www.michellemuckley.com

I decided at the beginning of today, that no matter what I would achieve two things. The first was to complete and publish my book trailer for The Loss of Deference. The second was to finish and publish my website. However simple these tasks seemed at the start of the day, plain sailing it was not.

Let's start with the trailer, and what I thought would be simplest. After 'completing' the trailer last night, and pulling back the big red imaginary drapes and counting down 5-4-3-2-1, I waited as the short film of two minutes, but which constitutes no less than ten hours work played out in front of me.  What did I get in response from the other side of the sofa?  'I don't like it.' After a weekend of work, hours of internet trawling, hours of fiddling around with a music mixing program that I had no idea how to use, especially since I somehow managed to download it in Greek despite selecting English, and all I got was a big resounding 'hum, not sure about that bit'.  So I set to it at nine this morning undeterred making the changes suggested, and after three hours and a selection of bilingual swear words later, I had something of a finished project: 'Operation Book Trailer' was complete.

Next step, website. I had already purchased the website domain, and I had over a week ago unveiled the WIP at another impromptu settee conference and made any amendments suggested by the household critic. After the changes and the tweaks, I had what seemed like quite a nice website. So I clicked the big orange publish button, and I was away. No less than a minute later I had joined the other six hundred and twenty million websites and was officially part of the World Wide Web. So I merrily sent out my emails to family and friends, gave myself a little pat on the back and sat down for lunch.

It didn't even take an hour before the first phone call came in. 'I can't get on your website', was the reply. Silly fool, I thought, so I tried to load it myself. I saw the briefest flash of my name, but then instead of my carefully crafted book cover, something else was starting back at me: a pretty blonde woman wearing a nice selection of clothes that would likely get you arrested if you went out in them, and her retail price was certainly a lot more than the one dollar sixty cents required to pick up a copy of The Loss of Deference. As friendly as she seemed, she was fulfilling an entirely different purpose than was intended when I purchased www.michellemuckley.com.

After another hour of button pressing, website verification, computer scans, and un-publishing of the website for malware checks, I have once again been able to publish my site minus the sultry and unexpected additions.  You can follow the link above to check out the site, but the trailer is also here for you now.

So twelve long hours later, I have indeed finished with the day.  I got my website and my trailer published, albeit with quite a few unexpected twists and turns.  But then again, that just about sums up self publishing.  When you do everything yourself like we do, you learn on your feet.  You find the problems and learn the remedies as you go.  It’s a long task, but at the end of the day, I can sit here with my cup of tea and know that what I see before me is my own craft, as I intended it.  I don’t have a team, unless you count the critic sat on the other side of the settee and the thousands of people via twitter.  Well, and today I guess, some geezer who thought he’d drop a bit of porn on my nice shiny new website – thanks for the blog post.