed into an iconoclastic, courageous, and effective leader of the AIDS movement.  When the movement moved on, Kramer seems to have been left, well, writing a book.  Despite his track record for being bold and resourceful, he can't seem to put together a new persona or career path.

As an executive-communications strategist/ghostwriter I have witnessed the tragedy of leaders who went out of fashion or accomplished their mission.  Some organization usually provides them with a title, office space, and contract to author a book.  Of course, that busyness becomes a sort of Father McKenzie sermon that no one will read.

Green's article opens the door on a part of American hedonism that many of us have been trained to shun.  Even the most rebellious among us, including me at least in my literary work, believe in the gospel of hard work and socially acceptable matings.  If Kramer's take on history is accurate, that might put us in the duped minority.  The majority was having a gay ole time.

First Communion Dresses - How Christian Expressions LLC made some seemingly big fat public relations mistakes

Maybe it was because, to some, communion represents a sacred entity.  Therefore they feel insulated from threats, the way Bishop Tobin did in instructing U.S. Representative Patrick Kennedy not to partake of the Eucharist.  The reason was Kennedy's policy stands, particularly on abortion.

That might have been the reason why Christian Expressions LLC didn't seem at its best when it bumped up against a public relations challenge.  That threat in the environment was my post on this blog late afternoon yesterday about Communion Dresses. 

Like all my recent commentary and my just-published novel it was heavy with irony, which has become the most effective and lowest-cost weapon of the 21st-century.  Look at how not even white-bread Disney messed with Letterman during the comic's own sex crisis.  Meanwhile, the too earnest by far Tiger Woods, like the never-light Jesus Christ, got crucified.

Christian Expressions LLC sent this email Download Communiondress.  Here are just some of the seeming big fat public relations mistakes that were made by Christian Expressions.  Its owner is Janice Lennon who tells me in the email "Our company has worked very hard over the years ..."  Like, if the Great Recession taught us nothing else it was the lack of correlation, never mind cause and effect relationship, between effort and results.  I worked very hard over the years to present myself as The Professional Woman.  No favorable outcomes were generated by that.

* The initial communications should have been by phone, not an email which makes threats that " ... we will defend it with all legal options." 

First of all, there's a paper trail.  No one should ever leave a paper trail if it can be avoided. 

Secondly, that menacing tone causes both parties to harden in their positions.  A fundamental of Dale Carnegie Systems teachings is: Begin in a friendly manner.  Dale Carnegie guru Mike Francoeur taught me everything I needed to start navigating the new economy.

Had Ms.  Lennon rang me up, I would have listened, been oriented toward compromise.  Could this have been a possible error of judgment arising from seeming low emotional intelligence [EI].  Here is my complimentary ebook on how to boost EI, which has had over a million downloads Download CUsersjasneDocumentsjg.

Now,  I have a very bad taste in my mouth.  Now, I myself am thinking legal remedies, coming from my side.  There are myriad grounds on which Genova Writing, Coaching and More can file a complaint against Christian Expressions LLC.  First I would have to investigate if it's a deep enough pocket worth suing. 

* The dispute could have and should have been formatted as a conversation.  Way back in 2000, there appeared "The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual." In it, authors Doc Searls, David Weinberger, et al. tipped us off:

• "Markets are conversations"
• "Conversations among human beings sound human.  They are conducted in a human voice."
• "Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing.  At them."

* Christians called it "original sin."  Shakespeare called it "cankered in the grain."  That's the high-style way of reminding human beings that we are myopic.   

Before making any move, Ms. Lennon should have collected her team and reviewed the tone and content of the website http://myfirstcommunion.com.  As a web strategist I assess both many misguided messages and missed opportunities on the site.  Here is an article I published on DIGITAL MEDIA BUZZ about web strategy Download Articleonweb. 

Should legal action proceed and expert witnesses be called in, my hunch is that they will zero in on what the web seemed to signal, perhaps unintentionally.

There's plenty more that could be said on this.  But the best place for Christian Expressions LLC to start might be visiting and analyzing social media networks like Facebook and Linkedin.  It will see that we're all trying to pull together and figure out the new economy.

$645K - A real steal in Greenwich, CT

The joke is still Greenwich, Connecticut.  And THE NEW YORK TIMES, like most of the elite institutions, has missed it.  In the "Real Estate" section, the NYT has a two-page article on the great bargains to be had now in that tony town.  Property can be purchased for - what a steal - $645,000.

For those who get the joke, an under $15 read, and a fast one, is my novel "The Fat Guy From Greenwich."  It even has the scoop on Greenwich Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, how the help hates the employers, and the Catholic Mafia.