Gifts for the Hard to Buy For

Getting back our Grand Opening Week, I wanted to start with one of our more popular items around the holidays. The Gift Album.
It's a little like a gift card, but more personal. It's a little catalog of products, and your lucky gift recipient gets to pick out what they want. Simple. They come in just about any value range you could want, or they also come by product type. There are teen albums, guy albums, jewelry, even a chocolate one!
My sister-in-law gets these for all the teenagers on her list because she never know what they want, but she doesn't like giving cash as a gift.
They're also great for long distance gifts because they're cheep to ship.
A Gift Album also makes a nice year-end gift from an employer to their workers.



To see the whole selection of albums, click here:
https://greatlife.mychoices.biz/Retail/Products.aspx?PG=3
and type - gift album - in the search bar.

My 15 Minutes

Parents Magazine (yes THE Parents magazine) did a little blurb on Etsy, and included my Soft Fabric Animal book.
Excuse me for a moment while I do a happy dance.

*dances*



Yep - I'm kinda excited.
The other items are cool too. I actually just bought some toys from Stumppondtoy for my kids. His shop has been on my favorite list for awhile now.

Grand Opening!

We held a live, in-person Grand Opening for our online Quixtar store yesterday here at out home. It was a lot of fun, and went very well. We learned a little more about each of the product lines, and got to play with and taste some stuff.

It makes logical sense to us that an online business deserves an online Grand Opening too. Plus we need about three more clients to meet our goal. Here's what we've decided to do:

Because of the nature of the Internet, we don't think it would be convenient for people to have a virtual meeting for a small window of an hour or so, like we did at our home. So the online version of our Grand Opening, is going to run for one week.

In order for our guests (that's you!) to browse around out product lines, you can go to our website:
Serious Energy

Now the fun of a Grand Opening is trying the stuff out, right? On our website there is a link that says "Contact me". If you look around and see something you'd like to try, use that button to send us a message. We don't have samples of every product, but we have some. We can send off some samples to you. Or if you don't know where to start, just send us a message through the "Contact me" link and we'll send a little variety of samples and information for you.

We're trying to make this as similar as possible to our real life Grand Opening, so that means a door prize too. Again, we're using that little "Contact Me" button as our way to know who 'attended' our opening. So even if you just look around, send us a message to be entered into the door prize drawing.

My blog has been neglected this month due to my novel writing efforts, but I plan to write a short update daily (or at least every other day) with some of the interesting information about the products and the business.

Thanks everyone!
Have fun.

NaNoWriMo

I've been MIA from my blog, so I thought I'd drop in and tell you why.

I decided to join the National Novel Writing Month this November. It's something I've always wanted to do, but never thought I had the time. This year I realised that I won't ever feel like I 'have the time' to write a novel. No one does. That's why NaNoWriMo exists in the first place.

The goal is to write at least 50,000 words in a novel during the month of November. That works out to be 1,667 words a day. So for someone with an already full life - a very lot of writing! I'm getting some pretty late bedtimes so far this week.

Here's my NaNo profile on the website if you'd like to learn more about it:
http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/204442

Now so far when I tell people I'm doing this, they ask about my novel. The short version is that it's a Sci-Fi novel about a ship of 1000 people going off to colonise a new planet. It's a story I was supposed to write 2 years ago. I joined an anthology contest on writing.com about 10 ships that left earth in search of new planets. We wrote a story proposal about what happened to one ship. My story got picked, and I began writing the full story. Then life got in the way and I basically stopped.
Now I'm starting over and using it for my NaNo novel. I don't think I really want the finial version to be 50,000 or more words long, but I'm writing a lot of background and more in depth character stuff that I probably don't really need, so when November is over, I hope to have enough material to edit it down to 20-30,000 words worth of good stuff.

That's the plan.

If you've ever Nano-ed, or are Nano-ing now, let me know! Share your tips for getting through the month - and tell me about your novel!