it's like a train wreck, only fluffier

I tore apart chapter one of my Little Mermaid thing yesterday, and got 1643 words in rewrites, but it was either that or another day with only double-digits of words. Having trouble pulling that one around to the plot-outline in my head.

Didn't sleep well. Thought it was because I'd had my SAD lamp on too late (lost track of time) but I'd forgotten to take one of my pills, worked out the problem and took it at 5 am, so I'm still woogy, and now I have to rearrange my entire goddamn medication timetable for today.

Need to concentrate on Etsy today, but hopefully I won't be too braindead to pick up the pace tonight. At least I've passed the 5k threshold at last.

 I mean, like, glowing reviews about precision and professional finish give me hardcore imposter syndrome, because I'm not doing laundry today due to glue...

 

Hey, I am one cripple in a back bedroom; gotta bodge it sometimes.

Eternally bemused by the people who contact me asking for freebies for review, because:

1) back in my day (oh bloody hell that sentence makes me feel so old), you built your reputation as a reviewer first, and then people contacted you about reviewing their stuff, not the other way around?

2) 99% of the time when I ask for their numbers or stats they have no idea what I could be talking about, and if I do get the numbers they're bewildered when I tell them it's not cost efficient, like what could I possibly mean by that...?  And then I have to explain that if, for example, I spend £15-20 on a BCA feature it goes in front of 75,000 people who're interested enough in buying British handcrafted items that they've signed up to do so.  Stationery isn't a niche market, so that's a lot of potential customers, especially if I spring the extra fiver for a Christmas shopping slot.  And the majority are then like "okay, but I'll do it for a free notebook", and I have to patiently explain, sometimes multiple times, that my materials and the postage aren't free.  Even if I send them the smallest of my notebooks it'll be approx £9 for materials, plus postage (usually they're not in the UK so £4-£5), so it's £13-£14 to put it in front of the followers they have.  One of them had two twitter followers, if you included her self-follow.  The maths just doesn't add up; why would I spend £14 for an audience of two people, including the person who received the free one, when £1 more will get my shop featured to an audience of 75,000 people?  Those numbers don't even crunch if they had a specialist channel?

3) aside from the maths, I do feel that it's deeply unfair to the customers who've bought a notebook from me and shared their genuine squee on social media.  A couple of youtubers have sent dozens of people my way.  (I sent one of the youtubers a free notebook for a giveaway she was doing, but she'd bought her first one and her vids featuring it have sent a lot of people to my shop.  Not the same thing as a newly started review channel who'd apparently "love to work with" me).  And, personally, I always trust a review less if the item was sent for free?  I don't think I'm alone in that, so I'd be paying for what I myself consider to be a lesser review?  I guess it makes sense to other people, but not to me.

Anyway.



In non-related news: the specialist we've been waiting two weeks for turned up, used his measuring thing, and announced that it was pointless to use the drying machine because we've done a great job of airing the floor dry ourselves and the machine wouldn't get it any dryer. So that's... something.