Forgive me Internet, for I have sinned. It’s been over a year since my last blog post. Let me give you the nutshell version of where I’ve been up to…

I finished a great freelance contract with Avvo last May, and their website is now online and flourishing. Avvo helps consumers find the right lawyers by ranking lawyers based on experience, industry recognition, and disciplinary action, as well as user-generated feedback from previous clients. The Avvo team is amazing and I’m incredibly proud to have played a part in bringing their website to fruition. See it for yourself at www.avvo.com.

After Avvo, I went to work for Allyis as an Editorial Marketing Manager for the Online Services team at Microsoft. For those of you who haven’t been privy to my in-person gushes, Allyis is the most incredible company to work for — great people, great benefits, great corporate culture. I’ll be sharing some of my work I’ve done on this contract as I’m able (much of what I’m working on can’t be shared out publicly, sorry about that).

My current contract is done at the end of June, and I’m not sure where I’m heading next – which I suppose explains why I’m back here on my portfolio blog. I’m officially putting it out to the Internet and the Universe at large that I’m ready for my next professional editorial adventure, whatever that may be.

I am hopeful and excited about the search!

I’ve just accepted a short-term writing project with a downtown start-up company called Avvo. They are in stealth mode so I can’t talk too much about what they do… other than I saw a functional alpha,  and it looks *really* good. I’ll be working with their team to write all the text for the product, as well as help files, tooltips, and all those sorts of editorial goodies.

I’m excited.

While working at Jobster, I had the privilege of meeting loads of super talented and smart people with diverse interests and passions. One of those folks was Elinor Alexander. In addition to basically running the mothership of Jobster and raising two adorable girls, she has been working on a motivational program called EducateSuccess.

I worked with Elinor and her business partner, Dariel Brown, to write all the text for their website — and it just launched this weekend! I’m so proud of her, and was delighted to be a part of bringing their website to fruition.

Check it out here: www.educatesuccess.com

Jobster needed an intensive training, help, and community website for its recruiter user community. Inititally, the quick and dirty solution was the Jobster recruiter community blog. But our team had grander aspirations for a new portal that would appear within the Jobster website, where recruiters could log-in and find help files, training dates and registration, and other Jobster recruiters to communicate with online.

To that end, here is the specification for that portal, as well as the zillions of help topics that would populate it.
> Help functional spec
> Help topics

When Jobster faced the challenge of how to offer help, training, and community resources to the 2,000 recruiters who were using the product, the V1 solution was a Typepad blog. By using categories to mimic the navigation and enlisting the help of the Client Services team, I designed, wrote, and implemented the entire system and had it up-and-running for recruiters within a matter of weeks.

Since the Jobster-dot-bomb dropped, the site hasn’t been updated much — but you can see what we had going on by visiting:

http://jobster.blogs.com/community/

The V2 help system will be far more interesting. I speced and wrote the content for that before the layoffs, and will be posting some sample content from that shortly.

Phew, things have been so crazy busy for me in the past few weeks that I haven’t had a chance to update my portfolio blog much. I did, however, have a chance to submit another show preview for the Stranger. This week’s was for a great local bill at the Sunset, with Thee Emergency headlining. Go on, read it.

I’ve written a slew of previews for the Stranger over the past few years. Here’s a random sampling…

• Conrad Ford preview
• The Cops preview
• The Peels preview
• Panda & Angel preview
• XXX Audio preview
• Argo preview
• Mercurial Sound feature

When Three Imaginary Girls was asked to write for the debut issue of Seattle Sound, a music magazine focused on the local, independent music scene in Seattle, I wrote this piece, entitled “Three Seattle Music Picks from Three Imaginary Girls.”

When then Seattle Weekly Music Editor Michaelangelo Matos asked me to write an article for their CD-R-Go column, I didn’t hestitate. Did I want to pick my favorite songs of the moment and write an article about them? That’s like, my dream job.

The resulting article was called “A Crush on Us” and ran in spring 2005.

I believe a good editor enhances a writer, and doesn’t smother style. I pride myself on editing with a firm hand, but one that allows for the writer’s tone and voice to still shine through. Some may call it a glory-less job, but it’s one I enjoy with a passion. I live to clean up documents. Seriously.

Sometimes this means removing a few commas and typos, and other times it means an overhaul of content. I’ve attached a few “presto-chango!” edits for your reviewing pleasure…

Jobster December 2006 Newsletter: Before…. and after!

When you start your own music website and you’re ready to tell people about things you do, you find you’re suddenly a press release writing machine. I’ve written countless ones for Three Imaginary Girls in the past few years. Here are a few:

• Three Imaginary Girls Reveal Best Northwest Releases Of 2005 Readers’ Poll Results, Winners’ Live Music Showcase On Jan. 20
• 69 Love Songs Pre-Valentine’s Day Bash
• Very Merry Karaoke Bash
• Three Imaginary Girls to Host “Silly Love Songs” Karaoke Bash on Friday the 13th!