official blog of Cat Whisker Studio

Well, why not?  Can’t get any worse, though one shouldn’t tempt fate, right?  Ended the year a bit slowly here at the studio.  Projects for Demand Media, Cat Whisker’s number one online copyediting client, went from a deluge to a trickle. I went from handling about 75 articles a week to about 10. And no wonder–they’ve stockpiled over 4 million articles as web content for their various sites.  Because of this astounding number, they are now turning to producing short videos as the next big demand in web content over the written word.  Unfortunately, those videos won’t need our meticulous editing.

In other studio news, I have just launched the first enewsletter for one of my clients in Vermont, Ecolawn Applicator. My task was to create an electronic newsletter that mimicked the look of their site at www.EcolawnApplicator.com, write the copy for the newsletter, copy edit that copy (phew!), create live links back to the site, add some eye-catching images, and launch it.  I chose Campaign Monitor for the launching pad, so to speak.  I also use Campaign Monitor for the enewsletters I’ve been creating for another client www.AgresourceInc.com since their premiere enewsletter in the summer of 2009.  Campaign Monitor has great support, software, server, and sandwiches. OK, I don’t know about their sandwiches. But for ease-of-use, pricing, and after-launch reports, Campaign Monitor can’t be beat.

Lastly, I’m working on some interesting fiction—my own and author Marliss Melton’s.  I’m planning to publish an historical romance (1870s) as an ebook in the early summer (2012), through Cat Whisker’s publishing division, Cat Whisker Press. It’s in the final copyediting stages now and being read over by a dedicated reader in California.  Successful novelist Marliss Melton, at www.MarlissMelton.com, has hired me to help develop and then copyedit her latest book, the first in her new counterterrorism series, Taskforce.

Looking forward to a great 2012.

This four-year-old company needed a complete overhaul for its website. Cat Whisker was happy to provide its new look, powering the site with WordPress’s Sliding Door theme. Take a look at www.EnergyEgghead.com.

Cat Whisker Studio was pleased to create a minimalist website using WP blog software for J. Young Culinary Events owner, Chef Jeff Young. You can view the site by clicking here. Send me additional great food shots, Chef Jeff, and we’ll get your site looking even more gorgeous. Makes me hungry just clicking through the sample menus. Congrats to Executive Chef Jeff Young on his new venture.

Chef Jeff taking a break during an event.

Not exactly finished, but nearly so . . . CWS latest work at www.TGouldAssociates.com. You are welcome to take a look and offer feedback.

Just wanted to give everyone a look at the latest site created by CWS. The business is Chi Time and the site is at www.TimeforChi.com.

Well, not best ever, but best that I’ve heard lately and I’m late hearing it because we’re so busy here at the studio. It went something like this: “[Blah, blah, blah] and then my donkey fell down your waffle hole.” Of course, it’s from Shrek 4, which I’m happy to say was better than most sequel movies are by the time they get to the fourth.

First off, I am amazed at my friends, colleagues, and family who can post every detail of their lives on personal blogs, email blasts, Facebook, and twitter. Where did they get their nifty time-slowing machines that enable them to find the extra 25th and 26th hours of the day? Okay, I’m just jealous, but also relieved, because as I read every minutiae of their lives, I think “Whew–they’re not really living life any larger than I am.” Well, maybe a little, but not a whole world of difference. They just have the gumption to put it all out there anyway!

At Cat Whisker, we are in high gear, 24/7. See, here is a valued staff member, hard at work:

Whoops! Wrong image. Here she is, checking the office window, making sure it’s secure and that she’s eaten all the flies:

And finally, thinking cap on, ready for anything (the fluffy blue pen is her favorite):

I am working non-stop this spring: Creating a website for a wonderful healer in VT; I’ll post the url here when it’s finished. Working on website text and every other kind of text for another VT company, waaaayyy up north, with its roots across the border in Canada. I’ll post that website here shortly as well when all the text is edited and the new site is up. Lastly, I’m spending the rest of my work hours copyediting for a major online company that produces many of the articles you read when you query something on the Internet, such as “What do I feed a yellow-spotted lizard?” or “How do I measure a hospital mattress?” Honestly! It is varied and fun at times.

And through it all, I’m reading, reading, reading. The best so far this spring has been Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair and its sequels. Where have I been? How did I let years go by without discovering this creative and irreverent writer. Also enjoyed How to Write a Bestselling Novel. No, I have the title wrong and can’t locate the author’s name at the moment either. Sorry. I will post it when I find it. Rather wry and amusing. Not my losing my memory but the book.

Back to work, as soon as I’ve read the umpteen tweets and emails and Facebook news posts that have just come in.

I notice that I end most of my emails to friends and family with “Gotta run.” And I do. Very busy around Cat Whisker Studio these days. But obviously not busy blogging, as I see the last post was in the fall of 2009. However, lots of happenings here, including a new contract with an online media company that keeps me copyediting morning, noon, and night. I’m also creating newsletters using Campaign Monitor, and I’m working on updating a couple of websites. “No wonder [I'm] late. Why, this watch is exactly two days slow.” Thank you Mr. Carroll for expressing it so artfully.

I'm late, I'm late.

I have had an intense “failure to launch” created by my own perfectionism or just plain chicken-heartedness, no offense to the chickens. I have never sent out a mass email to my friends and family announcing the grand opening of my website or my blog. Yikes! If I can’t even invite friends and family, then whom do I think will be looking and reading? Well, the word strangers comes to mind. Much easier to imagine strangers reading my blog posts and either enjoying my musings or dismissing me with a click, never to be seen or heard of again. But when I think of people I know (who, in turn, know me) taking a look, my cheeks get a bit red and hot, and another word, mortification, comes to mind. The same thing happens with my fiction writing. My manuscript that I think is nearly ready to send out into the great big world is clearly not ready for my mother, my husband, or my sister to see. As for my friends, well, for the most part, they’d have to pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.

I have thus determined that I am not immune to the somewhat disturbing trend of our time, laying it all out there (well, maybe not all of it) on the Internet for anyone to see, while maintaining a modest decorum in real life. There is hope, however. Miley Cyrus said goodbye to twitter last week. That has to count for something. I haven’t yet said hello to it, or uttered my first tweet, but now that Miley has made room, perhaps my time has come. Now I just have to invite everyone I know with one of those intriguing little taglines: Follow me on twitter.

I have noticed that a week (or six) has gone by since the last time I blogged. I am, I admit, a negligent blogger. And it is for exactly the opposite reason as to why I procrastinate with journal writing. If I have had a busy, exciting, whirlwind day, I am too darn tired to write in my journal in the evening. It is all I can do to prop open a good book on my knees and read it. It is nearly impossible for me to organize my thoughts, open my journal, grab a pen, and put the day’s events to paper. And the more days that go by, the more reluctant I am to crack open the journal because I know how behind I am in my own life’s story, how many words I’ll have to jot down to catch up, how many events I’ve forgotten, and how my hand will ache by the time I’m finished. That whole scenario happens so often that my journal writing has become a hideous monthly event, a fits-and-starts report of my life with most of the details skated over or completely forgotten.

Blog writing doesn’t get done for the opposite reason: Nothing is happening of any interest here at the studio during the summer, so there’s nothing to write about. Well, maybe a few things. I finished my novel (hallelujah, at long last!), 177,000 words, give or take 20,000 depending on which counting method I use. But I’d been working on it for so long, I knew it needed a thorough going over. I chased off some real (as in, money-making) web design work by saying the client could just as easily put up a site himself (and I guess he did). Then just as I settled in to rewrite . . . summer vacation arrived and my two children were suddenly on my hands again for 24 hours a day. By the time I came up for air after amusement park outings, museum visits, whitewater rafting, sleepovers at which no one slept, camping, hosting visitors, umpteen games of ping-pong and badminton, and trips to the beach, my manuscript files were still sitting there on my computer, mocking me. The rewrite wasn’t finished, no agent query letter had been sent, and my blog had sat neglected all summer. And perhaps the worst procrastination of all, I had stopped exercising with my favorite virtual Wii trainer, Maya (see “Working Out”, April 2, 2009). Oh, Maya! What would she say? Would she take away all the levels I’d earned and the extra music and workout areas that I’d unlocked with all my diligent huffing and puffing in the spring?

As it turned out, when I finally slipped the disc back in the Wii, she was quite forgiving. She gave me the longest speech she’d ever given me, starting with “You’ve missed some workouts lately.” Uh-oh, did her computer brain know exactly how many weeks it had been? But she went on with “Take time for yourself, no one else will.” Sort of stern but supportive. And I’m right back into it with my new multi-tasking idea of tying a piece of yarn around one wrist while I workout. For half an hour this morning, the cats thought I was playing with them while I marched in place and did bicep curls; it was brilliant.

And now I have work to do: New web development prospects and a brochure to edit. Best of all, I finally hit send on the query letter to the person I hope will agree to be my agent (please, please, please, please, please . . . ). I have vanquished procrastination at least until tonight when I may choose the latest book I’m reading, the excellent, excellent Year of Wonders: a Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks over my dusty journal.

Also, I wouldn’t post on this day without saying that I still get choked up as I remember those who lost their lives as well as their families on 9/11/2001.