Branding Without Having A Brand

Writing About Writing

 
ttdr: I have a writing website, willwriteforfeed.com. I don’t know what to do with it.

Blink and a year goes by.

What Have I Done?
Reviving my writing career is going even more slowly than progress with the horses, which I would not have said was possible. About this time last year, I made grand statements of intent [In Which I Stare, Blinking, Into the Future July 2018]. Notable lack of activity ensued. Then in January, I bought/rented my domain name through Blue Host. Maybe outlay of actual money would galvanize me. Uh, nope.

After several months, I made a feeble stab at starting my writing website & got immediately overwhelmed. Somehow, I connected the business site on WordPress.org to the blog on WordPress.com (note letters following the dot). One of the first questions it asked me was, Did I want to connect to a Gmail account? I guess so? Whereupon it downloaded a whole bunch of stuff from the blog.

One service I offer is grant writing. I may not understand what an XYZ is. I know that if you have two, you need a plural verb. Let’s say you want me to edit your grant. You click on my writing page. You are immediately confronted with my most recent whinings about my horses. Not a professional look.

I have no problem with people reading my most recent whinings. I would not blog if I did. However, I want it to be a clear subsection of the business site. Here’s all the wonderful things I can do for you! Here’s all the wonderful things I have done! Oh, by the way, if you want to know more about me, click here.

Right now, the willwriteforfeed.com About is the same as the blog About page. The Archives tab lists 109 posts, all from 2011 & 2012 for some reason. As best we can tell, these are COPIED from the blog not LINKED to the blog. The difference is important.

It wasn’t a computer problem so much as me not understanding the ramifications of the question I was answering. The program simply did what I told it to do. Increased flexibility is one reason to switch to WordPress.org. It can also trip up the unwary user. With moderate computing power comes moderate responsibility.

According to the nice folks at Blue Host, the best course of action to fix this is to delete the WordPress segment of my Blue Host account (confused yet?). Then I reinstall WordPress to my account without letting it know about the blog. Since the posts are copies of the original blog posts, nothing should happen to the blog. Should. We hope. You can see why I reluctant to do this.

For the moment, I have paused to consider.

On a separate note, Blue Host has been great. I spoke to two different people at the Blue Host call-in number. The first one sorted out simple domain name & login questions without making me feel stupid, which is an admirable skill in tech support. The second took over an hour attempting to figure out exactly what I had done and how to undo the snarl before coming up with the Gordian Knot solution.

What Should I Do?
Speaking of all the wonderful things I have done, I am also stuck over what to put on the page.

Take clips as an example. I have several hundred. I think 300+ at last count? Almost all of them are pre-digital. So no convenient links for me. I would have to get permission, scan the articles, and host them on my site. Not an insurmountable problem.

Unfortunately, most of my clips predate the collapse of the publishing industry, along with everything else, in 2008. That makes them all over 10 years old. My first freelance assignment was in 1989. Some of the clips are 20 or 30 years old.

At any time, old references are an issue. At this historical moment, the publishing industry has changed beyond anything we could have imagined back in the day. I remember faxing articles in. Who even remembers fax machines these days? I would essentially be waving stone tablets and asking folks to admire how well I chiseled my work into them.

Every aspect I try to address seems to lead me in this sort of circle. What services should I offer? How do show my digital savvy when I don’t have any? How do I get jobs without current references? How do I get current references without jobs?

I’m not going to starve. This is an administrative problem at most. But I do get overwhelmed and go back to hiding my head in the sand.

Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott