Velvet Verbosity

After a long hiatus, I’m pulling it back together to get in the swing of things.  Too bad work has decided to usurp my life recently.  The economy is tanking everyone, and it’s effect has been felt in my small offices.  That, and a mysterious illness that’s afflicted the boss-man, have been keeping me very busy this week.  I’ve also been without internet at home this week, but that is back up tomorrow.  Yay!  It’s quite an experience to go without internet for two weeks, let me tell you.   I felt so…disconnected!  Ha!

Anyway, there’s a long overdue roundup of the March challenge.  Aren’t you excited?  Reminder: I still need ideas of how to handle the tracking of the books I send out!  One of you must have far more techie knowledge than I!!!  Please read my last post for details if you haven’t already, because I could really use your feedback.

For the March challenge I chose Night Blogger’s entry as my pick.  It was the first I read, and so perhaps I didn’t give the rest of you a fighting chance, but it was just so powerful that I knew.

They marched like soldiers, like heroes, like villains. Their eyes all gleaming and shining with right.
To reclaim, to mark, to save the day, in ranks and rows of a hundred and two, pounding, pounding, shaking loose the foundation; a hundredfold steps.
One, two, the rhythm of warfare. Simple but always, returning, reviving, creeping up in the night to scratch at the door, a mangy stray cat with one eye and fever.
No more. They march, one step, two step, eyes like oceans that carry the soul. One, two, may the enemy cower when peace comes a’ knocking.
One, two.

In other words…

• The Ninja gets to the point. 
• Louceel shows us how getting in line isn’t always easy.
• The winds of March according to the poetry of Patsy.
• I love the name of this blog.

I think there may be more of you that were missed when my blog went MIA, so if you’re not included in this list, it’s because things were lost in the mix.  Shoot me a comment and I’ll add you.
This week’s word comes from The Virgin of Bennington by Kathleen Norris.  Bennington College is where Alba would like to go.  When I took her to the campus a few years ago, she actually broke into tears.  The word is…

Pleased

Well darling readers, I will be with you again shortly.

With love,

I’ve been really excited to get things going around here again.  I’m working on creating a letter for the two books I need to send out, and trying to subdue my perfectionist tendencies which can sometimes manifest as a paralysis.  If I can’t make it perfect, sometimes I don’t make it at all.  Once the books go out, I have to have a way to track them and I’m also trying to figure that out.  Finally, I’m also working on (potentially) a new design for Velvet Verbosity, but that could take months and isn’t the highest priority.

So, the first order of business is to get the books prepped for mailing and a space for people to write in and tell us where the book is.  According to my schedule, the 100 Word Challenge starts on Wednesday and is due by Sunday, so I’ll post the “March” selections this Wednesday and present the new challenge. If you’re new here, or just didn’t do the “March” challenge, now you’ve got a few days to write your own 100 words inspired by the word march and that gives me the next few days to deal with the books and the conundrum of how best to keep track of them.  (If anyone has ideas, for heaven’s sake, share them with me!)

Since I can’t mail the books until I figure out the URL I’ll be sending people to, I have to solve that problem first.  Maybe if I share my thoughts with you, y’all can help me figure out the best plan.

Obviously, my first thought was how to incorporate the books’ travels right here on the blog.  I could create pages for each book and each book would have its own www.velvetverbosity.com/book URL for people to comment.  That seems simple enough, but I’m afraid it will be a navigation nightmare.  If anyone knows more about wordpress pages, perhaps it will turn out that this solution is just fine.

Thinking that the above option might have limitations, or turn into a navigation nightmare, I then started thinking about various social networks and creating a profile for the journey of the books.  I can’t get my head around how this would work exactly, but I know that this may offer the most creative and fun solutions.  Ning.com allows you to create your own social network so I could create one specific to the journey of the books.  The drawback here is that anyone who finds the book would then have to join the network, and I worry that might dissuade someone from helping to track the journey, and may even stop the journey.   Most people these days are online, and have no problem taking a few seconds to sign up for a social network, but there are still plenty of people who don’t do social networks, nor understand how they work.  There might be away to allow anyone to comment without joining the network, but then that opens the network to all kinds of spam crap.

Those are my two best ideas at the moment…aside from building a separate website, which would a)cost money and b)not possible right now.  To add one later would be complicated as there would already be books out there.

So, I need your help here.  Many blogger heads are better than one, I always say.  Maybe one of you is more tech savvy than I am and knows of a relatively easy solution, or maybe one of you has an idea I haven’t thought of.   Put your thinking caps on and share share share!

For those of you still checking in and wondering what the hell happened, I’m back.  A more humble and healing VV.  I couldn’t ignore bringing Velvet Verbosity back at the urging and help of a fellow blogger.  I won’t say who or how, but trust that there are very kind strangers out there in the blogging world, and this one didn’t want to see me or the 100 Word Challenge disappear.

I have a few maintenance things to do, not to mention just getting back into blog mode, so I will be behind the scenes gathering up the mindset to get the gears in motion again.

I missed you all.  I really did.