1. Exclamation points at the end of each sentence have the exact same effect as no exclamation points at all.* No, really. You see, exclamation points are used for emphasis, and emphasis only works adjacent to non-emphasis. Like how you can only appreciate good in the face of evil, understand "dry" if you've gotten wet, enjoy warmth if you are occasionally cold. Emphasizing every single last thing in a two-page document just makes the reader tired and jaded. Though your every sentence is no doubt a jewel, it's time to get tough. Pick the highlights, leave the rest.
*Note: except for the additional, rarely positive, effect of making all your copy sound like it is being read by a 13-year-old who just bought her dress for Formal.

2. Certain words, when used in promotional copy, have the disconcerting ability to take on the exact opposite of their dictionary meanings. This happens for two main reasons:
a) Thoughtless overuse, as in the case of words like "exciting" and "unique." Everyone's everything is exciting and unique. Try harder.
b) Guilt by association. The average reader has learned by painful experience that products labeled "whimsical" by their pushers are most often trite and banal; "dreamy" anything will leave them thrashing in the grip of nightmare; and let's not even talk about "jazzy." While your things or events may actually be whimsical, dreamy, and/or jazzy, please don't saddle them with these warped appellations.

3. Take Coco's advice. She asked that women look in the mirror before leaving and remove one accessory; think of words as accessories and instead of one, cut half. The precious droplets of your creative drive will have little effect in five-point type. Besides, do you know how many people actually read postcards, pamphlets, invitations, brochures or even exit signs? If you took calls all day with questions from people who have the answers written on the same pieces of paper they got the number from, you might be less enthusiastic about all that verbosity.

4. Quotation marks, italics, and capital letters: do not go where you appear to think they go. Perhaps you skipped over this part in school because you were focusing on beefing up the vocab with whimsicals, dreamies and jazzies. Don't be ashamed. Just hire a copy editor, or find someone on your staff who knows this crap, and then let them do their thing. Really. It will all make much more sense in the end.

5. The job of writing copy and the job of layout are two discrete tasks. Here are some signs that you have crossed over from the former to the latter:
a) You are spending more time selecting colors and fonts for your copy (which will, by the way, be printed in black, with a maximum of two typefaces) than composing it.
b) You are using the Insert Picture function in Word. Trust us, if someone else is designing your document, you never ever ever need to do this.
c) Your copy contains stage directions, like "(In upper left-hand corner:)" or "(under artwork image; small text.)" We can probably figure out where the return address goes, thanks.

6. When you are given something and asked to proofread it, please actually read it instead of glancing at it for one tenth of one second and shoving it back at the giver with a "great. Did we get the quote from the printer yet?" Either that, or work on your penmanship, or refrain from crying to us when the band's name is spelled wrong. Your choice.

Thank you for taking the time to read and apply these guidelines. We do so look forward to working with you in the future. It should be whimsical!

I am mostly posting this so that I don't have to look at my own goofy face every time I come here, which is more often than it should be considering I never ever ever post. It is where I go for my links, you see, for the time-wasting.

But!

OMG you guys!!

You all know about del.icio.us, right? It is the best thing ever. Here I am there. I have been obsessively adding and tagging everything I have ever favorited or copied into a series of entries on my makeshift Filemaker to-do list at work or visited even once. So clever, so functional. So destined to get me fired, thus precipitating a grand adventure at the end of which I will no doubt be forced to transform into a mogul or a bootstrapper or an entrepreneur or something. It'll be great!

This is the face of someone who picked an unnecessarily complex project to learn plaid matching. Front vertical seams. Pleat underlays. Matching the pattern horizontally AND vertically. Yeah. It's not perfect, but it was obviously successful enough to drive me mad with power. Fear the plaid!

Murray has never been a big fan of the vacuum. You could in fact say that the vacuum is Murray's nemesis. So you can hardly blame him for gloating, in poor taste though it might be.

Our new vacuum is so wee and adorable that I hardly believe it can work for more than ten minutes, but we can but buy what fits the budget, and hope for the best.

This vacuum is about the same size as Murray, and similar in hue. Does this mean they might become friends, or are we just setting up some kind of evil-Doppelganger situation for the poor beleaguered cat? Only time, and our new variable-speed (and thus variable-shriek level) dial will tell.

I have been a little hibernaty so far this year as a result: lots of sleeping and home improvement have been going on at the Tron household. Unfortunately, I have a tendency to start home projects without making sure I have the wherewithal to complete them, so there are bags of crap in the living room awaiting a trip to the thrift store, utensils scattered hither and thither awaiting new storage, and such like that.

I finished up one project this weekend, though.

This fabric has been waiting around forever to be something; I hope it likes being this. I learned a lot about fitting while I made this, and made some bold and exciting new adjustments to make this dress fit me and my particular lumps and bumps, instead of some kind of synthesized pattern fitting human form. I was even a Very Proper Seamstress and made a test garment so I could fiddle around with all those lumps without torturing my real fabric. So that was fun.

Zombie Cake!
I was poking around the internet, looking for some Halloween baking inspiration, when I found this. Holy crap. Now there was an idea that needed stealing.

Although my cake is far less astonishing than the original, I'm still pretty happy with it considering that my main cake-decorating triumphs to this point comprised "making a cake that did not lean severely to one side" and "avoiding crumbs in the frosting."

Hair Garland!
The party was hosted by a co-worker who has very strict Halloween aesthetics, and an aversion to anything that could be considered cutesy, or kitschy, or pretty much anything ending with eee. So, crepe paper was forbidden. I will confess that I kvetched about this rule, but look what it hath wrought! In an effort to satisfy my urge to hang things from the ceiling, I came up with Hair Garland. It was quite satisfyingly creepy.

This year, I was A Magic Trick Gone Horribly Wrong. What did you dress up as?

(More Halloween photos, including an obsessively detailed making of the zombie cake photo shoot, can be found here.)

(Pictures. Just wait!)

How's your day going?

Have you
forgotten
your pudding?
It's chocolate and it's
behind
the divan.

or something, or I just wake up with the feeling that I've solved all my problems but it's lost to sleep. This time, it was like my subconscious rolled its eyes, said "oh come ON, this is easy, let's just do this so we can move on to something else, GOD," and got the job done. Poor subconscious. I guess I should get that shirt made so it can go back to fantastic voyages and/or insanely complicated errands.

I'd like to point out, however, that the skirt I was making to go with the shirt was hideous. Hi. de. ous. Multiple strips of raw-edged, acid-washed denim? Floor-length tulip skirt? I THINK NOT.

Simplicity #4171. Despite the pockets, pieced collar, inset sleeves and buttonholes, this came together much more willingly than the yellow dress. Hopefully there will not turn out to be some kind of inverse trouble to make/fun to wear ratio going on here, because I'm really looking forward to taking this for a spin tomorrow. In the meantime, I'll just go get you your check.

I don't have any of this. I haven't done a thing, and there are about five million things I'd rather do, and have been doing: make more dresses, make a skirt, make a blouse, experiment with resizing some tiny vintage patterns I have, reorganize the studio, make aprons, declutter the house, cook some lemon curd, bake an angel-food cake to go with it, go swimming, anything anything except think about Christmas stockings.

This is what always happens. I don't even dislike making stockings, but because I am supposed to be doing it the appeal has vanished. Whatever I'm doing, something else seems more fun.

I will buckle down eventually, and it will be okay, but it will be the hectic and crazy kind of okay that leaves me overworked, understocked, and completely sick of fake fur by the beginning of December, swearing that next year, NEXT YEAR, will be different: I will start early, I will pace myself, I will plan everything out so that there doesn't have to be all this scrambling. Hah.

Just now, a series of unlikely events led to me smashing my eye area into the handle of one of my desk drawers. (See, the handles, they're out to get me.) I realize that my chances of developing a black eye are slim, but just in case, I want to be prepared - given my lifestyle, I'm unlikely to have another shiner to talk about ever, so I need a good backstory. The "someone looked at me wrong" or "you should see the other guy" type responses are funny and classic, sure, but let's face it - they've been done. I'd like something new and fresh and as ridiculous as possible. Any thoughts?

In other stupid injury news, I have done something terrible and achy to my left hip. I suspect this may have happened at the ArtBeat fashion show/dance party on Saturday, which makes things all the more embarassing because I am a kind of crappy, self-conscious dancer, and as a result don't actually, um, move around all that much while "dancing." I have a standing injury, is more like it. Maybe a swaying injury. That's just sad.

From here.