I have been totally absent on my blog lately. My traffic dropped off like crazy because I haven’t posted (the graph looks like the stock market right now), but here is why. In list form, naturally. . .

• First, I am working on three big projects at work simultaneously. They are all going to be beyond awesome but it’s a lot of work all at once. Luckily, one of them just entered the very final stages last night so there is a bit of calm before the next two kick into high gear. I will show it to you when its available.
• Secondly, I took on a bunch of new responsibilities at Lulu. Nothing all that huge, but it means that some things took me much longer than usual because I was learning a new job. I think I have it down now where I can go through things pretty fast but for a while each email was taking 30 to 45 minutes instead of the usual 5. It was sucking up a lot of time.
• Thirdly, my dad just retired (Holy God, does that sound weird and make me feel old all at once!) and my brother is moving back to Florida. So lots of crazy family stuff all over the place.
• Fourthly, I was doing all of the above while packing for vacation, which we went to last week and are now back from. Side note: Vacation was awesome! More on that in a future post.
• So, yeah, I got back from vacation to a huge mess of work. I am basically living last week and this week at the same time from a work perspective. It’s been crazy busy but, luckily, in a fun and productive and not stressful way so I actually kinda like it. That and my hubby and I decided to celebrate our anniversary all week like the dorks we are so it’s been a lot of little silly fun Hillary and Steve sort of things. You know how we roll. 

Last, but not least, I fixing up this blog hopefully for the last time. After a lot of back and forth with myself, I am going to separate out all of the eBay and other e-commerce posts from this blog into a separate blog which I will be pimping here soon.

Dear god, why? You may well ask, especially since I only recently jammed them together. Well, I have two very different readerships with only a small amount of overlap. I have real life and online friends that read this because they know me as a person and like me and my writing. They are fans of Hillary.

Then I have my other group that are online friends that I talk shop with (such as selling on Amazon, eBay, etc). This group also includes fans of my non-fiction books who come here for info and not random rambling. They are fans of my experience and business know how, not so much me.

My business friends don’t want to hear about my personal life and my real life friends don’t care about eBay et al for the most part. So I have to chop the blogs in two. This one will look exactly the same, the only difference will be the content. That and I am going to try to fix up the categories so its easier to navigate.

All of this is happening in advance of NaNoWriMo when I get a lot more traffic from my writer friends and in advance of the release of The Author the book and podcast. (All of those people being fans of Hillary that I don’t want turned off by the e-commerce stuff) So there is a method to my madness.

Regardless, I have been reluctant to post here when I know anything I post will just need to be moved around in a few days anyway when I change the site so, yeah, there we are.

I think, in the end, this blog will be better for it.

Thanks for your understanding and this should be back up to fighting shape soon.

I’ll take terrible ideas for 800, Alex.

That sound you hear is TMNT fans everywhere weeping. Not in a good way. They are going to make another live action TMNT movie. Here is the news story.

I once spoke to a TMNT fan who told me that Eastman and Larid like nothing better than to take any good idea they have, not follow up on it and then do something terrible instead. This news seems to follow this pattern.

CGI TMNT movie was very popular, enough to warrent a sequel. So do they do that? No, of course not. They make another live action one. The 4 Kids show is hugely popular. Do they continue it? No, they do the terrible Fast Forward instead. I have never heard of any other thing like this where the creators are the last people the fans trust with their beloved characters but this seems to be the case here.

I am a big TMNT fan. Love the comics, the 4Kids show, the CGI movie. I do not love the live action movies other than in a “I am glad the Jim Henson creature shop has work” or a “God, I can’t believe I enjoyed this as a kid” kind of way. Do turtles fans want the movies to be darker? Heck yeah! But do it with a cartoon. You cannot make a live action TMNT movie any good because no matter how good the special effects are, the turtles look silly and it will never be good enough for the fans.

Let’s just say I hope this is a rumor. . .