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January 14, 2012
By LINDA GOODSPEED
“Oh NO!!” I heard the guide off my left shoulder yell.
Not exactly a comforting sound when you are a blind skier relying on voice commands from your guides behind you.
“DON’T FALL!” yelled the guide on my right.
Easy for you to say, I thought. How do you not fall when your hips are already committed and on the way down? But I could tell from the panic in their voices that I was in trouble. Off balance, I tried to crank my skis around and get them back under me. They were stuck. I couldn’t move them.
“Ooh! GROSS!” I heard guide number one yell.
“DON’t Fall!” number two repeated.
With my skis stuck and far off to the left of my body and my hips coming down, not falling was not an option. I stretched my upper body as far as I could to the right and tried to dive uphill. In slow motion, stretching as far as I could, I landed with a soft thud.
“Whew!” guide number one said, popping out of his skis and running over to me. “You missed it!”
“What IS it?” I asked.
My skis were still stuck and I couldn’t move.
“Mud!” guide number one said, lifting me up by the shoulders. “There’s a huge mud hole here. That’s what your skis are in. It’s like quick sand. Really gross!”
“Mud?!” I exclaimed. “These are new pants!”
“You missed it,” number two said. “I don’t know how, but you missed it.”
The two of them helped me lift my skis out of sticky, oozing mud and clamber up on to snow. Guide number two took a handful of snow and started washing my skis and boots off.
“What about my pants?” I asked. “These are new pants!”
“They’re fine,” number two said. “Not even a drop!”
By now, we had a crowd around us.
“Unbelievable!” I heard someone say. “Look at the size of that mudhole. It’s right on the edge of the trail!”
“I’m just glad there’s no YouTube cameras around,” I said, laughing at the absurdity of the scene.
What a commentary on the 2012 ski season so far! I thought. January 7, my first day out. First run and I land in a mudhole!
The ski resorts have done an incredible job of getting terrain open with no natural snow and warm temperatures. What skiing there is, is actually pretty good.
Just don’t venture too far off the trail!
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November 9, 2011
http://www.pegtv.com/ipegvideo.php
Go to the right and click on thin strip that says PEG TV 15 TALK SHOWS. Then you should see something that says Arts Show November 2.
PegTV Channel 15
By LINDA GOODSPEED
I was talking on the phone with a contact I had been trying to reach for days when I heard the mailman tramp up the front stairs and my dog, lying so contentedly at my feet a moment ago, started barking furiously, drowning out the man at the other end of the phone. I opened the door to my office to let the dog out, and my daughter walked in.
“Mom, do you know where my cleats are?”
I waved frantically for her to be quiet. Then the door bell rang, starting the dog barking all over again. I got up from my chair, holding the phone to my ear, my finger in my other ear, and went into the living room, looking for quiet. Instead, I tripped over my daughter’s school bag on the floor. The TV in the kitchen was blaring a music video.
“Can I put you on hold for a minute?” I weakly asked the busy executive I was trying to interview.
Such are the perils and distractions of working at home.
Working at home can be wonderful and frustrating all at the same time. Here are some tips to make working at home work for you.
1) Make an office. Don’t try to work on the dining room table. Set aside an office and keep it as your office. Put a door on it, even a lock if you have to.
2) Keep other family members, especially children, out of your office when you are working. Impress upon them that when you are in your office you are working. If they need you, they should knock on the door.
3) Even when you are not working, your office and office computer and phone should be off limits to the rest of the family. Invest in another computer and set it up in a public place for use by your children and for family computing, such as shopping on line, movie downloads, etc.
4) Keep regular hours. It’s OK to get up, put a wash in, or pick up the kitchen, or make the beds. But keep distractions to a minimum and your absences short.
5) Get dressed. You don’t need to dress for an outside office, but you shouldn’t work in your pajamas either. Find a casual, comfortable wardrobe that works for both running around town and working in your office..
6) Avoid getting sidetracked on the Internet researching that trip to Spain,shopping for Christmas, or chatting on Facebook. You wouldn’t (or at least shouldn’t) do this in an outside work office. Don’t do it in your home office.
7) Working at home can be isolating. Make lunch dates with friends and colleagues. Attend conferences and business events. They will provide good social outlets and are also good networking opportunities
8) Avoid home office creep. Keep papers, files, research materials, mail, notes in your office, not spread around the house. The rest of the house is for the family. Keep
your work in your office.
October 23, 2011
October 15, 2011
By LINDA GOODSPEED
Freelancing -– whether it’s writing, photography, consulting, any kind of self employment — is a great career because it offers so much freedom. Freedom to work where you want, when you want. Freedom to do the kind of work you want, how you want. One of the upsides of the current recession is the number of people deciding to follow their passions and start businesses at home.
Thanks to the Internet, phones and email it is possible to be connected to the rest of the world from almost anywhere, even a small town in Vermont. It is truly seamless. Most people, including my editors, do not know where I live and work. I can work early in the morning, late at night. When my daughter was a baby, I could work during nap time in the afternoon. I can work on the weekend, Sunday afternoon or after Thanksgiving dinner (provided I’m not sleeping off all the turkey). My work schedule fits my personal living schedule, not the other way around.
But the very freedom that freelancing offers and that makes it so attractive, is also its curse. Just as the freedoms we enjoy in the free-est country in the world also make living in America so very challenging, the freedoms of freelancing come with burdens and responsibilities. Precisely because we do have so much freedom to work when we want and how we want, sometimes we put that work off. I’ll write that essay this afternoon, or later this evening. Evening comes and we’re tired, there’s a show on TV we want to watch. We wake up in the morning, intending to sit down and work , but it’s a beautiful blue sky day and we go skiing instead.
If you really want to enjoy and take advantage of all of the freedoms freelancing offers, best to treat it like a regular job. Keep regular hours. Don’t let yourself get distracted by something else. Set realistic goals of what you want and need to accomplish each day.
Freelancing is the best job on earth. And freedom the most precious of commodities. Treasure it. Respect it. Don’t let it overwhelm you. And don’t squander it.
October 10, 2011
VPR/Nina Keck
Author Linda Goodspeed’s new book looks at the 1886 political move that led to the division of Rutland.
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(Host) In 1880, Rutland was Vermont’s largest and most prosperous city. But a controversial political move in 1886 forever changed that.
As VPR’s Nina Keck reports, a new novel delves into the events and the man behind the division of Rutland.
(Keck) Writer Linda Goodspeed grew up in Rutland, but says she knew very little about Redfield Proctor – the founder of the Vermont Marble Company.
(Goodspeed) ”When I was working on this book people would ask what are you working on, and I would say something about Redfield Proctor and the responses would almost always be, oh, yes, he’s the one who divided Rutland.”
(Keck) Goodspeed says she became interested in Proctor while doing research for a book on Pico Mountain, which Redfield Proctor had owned at one time. She soon found herself going through Proctor’s personal papers, state archives and old newspaper clippings.
(Goodspeed) ”Redfield Proctor was a very extraordinary man. I was captivated by him.
(Keck) This summer, her book Redfield Proctor and the Division of Rutland was published by the History Press.
(Goodspeed) ”I wrote it as a historical novel so it is a work of fiction based on the major events of Proctor’s life. But many of the words that come out of Proctor’s mouth are actually drawn right from his papers.”
(Keck) Goodspeed says she kept to the facts, but took liberties with character development and some dialog. She says Redfield Proctor’s charisma, accomplishments and ruthlessness needed no embellishing.
(Goodspeed) ”In 1869 he took over a bankrupt marble mill. He was 38 years old at the time. And within a very few short years he had turned that marble mill into the largest marble operation in the world. “
 (Keck) Proctor became one of the richest and most powerful men in Vermont, holding nearly every political office in the state, including Governor. Goodspeed says in the years after the Civil War, Vermont was staunchly republican. But the many ethnic marble workers in Rutland began to organize with other labor groups and they shocked many in Vermont when they elected a democrat to the statehouse.
(Goodspeed) ”Proctor of course could not abide this. He also had his eye on the national election of 1888. I think he had his eye on national office. And so he really saw an opportunity to divide Rutland in 1886 and get it back into the Republican column.”
(Keck) At the time, each Vermont town had one vote in the statehouse. Proctor pushed to have Rutland carved into three smaller towns. The newly proposed towns of Proctor and West Rutland contained Proctor’s Marble quarries, carving facilities and most of his employees. Vermont historian Don Wickman says that allowed Proctor to exert enormous control over how the towns voted.
(Wickman) “He would control by having company stores and company housing. So they were more or less subservient to him. I think the other catch is that those people – the ethnic groups and the laborer did not have a lot of clout in the town.”
(Keck) And any clout they had begun to generate in the early 1880s was new and fragile. If Proctor got his way, one town’s democratic vote would be turned into two and possibly three republican votes.
(Goodspeed) “There was enormous opposition to this proposal.”
(Goodspeed) “In her novel, Linda Goodspeed includes testimony from public meetings and labor groups, letters and editorials by the Rutland Herald condemning Proctor’s plan.
(Goodspeed) ”And he just rammed it through. He did what he had to do to get it through the house and senate. He actually hired every lawyer in the county on retainer just to keep them away form the opposition.”
(Keck) For Redfield Proctor and his fellow republicans the division was a success. The party gained two seats in Montpelier and Proctor went on to become Secretary of War and a U.S. Senator. Historian Don Wickman.
(Wickman) “I think it shows that local people did not have a lot of power at that time. Things were going to be debated up at the Statehouse. You can almost see the cigar smoking back rooms there. For Rutland I think it just changed the entire character of the community at that time. It lost probably some of its flavor back in 1886.
(Keck) Author Linda Goodspeed says Rutland lost a lot more than its flavor.
(Goodspeed) “All of the marble quarries were split off from Rutland so it’s tax base was diminished by about 4/5ths. We’ve never really recovered from this.”
(Keck) Goodspeed and other historians says what’s ironic is that local citizens at the time had no say or vote on the matter. Redfield Proctor clearly benefited as did his family. Both Proctor’s sons and his grandson served as governor. Redfield Proctor died in 1908 at the age of 76.
For VPR News, I’m Nina Keck in Rutland.
September 13, 2011
Redfield Proctor (1831-1908) was an extraordinary man.
The founder of the Vermont Marble Company and one of the leading business and political figures of the late 1800s, Proctor had a gift for connecting with people. One of the stories about him was that he could go into any town in Vermont and know at least one person from hisdays in the Civil War. Proctor was a colonel in the Union army. He had the “common touch” and was a natural politician.
He also moved easily among the most powerful men in the country. Presidents thought highly of him. Benjamin Harrison put Proctor in his cabinet in 1889. Three sitting Presidents — Harrison, McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt — all visited Proctor at his home in Vermont while they were in office.
Proctor was also a shrewd, almost to the point of ruthless, businessman. He thought nothing of taking a loss on a job if he could crush a business rival. One of the quotes that really summed up Proctor for me was a quote that I used at the beginning of my historical novel, Redfield Proctor and the Division of Rutland (History Press, 2011). In the quote Proctor is talking about how he cared more for power than he did money. “We worked for that [power] more than we did mere profit,” he said. That quote, for me, really summed up Proctor the businessman and the politician. He knew what he wanted and went out and got it. Obstacles be damned.
In my book, I really strived to bring this multi-faceted man to life -– his humor, affability, easy-going temperament, his political instincts, shrewdness, the way he attracted young men to his cause, promoted them and gave them great responsibility.
I have received many compliments about the book. One comment I especially enjoyed came from Nina Keck, a commentator for Vermont Public Radio, who told me her feelings about Proctor swung from admiration to dislike and back again as she read the book.
That comment was very gratifying to me. Redfield Proctor was not a one-dimensional figure. He was an extraordinary, complex, multi-faceted little-known giant of the late 1800s.
July 21, 2011
Writing is a job. So treat it like a job. Don’t wait for the proverbial “inspiration.” If you do, you will never write anything. Of course, inspiration does come, especially in the middle of the night. So keep a notebook handy to jot down thoughts. How to resolve a character in my latest book came to me while I was peeling potatoes.
But in general, my inspiration is turning on my computer and sitting down at my desk. Other tips:
- Keep regular hours.
- Get dressed. So you work at home. This doesn’t mean you should lounge around in your pajamas. Get dressed. Put on makeup. You’re going to your job.
- Avoid distractions. Your home, Internet, are full of distractions. Avoid them. Facebook, reading a magazine, gabbing or texting to friends on the phone, taking a nap are for after work. Remember, you’re at your job.
- If you don’t have a writing assignment to work on, you can always do marketing. Research pubs, outlets for your writing. Write query leters. Network, network, network. Find out various movements among editors. Research story ideas. Update your contacts list. Clean your desk and the desktop on your computer.
- Learn all you can about your craft of writing and the tools of your craft. Search Amazon. What are the top books? Genres? What is selling? Research publishers and what they are looking for and how to approach them. Learn all you can about the tools of your craft: computer applications, Internet marketing, social media. If there are seminars and workshops, attend them. They are also good networking opportunities.
December 12, 2010
 Linda Goodspeed canoeing with Vermont Adaptive; Taken by Masha Goodspeed For someone who walks with a cane, or sits in a wheelchair, whooshing down a ski slope, paddling a quiet, meandering river or spinning along a wooded biking trail is exhilarating beyond description. Able-bodied people take these thrills and opportunities for granted. If you want to know how much emotional, psychological and social benefit there is in sports and recreation, tag along with Vermont Adaptive for a day. I doubt you’ll see as many smiles and happy, tired faces in one place. And I bet you’ll be hard pressed to tell who enjoys the experience more — the wounded vet in the wheelchair, the autistic youngster, or the volunteers who ski and paddle and bike and hike and skate and bowl and rock climb and en-able any other sport you can think of. Ever since I lost my eyesight, people like to tell me all the things I am not able to do. “You’re blind. You’re not able to ride a bike.” “You’re not able to ski. You’re blind.” “Paddle a kayak? No way you’re able to do that.”
Yes, way. …
Disability is an isolating condition. It’s also equal opportunity. Young, old, rich, poor, male, female, religious, social, ethnic background. It makes no difference. Disability can, and does, touch all kinds of people and families. It does not discriminate. But it does isolate.
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