My Inner Control Freak
In a couple of months, I’ll be launching a new steampunk romance series. This excites me on a million different levels, but one of the reasons is that I’ll be updating my website to reflect both of my ongoing series (and because I don’t love love my current design). And this is the point where a lot of authors would start looking around at web designers, deciding whose work would best fit the vision of their site. I look around, yes. But when it comes to hiring?
I just can’t do it.
Now, I’m a ridiculously laid-back person. So imagine my surprise when I began this writing gig, and I found out that I had this new control freak raging inside me*. Not only do I have to control the content (which anyone with a WordPress site can do — Thank you, WordPress) but I have to be able to tweak and mess with the look any time I want to. The same is true for my promo items like bookmarks; even knowing that someone with more skill could make them prettier, I just can’t let them go out.
Not that this is all bad. I’ve had to learn to use Photoshop and manipulate CSS and HTML. I’m no expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I can get by (and the zillion tutorials and guides on the internet help a lot.) When I take breaks from writing, very often I’m looking through stock photos or tutorials, checking out other websites and promo item designs, figuring out how to make mine better. My idea of a fun lunch is checking e-mail, checking Twitter, and then playing with bookmark designs — and in the five years since I’ve started doing this, every site redesign and promo item has an improved design (and function) over the last. So that’s good.
Recognizing my limitations is not so awesome. For example, today I came across an awesome piece of artwork that had the feel I really want for the site, even if the subject wouldn’t fit. In my head, I’ve already combined elements with a really fantastic piece of steampunky jewelry that Jill sent to me this winter. But I don’t have the skills yet to put it all together.
And so I began to seriously, seriously, seriously consider finding someone to send a couple of JPEGs to, and say: Plz make something amazing for me? kthx.
Yeah, that impulse lasted for all of five minutes, and then I began Googling tutorials. So Photoshop, CSS and I are going to become even closer friends over the next several months of lunches.
*Before I began writing, I used to have a different inner control freak, which was budgeting, projecting expenses, and tracking my bank balances. I had monthly and yearly spreadsheets and crap with all kinds of crazy formulas. I made myself stop, because I can only have one control freak inside me at a time. I think there might have been a cage match to the death between Website Freak and Spreadsheet Freak, and the Website Freak won. Either that or the writing gig combined with quitting the day job just made the Spreadsheet Freak retreat in denial and despair.
Your inner control freak — do you have one? Have you had control freak cage matches? TWO FREAKS ENTER. ONE FREAK LEAVES.
I’d totally watch that.
Artwork: Conception by Myke Amend, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Okay, I can’t WAIT to see your new site. Wow, I bet it will be awesome. And I totally understand about the control freak thing. I love making all that stuff. It’s like, art projects!
Thanks! I hope it turns out okay. Did you do your own, too? (It looks fantastic.)
Thanks! I did my author site myself. Lots of hair pulling. I didn’t do my sprout, (that was Lea of Closetwriter, a generous gift, and what did I do? Tormented her with change requests forever! Hopefully not making her sorry.)
Okay, so I’ve been in the obsessed with books phase for about a year and a half now. I learned very quickly what urban fantasy was, and that I love it. I love some crazy fantasy, sci-fi, and paranormal romance. I don’t love so much romance, unless it has some thriller/mystery/suspense going on. So I’ve heard this term steam-punk several times, but I don’t have a clue what it is. Can someone clue me in?
Ah, the power of google. Steampunk = Castle in the Sky, but in book form. Alright. Got it! (I love Miyazaki)
my definition:
Jules Verne, in his time, wrote science fiction. If he were writing those books today, they’d be steam punk.
Yep! You got it. I have a quick overview of the way I approach it here, but in a few words, it’s basically historical science fiction.
Let’s see – the only control freak death match that I have so far experienced occurred when DH and I began co-habitating. I am not a complete neat freak, but I like things picked up. I like to use the kitchen counters for, hypothetically, cooking and stuff, not watching how many boxes of cereal we can collect.
I’ll put it another way – while we both may have a lot of stuff, I’d rather triple stack my paperbacks on shelves, and he’d rather spread them out in one layer on the floor, so he can see them all.
I think my control freak lost. I decided the rest of the relationship was worth letting my control freak go sulk in the corner. Every once in a while it busts out and I have cleaning frenzy, but mostly I just grin and bear it.
I think my husband and I could benefit from having at least one of us be the “clean clean organize!” control freak. Instead we are the messy, cluttery type.
I am a control freak about my space. Not that I’m a clean-freak – quite the opposite at present. But my space is the only place where I get to be myself, and I am VERY posessive of that. I am also a control freak about my actions – I don’t drink, and I have to be in excruciating pain before I’ll take anything stronger than a mix of ibuprophen and acetaminophen. Even so, polite people note that my habits are…somewhat eccentric
Cage match – my persona and shadow (ala Jung) had it out back in college. Things got a bit tense, for a while, but they managed to come to a compromise – the result being that I need space in which to be myself, and maintain careful control of my actions everywhere else….
Actually, when I think about it, I’m pretty much a control freak about my work area and my computer. If either my husband or my daughter need to use my laptop for any reason, I have to stop myself from hovering.
I know that stems from knowing just HOW MUCH is on my computer, from manuscripts to my website files, etc etc — and even though I have all of it backed up, I live in fear that something will happen the moment my back is turned.
Like, just last week, my husband and I ended up going straight from his work to have dinner with a friend, when I’d expected to return home immediately. I couldn’t do it; I had these visions of the house catching on fire and losing all of my work for my current WIP. So I drove us home first, e-mailed my backup to my Google account, and then went to dinner.
Is that control-freak or paranoia? Ha, I’m not sure.
It’s not paranoia if technology has lost things for you in the past.
Like the time that my file for my second Guardian book was corrupted one month before deadline (and 120,000 words into it.) Oh, god. I almost puked blood.
Luckily, I’d e-mailed it to myself a couple of weeks before that, and I’d been mailing daily excerpts to my BFF, so I was able to piece a lot of it back together (with no formatting, and all of my revise-as-I-go edits lost) … but it was horrifying. NEVER AGAIN.
My bedroom would probably define the word “cluttered” .. or maybe “scattered” is the better word. Books are everywhere. I found one in my socks/pj/underthings drawer the other night?!?!
Don’t ask, I don’t remember how it got there.
My books are my babies. I organize them, alphabetize them, by genre, sub-genre, author, first release to the last… EVERYTHING. Just so. I’ve gotten that “WTF” look when I try to explain my system and how nice and pretty it is.
I’m not big on surprises. I’ve been working on that particular aspect of my personality.. but thus far, it hasn’t changed. I like knowing what I’m doing, where I’m going, what time, who’ll be there.. and when you throw a monkey wrench into the works, I iz not a happy camper.
Well, huh. Never exactly thought about it this way before, but I used to have the Spreadsheet Freak. She quietly moved on to Valhalla when I started actively writing toward publication. Honestly, I didn’t really miss her. Filling pages & pages with calculations on amortization and percentages? Oddly satisfying, but not much fun.
She’s been replaced by the Word Count Freak. That is one demanding bitch.
i see some book covers and i itch to redesign them. :::nods::: they’re not even people i KNOW or READ and i want better covers
I can relate to your computer sharing woes. I’ve been letting my daughter play games on my computer and the kid has taken over! My computer. Mine. (I bought her a netbook this weekend.)
I learned html too, and I can do quite a bit, but I’m still learning CSS. I get really control freaky over colors and clutter on my blogs. I had a website for ten years then sold it to write more. I used to obsess over colors on that too. Coding my own stuff is the most frustrating and yet satisfying thing I’ve done. I can tear my hair out, cry and want to throw my computer while I’m doing it but when it’s done then I get all “OMG look at what I did!”. I can’t imagine you losing that file. I really would have puked blood.