Sunday, September 28, 2008

the cloud is moving nearer still, aurora borealis comes in view

Happy birthday, Jackie!

I spent most of today creating a website and blog for my romance business. I decided to ditch Wordpress and go with a combination of Google Sites, Google Apps for your Domain, and Blogger. Yes, I'm a corporate whore. But, I think there is something to be said for having a website with static content and a blog with frequently-updated content; they create two different kinds of user experiences, appealing to a wider variety of people.

I'll update the links on this blog shortly, but you can see my rudimentary website at www.sararamsey.com and my blog at sararamsey.blogspot.com. I want to really flesh out the content on the website; I already have key photos from my Europe trip, an 'about me' section, a teaser of my first book, and placeholders for intros to my characters, but there's more I can do. I want to have lists of my inspirations (books and movies), links to other great romance writer/agent/editor sites, and an FAQ (even though I've gotten no questions, ha). For the blog, I need to start posting ~3 times/week -- anything from reviews of books I've just read, to links to awesome girly/romantic products, to items of interest in the publishing community, to my own struggles/successes as an aspiring novelist.

The one thing I need to be mindful of is that committing to updating another blog and a website in addition to this blog is a handful -- and it can't cut into my real writing time, or else it's completely pointless. But I can afford to spend a couple of weeks playing around with the content -- I decided I need to take a hiatus from the book and recharge my creative batteries, so a combination of reading, watching movies, playing with the website, and of course slogging away at work is going to be great.

Two exciting friend-related things happened today. The first was that I met Katrina at a cafe for an afternoon of 'working' over coffee. I was somewhat productive, but I will never go back to that cafe again; the apparent owners had a toddler who screamed constantly, ran around and harassed the customers, and was ultimately picked up/teased for half an hour by an extremely sketchy older man while her parents hung out on the other side of the cafe. Also, the place was dirty, the person behind the counter didn't speak English, and Katrina's sandwich was ridiculously small. But, it was good to see her even if Yelp led us astray.

The other exciting thing was that Ritu called me, and we caught up for quite awhile, which was v. lovely. I miss that girl.

I suppose it's my bedtime; I have plenty to do at work tomorrow, so that means I should go to bed so that I can get into the office and start the week. Goodnight!

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