On a spring day in 2015, I wrote a date on the corner of a white board that hung in my office – 12/31/19. That was the deadline for a project I mentally titled “Operation Outlander.”
One of my literary obsessions is the time-traveling historical fiction series Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. In the New York Times bestselling novel that launched a series, Claire Beauchamp, a battletested WWII nurse touches a Scottish stone circle and finds herself accidently transported to 1741 - smack into the middle of a skirmish between Highlanders and the King’s Army.
It wasn’t that I wanted to travel back in time, but rather that for me, forward motion was critical. I had been running a.s.a.p.r. integrated marketing for two decades, and while I was privileged to do it, the things I loved were becoming buried by the things I had to do to grow the firm. I wanted to do more writing and communications. Instead I was doing more accounting and HR. I wanted to travel for research and interviews. Instead I was traveling for meetings about ad buys and event planning.
Since 2015, seemingly a million things happened around and to me, some of them excellent and some awful. (We can debate which is which another day.) But even when that white board came down in our last office move, the date for Operation Outlander remained fixed in my brain.
Now, here we are in 2020, just about six months past the deadline I set for myself, and change is here in the form of a.s.a.p.r. Ink!
I am a storyteller, and that is where I need to put my energy. Whether writing articles or blogs, creating marketing with meaning, or teaching others how to tell their stories, that is my purpose. And, fingers crossed, make a bit of positive change while doing it.
I hope you will investigate this new website and be excited to reach out to talk about how we might find ways to work together.
Except, I ask, between 8:00 – 9:00 a.m. weekdays. Remember that book Outlander? Gabaldon always said it was her “practice novel” while she was working as a software reviewer and technical writer - which certainly did not turn out badly for her. So, for me, that hour is when I will be working on my own little project. If I don’t answer, I promise to call you back.
Thank you for your years of support, kindness and friendship. It means the world to me.
-Robbie