I was standing in a courtyard that had some sort of large canopy over it. It was kind of like an ginormous parachute with a gingham print and it completely enclosed me but allowed sunlight to bleed thru. I was talking with Kirby on the cell tho I don’t recall what we were talking about. Next to me was a very old and large tree. I presume that it was a eucalyptus because it had the bark features of the painted variety except that it was white. There were slight colour variations in the bark but overall, it just appeared to be a huge white tree. That wasn’t the unusual thing tho. What was unusal was that it was covered with large pictographic symbols, similar to what you might see in the Northwest US. The colours were blue, red, yellow, green and black and most of the larger symbols were symmetrical ass opposed to the smaller, less mature symbols that were still growing and had not yet reached full symmetry. I recall finding a split in the canopy where there was a large seem the fell to the ground and divided the canopy in two, but seeing it was only by accident because it was an optical anomaly and I only found it by standing in the right place and looking to my right.
I don’t have a lot of detail about either of the women; both were blond, shorter than me, and thin. The first encounter was brief and I don’t really recall much of it. The second was more detailed and explicit. The bed was probably a king with satin blue sheets. When I first remembered the act, we were actually standing on the bed against a large mahogany headboard and she had one leg up and in my arms and I was to the side and the back of her. Then I tilted her upside down so that her shoulders and head were on the bed while I was still standing and facing her. The sex was quite passionate and heated with no rest involved. It felt very carnal but there was an association between us other than our sexual intimacy.
I was working in a super market as a stock clerk. It was a little more than a super market as they carried home goods and some furnishings, kinda like a giant Target, but the shelves were more like Home Depot. I ended up walking a long ways looking for some place to put something and I realized that I was naked and I was talking with someone that was walking with me. I wasn’t really bashful about being naked but it was something I was aware of. I walked out into some sort of loading area in the back where I met a group of co-workers. One of them turned out to be my boss who was an Asian woman that went be the name of Deb. She was going to promote me to being a cashier of which I was pretty indifferent. She asked me why I wanted to work there in the first place to gauge my interest and commitment to the position. I told here that I’d worked in the computer industry for 15 years and that I was completely burned out on it and that I was completely happy with my new job at this market. I put a lot of emotion behind what I was telling her and she seemed to appreciate it.
I was with Anthony W in some dwelling that he’d acquired and was making upgrades to. It was an older home that had been Frankensteined since the early 1900’s and we were assessing a room that had once been an outdoor patio, but had a roof put over it to connect it to the main house. Whomever did the work didn’t put a ceiling in because it would’ve made it too low and I was holding up 2×4 to see if there was something we could do to close off the exposed roofing. Anthony was standing next too me and was talking about going into the back where there was a 3 story apartment building with one apartment on each floor, across from a large carriage house. I decided to walk out into the front of the house o take a look at the entire grounds, but when I turned around, all I saw was that the apartment structure was starting to collapse. I started screaming Anthony’s name over and over, but I had laryngitis and could hardly get his name out to warn him. As I started running toward the house, I watched the apartment completely collapse. I ran into the courtyard looking for him but couldn’t find him.
This week’s chapter is about growing your email list. Last week we created it and now Ariel has some great tips for adding names too it. She recommends that you reach out to your friends and family. This was the first thing that I did when I started my email list 6 years ago. My approach was to just add them with a simple unsubscribe link in the email which should always be present and tell them that they can opt out should they choose to. Make sure that you craft your subject line well. I use Sean Michael Imler AKA Rhythma Newsletter. If you don’t do this, chances are that they’ll delete the email as spam since it likely will not be coming from an address they already have in their address book. That being said, also request that they add the return address to their address book so that their ISP won’t flag you as spam.
Another recommendation is to create a folder especially for potential inclusions to your email list. I really like this idea because I’m always getting email from people but never really think of them as email list candidates. When you sell CDs or downloads from CDBaby, they capture the email address of the buyer, so that’s another source for your email list which is a great source because they’ve already expressed interest in your music. Never just add them without their consent though.
The item that I’ve recently put into action is offering a free download if a visitor at my web site signs up on my email list. It took me a little while to build this and tho I would’ve liked to do it with a uniquely encrypted password, that was more effort than I wanted to put into it so I opted to send the url to the user in the confirmation email. I can’t say that I’ve gotten any bites on this yet but my page views haven’t gone up THAT much since I’ve been working on this book’s plan.
And on that point, something you should absolutely do is to get Google Analytics going on your site so that you can track page visits. It’s really easy to hook up and it will tell you if you’re plans are fruitful. To be honest, I think that Ariel should put this in her book, maybe near the front of the book. This should go in a section about “measuring success” because you need a way to track that what you’ve done is actually producing success by comparing it to what you already have.
There are a couple of other recommendations that she’s suggested like starting a text message list and trading email lists with another band. I think the former might work if you have an audience that’s on the go and relies on their phones a lot. This won’t work if your audience is still in the 90’s. Someone told me about 2 years ago that texting was the new email list. I personally haven’t seen that but I am on a couple friend’s text message lists and I’m not crazy about getting them. I kinda want to use my texting for conversations, not announcements. A site that gives tools for collecting numbers for texting lists is BroadTexter. I should be hooking this up this week so that I’m not criticizing without actual experience.
The trading of lists I’ve always found a little weird because email is already so impacted with spam and other business promotion communications that I haven’t wanted to try getting email addresses that way. I like the opt-in approach but maybe the right opportunity hasn’t presented itself, and maybe I haven’t been looking at myself as a business. These are things I should cogitate on.
The gem here is actually scheduling time to do email list promotion and not waiting for people to find your list. This is something I’m working into my schedule. I’m not sure how email lists rank against Twitter, Facebook and MySpace work but I’d be curious to hear about other people’s experiences with these other networks and their successes with them by comparison. Could it be the email lists are too last decade?
I was laying in the water bed that I had as a kid when I lived with my mother. I was curled up and very comfortable when my body started being pulled to the foot of the bed. It was like I was sliding because my posture wasn’t really changing, just my location. I felt a presence in the room like I wasn’t alone and whatever was there with me was powerful. When I finally stopped moving, I looked down at my feet and they seemed incredibly close too me. Then, a woman was there, standing at the side of the bed. She was in her late 30’s/early 40’s and was dressed in weekend night attire like she was going out. She had on a green blouse and black pants and wore a lot of silver jewelry. She started talking to me about something but I couldn’t recall what it was, but I flat out asked her if she was there for my highest good. I guess she wasn’t because right after I asked her that, she vanished, leaving her clothes rumpled up on the floor. I swung my legs over the side and stood up and kicked at them to make sure that there really was nothing left of her.
I was holed up in an apartment that belonged to a Mafia boss. His daughter was hiding me because the Mafia boss and a lot of others were looking for me. His apartment was the last place he’d looked so I was in the back in his daughter’s bedroom. I could hear men out in the streets shouting and I was pretty nervous. I knew I couldn’t stay there and needed to get out but wasn’t sure how. The ceiling of the room was about 12ft. high and at it’s apex was a small window that I was considering climbing up the edges of the wall to get to. I heard someone come into the house and realized I didn’t have much time. I was getting ready to climb when I looked to my left and noticed a small hallway where the washer and dryer were, and at the end of the hallway was a small window that led to the backyard. It was covered by a screen, and tho I didn’t want anyone to know that I’d gone thru this window, I cut a slice in the screen at the edge near the frame, and stealthily slid thru the opening and escaped out the backyard, up a small hill. I knew that I was going to be able to escape and I wouldn’t be found.
I was on a large helicopter with a group of people. It was nighttime and there was some sort of system malfunction. The pilot was the only person who knew how to hold the helicopter together long enough so that the passengers could parachute up and jump before it went down. He crawled to the back where he was rewiring and literally holding parts together and keeping connections alive and it seemed certain that he was going to go down with the ship. I was the last passenger and it seemed so heroic and noble to keep the helicopter airborne while the passengers escaped, even if it meant that the pilot would die, that I couldn’t just leave him behind; I wanted him to survive but didn’t know what to do but I didn’t jump with the rest of the passengers. Instead, I crawled to the cockpit chair on the left. The ground was approaching really fast and just as we were going to hit, a voice in my head told me to grab the joystick and yank it to the right, right now. I followed this instruction and just as the body of the helicopter was about to hit the ground, the blades struck first, causing the body to shift upward and alleviate sudden impact that would otherwise have crushed the body. We essentially escaped without a scratch and the pilot was so very grateful for hanging on with him.
I was at some conference where I was talking to some people about heading over to different conference to register for it but was worried that I’d misread the documentation about the schedule and expected that I was too late to get in. I left anyhow and drove into a parking garage that was very similar to the one where Road Rally was held.
When I got inside, it was indeed completely jammed with people waiting to register. The line was so long, I didn’t think there was any way that I was going to get any of the accommodations I was looking for, but I got in line anyway and started chatting with the people around me. Suddenly, this young woman walked up and asked if I was Sean and told me that they’d set aside some panels for me and that everything I had wanted to attend was attainable. I was elated. I went back to the other conference I was at shared my excitement with my friends that everything had worked out.
I was in some sort of salon. Jan was with me and another woman. They started singing what I thought was a “Heart” song. The lyrics had something about the power of love in it and when they were singing it, I could hear it in my mind. Another woman came up and they were trying to remember the lyrics to the second verse. I started singing it and they started fumbling to follow along. We finally made it back to the chorus and and the four of us were singing but as I was singing, I started to get kinda dizzy and it felt like the song was morphing into another song. I could hear the chorus in my head even as I woke up, and realized that this was never a “Heart” song, it was something that seemed very familiar but I’d actually never heard before. Now I wished I remembered it.
