I Begin to Understand Why People Have Assistants

Being a reasonably computer savvy individual, my initial instinct when faced with the need for something online or otherwise technical is to just take care of it myself. I’ve programmed for a living, and even now teach people how to program so they can do it for a living (making it all the more easy for me not to have to.) When I’m not doing it for a living, I even enjoy programming. And so, with the now impending release of my first book, I’m realizing that I probably need a slightly better web presence than a free WordPress blog.

Step One was to create an author page on Facebook. Check. (And hey – there’s a widget over in my sidebar, if it’s not too needy sounding, would you be so kind as to like me? It feels kind of lonely with just 14 likes. Even if it is too needy sounding…would you do it anyway? Please?) But the finished product was…kind of sad looking. I wanted to have a place to list my books and other things. “Tabs,” I thought, “I need tabs.” A quick Google and I had a very easy to follow instruction list for how to do that. So I whipped up a little image to display, created my tab app in the Facebook developer, and voila! One tab for “Books by Elizabeth” over on my FB author page. Easy peasy.

Except…it’s linking to my books page here. And the way FB does it, it looks rather, well, we’ll go with amateur because I’m trying very hard to keep my son from calling things stupid. (Step one in that battle: stop using the word stupid yourself. Never realized how large a part of my vocabulary that is.)

Which brings us to Step Two: get hosting with a better WordPress set up and, side benefit, the ability to host individual HTML pages (Step Three: Make those pages!) that can then be linked to the FB author page and not look silly.

And if I do that, then I really want to tweak my layout of the website proper because there are some things I’m not in love with here, but they were good enough (hey, it’s free) for the time being and I was making do. But if I’m going to have my own install, then, well, I want it right. Which means CSS tweaks (again easy, just a time thing).

In the mean time, I’m on my final edits of Wisdom to Know (due to the publisher 7/31. I’ll make it, I really will, I’m not that far from being finished) and I’m working on the sequel and need to be spending time on that every day so I can get it rolling…because we’re looking at a March release for it and when you back up the time for that to be the case, the deadline begins to loom just a tad. (Especially when you add on book 3, as yet unstarted, slated for May). And oh yes, there’s my non-writing life (a husband, 2 kids (meaning housework and groceries and taxi services), and 30 students currently learning Java who need work graded and discussion posts responded to and so forth and so on.) I’m not complaining – I adore it, but it means…I probably don’t have time to tinker with the programming/technical bits that need doing.

And so I begin to understand why even reasonably technical people hire that work done or get themselves an assistant to take care of it for them. Hmmm…my husband is also reasonably technical. I wonder if I can coax him into doing it?