It's all about me

I'm currently in the process of having an author website designed. And it's taking more time than I expected. It's me, though, not them. The same ladies that brought my girls to life--the main heroines in my novels (see SkyMaDa Designs)--are the ones I contracted to do this project. I have the utmost faith in their artistic abilities and know they'll do a great job, but I have a feeling their "creative mojo" is stifled by the contract we signed. The one that states the design layout doesn't include graphics; that's gonna cost me extra.

The 5--count'em 5--site layouts they've sent me so far leave me with a scrunched up That's-not-what-I-was-going-for expression on my face. I want fun, sassy, hip...cartoonish. I wasn't getting that. At. All. They were channeling elegant and austere. Crazy as it may seem, when I was first telling Ai and Dax (well, I mostly correspond with Ai) about my idea for the site, I was thinking about using a cartoonish drawing of me on almost all the pages. For example, there's going to be a Contact Me page where people can email me and join my newsletter. For that page, I envisioned an illustration of me, lying on a comfy chaise lounge, talking on the phone and above my head would be a bubble--like the kind you see in a cartoon (see the pattern here?)--saying something like "I'd love to hear from you, so drop me a line or sign up for newsletter" blah, blah, blah. You get the gist.

And for the SkyMaDa Designs pages, I was envisioning me--again in cartoon form--loaded down with shopping bags and a bubble saying "Shop til you drop at...." yadda, yadda, yadda. I don't have to spell it out for you. Okay, maybe I do. I want c-a-r-t-o-o-n-y. I get so many ideas from looking at the blog templates on here, that I know that's what I want my site to look like. I want it to be the same as everyone else, yet unique and different. I want it to reflect my personality but still grow with me when I decide to step outside the "young adult" box and try adult romance (hell, I read the damn things so much, I could probably write one. "Probably" being the key word here because I know it ain't easy). If that makes sense. I'm thinking that I'm going to have to suck it up and spend the extra greenbacks to get it the way I want.

It's probably going to take more time because I'm going to have to approve the graphics. I was hoping it would be done by April 1st, but I don't think that's going to happen. I had these cute "Author" cards made up and the AZ Book Festival would've been the perfect time to debut them...and the website. *heavy, drawn out sigh*. Oh well. Great creativity takes time. I know this, creative creature that I am. But I'd rather have THIS IS TOTALLY FREAKIN' AWESOME than "Well, it'll do for now."

On top of that...I'm re-vamping my company website. Ai and Dax are going to be rejuvenating the logo. They would've done the site, too, but again...greenbacks I don't have at the moment, so I'm attempting to do it myself. In the process of deleting things, changing things around and adding new stuff, I accidentally deleted the colorful background. It now looks like this. Steven's all "Wow, that's really plain, babe." Really? Kinda hard to tell. *roll my eyes* Which is why I put the little notice in red. Hell, I didn't mean to do it. I was just deleting a lot of things and ended up tossin' out all the color. *shrugs* It's all good. This kind of mishap has happened once before. Granted, it involved deleting THE WHOLE WEBSITE and my reaction was on par with the death of a loved one, but I have since learned to believe in signs. Flushing the color out of my website means it will look better when it's done. And hopefully won't suck.