In the grand scheme of things, I’ve spent the majority of 2013 looking forward to:
- My ten-year wedding anniversary
- The 150th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg
- Wedding number one: The Bridesmaid edition
- Wedding number two: The Matron of Honor edition
We’re now on the other side of that. Well on the other side of that, as a matter of fact, and frankly, I have no purpose right now. I mean, sure, I work during the day. I’m Responsible Parent. I’m the Constant Dieter. But…yikes, there’s really not much going on on the old social calendar these days.
Take this week for example. Day Job has been out of control and I’ve been coming home a tired, crispy husk of a person who fiddles their way through preparing dinner and then stares at the television, sublimely engrossed in the latest episode of Henry Hugglemonster. The Hubs comes home from work, The Rowdy boys go to bed, and The Hubs and I cuddle on the couch….where I promptly fall asleep ten minutes later. Go to bed. Wake up. Repeat.
Of course, there’s the matter of Anything You Ask of Me getting published. Frankly, I’m tickled.
On the other side of the hallway, however, is the fact I’m a gal in need of a plan. And when I say plan, I’m thinking terms of a to do list of author-y things “the internets” tells me I need to take into consideration. This involves, but of course is not limited to, the following:
The next book!
Obviously. As of late, I traded in all things creative for instead being a glamorous, Anne Hathaway-esq matron of honor who can dance the Macerena like it’s still 1996. Don’t be jealous. But, there’s the matter of a next book. I have a couple of candidates to choose from: Historical Fiction A, Historical Fiction B, and Random Contemporary. Last night I opened the file for Random Contemporary and almost, almost started working on it. Instead, however, I somehow found myself on Carnival Cruise’s website, almost booking another cruise. The Hubs and his roving aire of responsibility stopped me. Drat.
As my father would say, now that I’ve gotten a hit (signing a contract for my debut novel), I need to stop patting myself on the back and start heading for the bases. My father and I played church league softball when I was age 12 through age 15. I was terrible. I was uncoordinated. But, yes, his words of wisdom are just as applicable to the one base hit I got on my thirteenth birthday to this novelist business. One book is in the bag. Celebrating is over. Time to get my novel on. Again.
Website
Word on the street is that authors have websites. Not just blogs, but actual websites.
I find this perplexing.
I only have two reasons of why I’m wary of creating a website and neither are legitimate. First, I’m cheap. If you pay someone to make a website, it’s costly. Uber costly. As in, the cheapest I found for a template site was 600 bucks. For a dandy, custom site it’s anywhere from $1000 to $3000. I don’t have that kind of cash lying around and, if I did, I’d have a new car. Or I’d paint the living room. No, false, I’d be on a cruise right now. So, that leaves creating a website. Which….yes, is cheaper. But it also requires a little bit of skill and the rarest of all things: spare time. WordPress assures me it’s not hard to make a website, but to my untrained eye and admittedly fast perusal of the instructions, it looks like my blog. It’s like, my blog with a static front page. In case you’re wondering, yes, static front page is one of the terms I picked up from the article. The other term I picked up was “hosting fee” because running a site also incurs a monthly fee for your little piece of internet property.
So I don’t know what to do about a site. Part of my brain says, “Well, all the other authors are doing it. They all have sites. You have a blog.” The other part of my brain says, “Girl, you’re cheap. You have a blog and it’s a study in awesomeness.”
Decisions, decisions. To website or not to website. That is the question.
Social media profile updates
This isn’t finished yet because I’m lazy. And perpetually distracted. Thus far I’ve updated my “About Me” here on The Rambling Jour and started updating my Facebook Fan Page. My Facebook Fan Page is….ugh, it’s a hot mess. I don’t even know where to start with it and that’s pretty bad, considering I took a class in how to have an author Facebook Fan Page. Horrible.
I also need to start working out again, but that’s another beast entirely. I’d rather dust my desk at work.
With all this in mind, I have done nothing more than put on masceara, look at new blog templates on WordPress and decide I need to buy more binders and notebooks. Because, you know, having a laptop isn’t enough to keep all my writing ideas, blog ideas, and novel fodder in one convenient place.
And I need a haircut.
In the end, it’s time to buckle down into some state of legitimacy and write. Even it’s pitiful and poorly researched. It needs done. This week I’ve been a couch potato. A lazy legume. So here I go, off to be creative and write something; anything. Historical A or B or Random Contemporary.
And here comes The Hubs with a bag of fresh popped popcorn. Sustenance. Good, first I’ll snack. Then I’ll write.
Sounds like a plan—and that’s totally what I was going for. Victory!!!
Hurray for the lady with a plan! One step at a time, I say. Sure you have things to do as a new signed-on-the-dotted-line author, but you’ll get to it.
I’m not so sure you need anything other than what you have here as far as a website goes. You already have a presence on the web, and a Google search will lead readers here. If you still want a website, I use Blue Host and have found them reasonable. As far as Facebook fan pages, I’m still trying to figure that out, too!
I feel like my FB Fan page just sits there. I’ve “liked’ other peoples pages and I feel like they are constantly on there, posting updates and page counts and the like. Have I really gotten so old that I can’t keep up with it? I find that hard to believe. You know, I even took a class on how to have a successful FB fan page. I still don’t know what I’m doing!
I’ll stick a pin in the website and come back to it later. As for now, there’s too many other things to distract me. Like my Random Contemporary. I can’t keep away from it!
At least you can still dance the Macarena – I think my hips are starting to protest when I do it.
Not only could I dance it–but I knew all the words still. Sad. Just sad, lol.
Just my 2 cents as a web developer … for what you want to do your blog is fine. It is branded as you, it has your name (not yourname.wordpress.org) and it gets across everything you need. When you become an even bigger author it has the ability to display an signing events calendar and such. And your sidebar on the right is a perfect place to advertise your book when it comes out.
On the one hand I should be saying to you, “talk to me and I will help you build a website inexpensively.” That is what I do. But in reality you simply don’t need anything else right now.
So paint the living room. Or better yet, take a cruise and work on the second book.
Aw, thank you so much! The cruise sounds like the best of all my ideas.
I’ll probably revisit the website idea after publication. Fun fact: Many, many ages ago (as in 1996), I had a website via AOLPress. It had all tie dye backgrounds and was a Monkees tribute page. Things have come along way since then! Even my own mother is better at HTML than I am!