Marketing & Miscellany

The Marketing:

I spent much of the weekend polishing up my online presence to appear a little more professional. Most significantly, this included updating my LinkedIn profile, changing my Tumblr blog into a portfolio for personal and practice projects, and launching JMBauhaus(.net), my new central hub which is now the easiest way to keep up with everything I'm doing online if you're inclined to do so (Big Sis).

I was forced to switch from .com to .net thanks to my stupidity in letting my jmbauhaus.com domain expire earlier this year. Dotster then wanted a hundred dollars to renew it; otherwise I had to wait 90 days for it to go back on the market. Which I decided to do, but before I could register it again some domain squatters snatched it up, and there's no telling how much they want for it, but they can just sit on it, because I don't want it badly enough to pay more than $10 for it, and I don't see anybody else wanting it, either. I'm perfectly happy being an $8 .net instead. So enjoy your worthless jmbauhaus.com domain there, squatters!

ANyway. Since I'm so enamored with the service that's hosting my new site, Flavors.me, I'm offering a very affordable Flavors.me customization package.

Another new service I'm offering is through Fiverr.com: $5 Typographical Logos. I enjoy logo design but I don't get a lot of opportunity to practice it, so hopefully this is a way to give me some practice and beef up my portfolio in that area.

I don't think I've mentioned it here, but I'm also running a contest to drum up "fans" for my Facebook business page. I'm offering a free custom Twitter background (a $60 value) to one random winner. All you have to do to enter is "like" my Task Wrangler page on Facebook and leave a comment in the discussion there declaring your entry. Click here for contest details.

So far it's working like a charm... not. Apparently nobody wants their own fancy custom Twitter background badly enough to bother clicking a "Like" button and leaving a comment. Which is to say that if you DO want your own fancy custom Twitter background, your chances of winning at this point are VERY good.

Of course, if nobody enters, that's less work for me to do, so win-win, I guess.

The Miscellany

It's officially fall now, right? Or is that tomorrow? Either way, I'm ready for this late summer we're having to get lost and leave me alone. September started out promisingly enough with a nice reprieve from the ridiculously hot weather we had in July and August, but it's gotten hot again, and I couldn't be more ready for fall weather to get here. I'm just afraid that we'll have a repeat of last year, where it pretty much skipped right over the usual great fall weather and went straight from hot and miserable to cold and crappy. We're starting to gear up for another short camping trip in October, and I've a feeling Matt will want to go no matter what, so I'm really crossing my fingers for it not to be cold and crappy all month. Come on, October. Show me why you were always my favorite month.

To help beat the heat and get myself in a fall state of mine, I've been watching a lot of spooky stuff, i.e. horror movies and Ghost Hunters. I don't know why scary stuff puts me in mind of fall--I guess it's because for me fall = Halloween. At any rate, I'm in the mood these days for safe scares. This will probably come back to bite me when we're camping next month and I find myself having to go out into the darkness by myself in the middle of the night for a potty emergency.

It's also that time of year for me to decide whether I'll be doing NaNoWriMo, and if so, what will I be writing? Right now I'm kind of leaning towards giving it a pass this year. Last year I started out gang-busters, hitting about 20,000 words in the first week before I found out I was pregnant, and all of the baby drama ensued, and my focus went right out the window. If I do it this year I'll either invoke the Zokutou Clause and finish Dominion of the Damned, or challenge myself to write a collection of memoirs and personal essays all month.

If I do the latter, I figure I'll post them here as I go and then maybe collect the good ones into a chap book or see if any of them are good enough for the magazine market. The problem is that I just can't seem to get excited about writing -- which might be all the more reason why I should sign up for 'WriMo. It might also make a good distraction from the fact that baby #2 would've been due the first week of November, which I'm already starting to struggle with a little... which probably explains my current ambivalence toward writing, and toward NaNoWriMo in particular. I remember thinking that there was no way I'd be able to do it this year because I'd be busy taking care of a newborn baby, so the fact that there's really no reason for me not to do it makes me pretty sad.

In less depressing news, these past two weeks I've pretty much had my head down, brushing up on my web design skills and learning new software and new techniques to prepare for a web site overhaul for a new client. I've been learning a lot, but I haven't been doing much else, and the imbalance is starting to wear on me. I'm beginning to feel lethargic and headachey all the time, and I'm already putting the weight back on that I managed to shed over the summer. So starting today I've got to start forcing myself to make time for regular workouts again. Between the new TV season kicking off in full force this week and Matt's recent habit of spending his evenings holed up in the bedroom to study, it should be pretty easy for me to start parking myself on the stationary bike in front of the TV every night.

What about you guys? Are any of you doing 'WriMo this year? If so, do you know what you'll be working on?