I’m Not The Same Writer I Was In August

On Monday I posted about a panel I’m going to be on next week, about branding in the modern age. In that post I said that I’m “someone who does branding professionally.” This is true, but as I reread it, I can’t help but cringe.

As someone who works on branding and marketing professionally, all day every day, I have come to hate my website. It needs a lot of work.

Here’s the thing – when I set up this website, which is actually the third design iteration of aprildavila.com – I was in a very different place as a writer. Back then, I was working as a freelance writer. I was looking for work anywhere and everywhere. I needed to showcase my feature articles, my travel writing, and my copyediting, not to mention my fiction.

But the day I took this full time gig, that all changed. I don’t have time for writing assignments. While there is a part of me that would love to write more features, the truth is, I don’t have time. And nothing makes a girl prioritize like a serious time crunch.

All I want to write (outside of work) is fiction. Fiction, fiction, fiction.

And all I want to blog about is my fiction. In fact, looking over my posts since September, when I started full time, almost all of my posts have been about fiction writing. So I need to do some serious re-branding.

So I’ve started to think about another website overhaul. (As a side note, I tell clients at work that websites need to be completely updated every two years. They never believe me, they want their sites to last a decade, but things just change too quickly for that. I last renovated my site in early 2011. So I’m totally practicing what I preach here.) I want the new one to still be centered around the blog, but I’m going to downplay all my writing that isn’t fiction.

Instead of pushing myself as a writer who can and will write anything (which you have to do when you’re living the freelance life), I’m going to change the site to reflect what I really am now – a full time working mom and wife who takes advantage of every free minute to try to finish her novel and get it published.

I’m still working on design ideas, so it may be a few months in the making still, but doubt not – it’s coming.