Hello Friends!

I am so happy to invite you to check out my new website!  S & B did a fantastic job of capturing my glow and they put together a beautiful, colourful, and perfect-for-me website.

Please do pop by and visit my new blog too.  I’ll be blogging about writing, my experiences as a new mom, and lots in between.

Hope to see you soon!

Erika.

Eric Passmore - Photographed by Brian Toller

For more than a year, Eric Passmore has balanced his art and his day job as he wrote, recorded, and produced his first solo record Pages of the Day.

By day, the former Gentleman’s Club member managed Nature’s Buzz, a New Edinburgh health food store. By night, he crafted songs with lyrics gleaned from experience and melodies that listeners can really latch onto.

With Pages of the Day being released this month, I met up with Eric at the New Edinburgh Pub. Over several glasses of wine, we talked about inspiration, the mysterious art of catching melodies, and his early experiences playing with The No Shirts and The Gentleman’s Club.

Visit the Apartment613 blog to read the rest of the profile and catch Eric’s CD release party on Saturday, February 19th at Irene’s Pub (885 Bank Street in Ottawa).

Baby Pants - The Kanoko Pants pattern by Yumiko Sakurai, knit in Mission Falls Wool in Natural (001) and Basil (532).

Happy New Year!

Three days into 2011 and I already have a good feeling about the year.  I hope you do too!

This year is especially exciting for us because we’ll be welcoming a new little baby into the family sometime near the end of the month.  I love to plan ahead but for once all I can do is wait and see because I have no idea what life with babe will be like.

Adding to the excitement is a one year maternity leave from my day job.  I am so fortunate to be able to take this time to get to know and care for Baby Cuccaro and also to get an opportunity to do some professional development and work on my creative side projects.

When Annabel Lyon read at the Fall 2009 Writers Festival, she talked about taking advantage of nap time and writing furiously while her children slept.  She’ll be my  motivation as I tackle my projects for 2011.

What’s on my roster?

• To finish my Writing for Publication certificate at Algonquin College
• To write every day for 20 – 60 minutes
• To record my Oma’s history, beginning with her childhood in rural Austria, World War II, and her journey to, and experiences in, Canada

What do you have planned for this brand new year?

Erika.

It’s been a while since I last wrote.  In fact, I missed nearly a whole season!  Thank you to those who have emailed to see what’s going on.  You inspired me to jump back on the blog pony and get things going again.

The good news is that the reasons that I have been absent from blogging are because I sank my teeth into a variety of absorbing projects and just didn’t have time to tell you all about it! 

What have you been working on?

Thanks for asking!  Here’s a taste of how I spent September – November 2010:

Teaching the Travel Bug_Sept10

The world is Germain Landry’s classroom.  The Canadian Academy of Travel and Tourism (CATT) coordinator and teacher at St. Mary’s Secondary School (SMSS) in Cobourg, Ontario milks every opportunity to expose his students to practical experiences, providing a lush educational landscape that his students will draw on no matter where life takes them.

Published in: Canadian Teacher Magazine

Flock – Clothing, crafts and more for birds of any feather

Christina Ballhorn and Bridget Remai opened Workshop Studio & Boutique on Dalhousie St. in 2005. Since then, it has expanded and became a pillar of the Lowertown shopping experience. However, five years is a long time. As Workshop evolved, Christina and Bridget experienced major milestones in their personal lives – marriage, children, extensive home renovations – and the duo wanted to tackle a new challenge. “We wanted to do something similar to Workshop but different too,” says Christina. “A new adventure in a new neighbourhood seemed like a great way to go.”

Published in: Apartment 613

And last but not least, my biggest job to date: the Canadian Toy Testing Council (CTTC)‘s Annual Toy Report!  I tackled this big job with my writing partners Allison and Chris.  We attended weekly Toy Evaluation meetings and split the ~450 toy reviews among the three of us.  The report was released last Friday and it’s pretty exciting to see how it all came together.

It was a crazy and challenging autumn.  As the days become shorter, I look forward to continuing my freelance adventures and to sharing them with you on my blog. 

Erika.

I just finished reading Heather O’Neill‘s Lullabies for Little Criminals.  At the end of the book, there was one of those sections with interviews with the writer and I came across the quote below and thought you would enjoy it:

“I started off writing this book some summers ago.  Working on a novel is kind of like putting together a robot without an instruction manual.  Each word is a nut or a screw and there are hundreds of thousands of them.  You put it together and tinker with it, hoping that it will come alive in the reader’s mind.  I read an interview with Hotel, a member of the punk band the Kills, where he said that when he was little, he fell in love with a pair of leather boots and his whole personality was inspired by them.  Every detail in a novel should have that sort of transformative power.“

~ Heather O’Neill on writing Lullabies for Little Criminals

Be Easy to Find. And Smile...Always, always smile.

In my day-job as an in-house writer/editor Downtown, I need to find graphic design firms so I could send a RFE to design the annual report that I’m writing.

Two of my friends run a graphic design firm that I’ve heard great things about but I couldn’t remember the name of their firm.

What did I do?

I googled their names.

What came up?

Dominic’s LinkedIn profile.  His profile linked to the xquisit communications website where I found his contact info.

Easy.

I could have gone another way.  xquisit communications has a Facebook page that lists their company overview, mission, and products.  The page is updated regularly with links, posts, and contests.

My five minute mission taught me an important lesson about marketing for small businesses:  Be easy to find.

Opportunity knocked because xquisit communications made it easy for me to track them down.

As small business owners, we don’t have big marketing budgets but social networking makes it possible to get the word out with a little elbow grease.  Let’s use the free resources around us to create buzz…not only for ourselves but for other entrepreneurs in our circles.

To find out who’s got the glow in my book, check out my Glow-Rated page.

~ Erika.

"Pinocchio witnessing the smell of the great white bath" - Photo by Andrew Wright

My latest guest post at Apartment613 is an interview with Ottawa artist, Theo Pelmus.  Check out the interview, then check out his show tonight at La Petite Mort Gallery (306 Cumberland St., Ottawa)

Once again, here’s just a taste of the interview…check out Apartment613 for the entire post:

Romanian-born Ottawa artist, Theo Pelmus, has been heating up the Ottawa art scene for five years. An emerging performance artist, Theo uses unusual elements like butterflies, branding, and self-portrait busts made of delicacies like gelato and chocolate to examine ideas of layered reality, reinvention, and self-representation.

Upcoming appearances include: a shared bill with Ulysses Castellanos at La Petite Mort Gallery on June 4; a performance for Montreal-based artist, Julie Favreau at AxeNeo7 on June 10; a performance in collaboration with Cara Tierney at Westfest on June 12; a performance at Saint Brigid’s Centre for the Arts and Humanities on June 23; and the Times 3 Gallery 101 Summer event on August 21.

On Victoria Day, Theo and I enjoyed the heat and a pitcher of Keiths while discussing the idea of building identity, the Ottawa art scene, and achieving maximum creativity.

Thanks for reading!

Erika.

From the series "Power Line Refurbishment on rue de L’Église" by Shannon Whittle

A big thank you to Katie and everyone at Apartment613 for the opportunity to post my interview with Shannon Whittle on their blog!

The full interview is here but here’s a sneak peek to whet your appetite:

With summer nearly upon us, construction zones are popping up faster than the tulips at Major’s Hill Park. Most of us walk, drive, or bike through construction and promptly forget about it. Local artist Shannon Whittle sees it a little differently.

Shannon Whittle’s latest exhibition opens  on May 27 at the Trinity Gallery at the Shenkman Arts Centre and runs to June 22, with a vernissage on May 30th from 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm. The show features recent paintings of stills and scenes of everyday subjects, including a new series entitled Power Line Refurbishment on rue de L’Église (pictured above).

I met Shannon over scones and (what else?) coffee at Ideal Coffee to chat about art, Shannon’s creative process, and her avid fascination with the constant battle between construction workers and the elements.

From the series "Power Line Refurbishment on rue de L’Église" by Shannon Whittle

New website in September!

May has been a crazy busy month here at Freelance HQ.

I’ve been working on some brilliant projects with Shannon Whittle and the Canadian Tourism Human Resource Council (links coming soon!), as well as teaming up with Allison Forsythe and Chris Lendrum to write and edit the annual Toy Report for the Canadian Toy Testing Council.

In September, I will be launching my new website…it’s going to be really great!  If you want me to email you when the new site is launched, please leave a comment below or email me at erika[dot]cuccaro[at]gmail[dot]com.

If you’re craving new content, check out my  new About, Services, and Glow-Rated pages!

Have a great weekend,

Erika.

OK, I think I finally learned the lesson that every single writing book that I’ve read has been trying to teach me for years:  Bring your journal everywhere.

No matter where you are going, no matter what you are wearing, make room for a small book and a pencil.  In fact, since we already know to take our business cards wherever we go, we might as well strap them to our journals because they are both essential items in our arsenal as freelancers.

True to form, I learned this lesson the hard way.

It’s Cooper’s birthday.  My fuzzy little friend turned two today.  As we enjoyed an extra-long walk to celebrate, I composed an eloquent blog post extolling all the great things about Cooper.  I mixed fact with observation with everything I’ve learned from Coop and, I’ve got to say, it came out amazing.

When I sat down to write the post…It sounded like a eulogy.  Terrible.

This is only one occasion where a journal would come in handy.  Think of all the plot points, nuggets of dialogue, and character names that are slipping away faster than your brain/muse can churn them out!

Let’s all do this together.  Let’s put a little book and a little pencil in our bag for tomorrow {I just did} and see what glimmers of magic we capture with it.

And…Happy Birthday, Special Agent Cooper!  ♥

Because of you, I connected with my very first client, I get outside and explore the lovely green world around me, and I know nearly all of my neighbours.

Erika.

In the “Free Tips” column, I share what I’ve learned about Freelance Writing as I navigate the highs and lows of the learning curve.

Got a tip to share?  Email me at: erika[dot]cuccaro[at]gmail[dot]com.

You’ll get the credit AND a link to your blog/website!