Pete’s Guide to Greeley
A bit of a tour guide to my humble home town.
Interview with The Colorado Talking Book Library
This project came about because an admin with High Plains Library District (HPLD) wanted me to give The Colorado Talking Book Library a spot on our website to advertise their services, and after we met, we agreed that a more appropriate and effective method of getting the word out would be to do something more in-depth that gave the folks at CTBL a chance to talk about what it is they do, how they go about it, and how people can access their services.
Save YES!fest Video Game
This project was a little more out there: To promote our annual Youth Engineering and Science Festival (YES!fest), I put together a very short video game by editing some templates and building some of my own items in Game Boy Studio.
The main brief for our advertising was to make sure people knew the date, and I put together a narrative that would make it nearly impossible to ignore the date.
This was a bit of a different tack for us, but the event has been very successful, so the risk was mitigated, and this opportunity presented a good space to try something new.
Here is a link to the game itself, play-able in your browser.
Here is a link to a video playthrough of the game, in case that’s more to your liking.
Bob Seger’s “Night Moves”: A Short Lesson in Repetition
This is a freelance column I wrote for LitReactor, a site that was focused on reading and writing, including writing advice.
LitReactor had a VERY different audience and house style. I wanted to include this because the range is important to me. I’m very flexible when it comes to style needs and requirements, and I’m good at finding my own voice within a style so that we can maintain the necessary uniformity while still giving things a spice level.
Weld Found: Cycling Without Age
This is a podcast episode I collaborated on. I did the interviews and cut most of it together, other than the intro and outro, and I wrote my own narration.
The HPLD Cult Movie Vault Presents: Night of the Living Dead
This is an excerpt from a compendium of Cult Movie Vault columns I started as a regular feature in the High Plains Library District’s CommUNITY newsletter.
The Cult Movie Vault was a subset of our DVD/Blu-Ray collection meant to collect some unusual titles that are popular in midnight movie circles. In order to promote the collection, I started writing these Cult Movie Vault columns. I also felt this was a subtle way of showing folks that their library has a vast collection and that you don’t have to feel like you’re asking your English teacher for items. We’re people who like The Stuff as well as Hemingway.
It’s also a bit of content marketing, which I do think is very important in our current age. When ChatGPT can make something in an instant, we have to work harder to make things people will actually enjoy.
This has been our most popular newsletter feature, and we get more feedback about this column than any other, all positive.
I’ll link you directly to a piece I wrote about George Romer’s Night of the Living Dead, which was a favorite among many for its mix of film history and silliness.
The formatting may appear a little strange, and that’s because the compendium this comes from was created for a zine fest. I thought adding our own zine would be a good way to promote the library as well as a good way to reuse already-created content.
Breaking Bad News
One of the things I had to do from time to time was break some bad news, like I did this last summer when a visiting children’s book author, Rosemary Wells, had to cancel her events.
I decided to write a short picture book of my own and read it aloud in a video post on social media as a way of breaking the bad news while also trying to keep things light, fun, and perhaps mitigate some of the disappointment with my read-aloud skills. Which I probably didn’t do, but, hey, I’m no Rosemary Wells.
Jack Outreacher
I started writing a “thriller” in the style of a Jack Reacher novel called Jack Outreacher, a play on the name of our Outreach department. This is a supremely silly idea, and at first it might seem pointless, but one of the major struggles in the library is that the community often perceives library staff as stuffy and hyper-academic, as though we’ll dislike them checking out things that are fun or entertainment-based. Sometimes, this perception keeps people from asking questions that they think are “dumb.” So, one of my consistent choruses within the things I write for HPLD is reinforcing that the library’s staff is made up of regular folks, and it’s okay to ask for things. Occasionally, by playing the jester, I can help change the way people perceive the library.