Make It

Uncriticism

An interesting read about the hesitance to criticize design in the blog world. Matt and I have talked about this issue a bit. He's more familiar with more techy/geeky (male-dominated?) types of blogs where people and products get regularly criticized by both writers and commenters. Is it a gendered thing? Are female bloggers scared to be seen as not nice?

"The last category of the uncriticized is perhaps the newest: the power of happy. I speak mostly of the bloggers, those too helpful, too tasteful, and too relentlessly positive to be critiqued. There are two versions of this: the ostensibly neutral online magazine, like Dezeen and Fast Company’s Co. Design blog, and the more personal design blog. Co. Design occasionally publishes criticism, including a recent test run of the Jawbone UP, but the overall tone is aggressively up." 

 

Happy New Year!

Looks like somebody partied a little too hard last night. twitter.com/rifferaff/stat…

— shannon riffe (@rifferaff) January 1, 2012

Online Marketing and the Self-Published Author

The Wall Street Journal recently profiled self-publishing success story Darcie Chan, who spent $1,000 on some really effective marketing strategies for her first ebook and sold 400,000 copies.

I've always wondered why self-published authors don't do more online advertising like this. I think the quick answer is that they don't even know where to start. This overview is a nice overview of some of the basics, and even taught me a few things. For example, I didn't know that anyone could purchase a review from Kirkus.

Just as agencies have emerged to help businesses with social media marketing, I wonder if we'll start to see the emergence of marketing agencies specifically geared toward online promotion for self-published authors. (via)

 

Done is Better Than Perfect

A worthy mantra. (photo credit)

Writing Motivation

I found out some big news this weekend when I heard that my former writing group partner, Phoebe, scored a two-book deal with Simon and Schuster. While I now know a couple of people with literary agents, Phoebe is the first person I actually know to get a book deal and it couldn't have happened to a better writer. Phoebe loves YA but she's also able to look at the genre with a critical eye. She's smart and thoughful and I'm really happy that her perspective is going to be represented on bookshelves. I can't wait to follow her progress on the blog as she goes through edits, cover design, marketing, and all the other steps it takes to get her books on the shelves in 2013. In the meantime, she's done a post on her blog answering some common question about getting published.

Phoebe and I started writing our respective books around the same time. While she's gone through revision after revision (I read and offered feedback on an early draft), I've sort of fizzled out. But no more! Phoebe's achievement is great motivation for me. It makes the whole idea of actually getting an agent and then actually getting published seem that much more real. The kick in the pants that I needed came this weekend when I agreed at my current writing group to submit my manuscript for critique on January 1. This gives me a hard and fast deadline and holds me accountable to 5 other people. It's time to whip my current manuscript into readable shape and send it out into the world.

Finally, a writer who is another great source of inspiration to me is Lauren Oliver, whose BEFORE I FALL was one of my favorite YA books of 2010. In addition to being a talented writer, Lauren runs a book packaging company that has sold 20 books in something like two years which is just mind-blowing. Here's a short article about the success she's found in publishing.

Carnitas. Yeah.

Between the wedding, the food orgy of Thanksgiving, and Matt getting three square meals a day at a weekend-long conference, I haven't yet had the chance to cook a giant piece of meat. But when I do, this so-simple-this-can't-be-right Carnitas recipe is tops on my list.

Seriously, there are three ingredients and one of them is water!

(photo by Jennifer Causey)

Sisters in Style

Fly posted this a few weeks ago but I've been meaning to share it here anyway. I love this Sisters in Style feature on the Madewell site (sidenote: Can we talk about Madewell? I think their marketing is really great and the stuff on their website is cute. I've sort of enjoyed their clothes from afar for a while but then I went to the recently opened Madewell in nearby Troy, MI and saw their clothing in person for the first time and was so underwhelmed. I knew they were the "younger sister" of J.Crew, but the clothes seemed really cheap, way overpriced and the styling was too aggressively hipster. It really turned me off of the brand a bit. I guess I'm not the target demo?).

In any case, sisters Cassi and Nicki have style for days. They've lived in a million different countries but they talk like they grew up in Southern California. I totally want to know more about them because they seem interesting (Nicki's job is listed as "tea consultant!") and genuine and funny and where can I get that grey nail polish Nicki is wearing in the vid? More Cassi and Nicki, less Kardashians, please!

Check out the video on Madewell.

Hitched!

I apologize for the extended absence, but, in all fairness, a lot has happened since my last post. I've moved (still within Ann Arbor), started a new job, and, oh yeah, got married!

Matt and I tied the knot on 11.11.11 in Chicago. Our ceremony took place on the 94th floor of the John Hancock Center and we had a dinner afterwards at a restaurant called Tru. We had seven guests, which consisted only of parents and siblings. It was a really nice, low stress way to mark the occasion and I'm really happy we chose to get married this way after considering a lot of other options (big wedding, wedding in Ann Arbor, DIY backyard wedding, etc).

I'll talk about it in more detail once I get more photos to share. I'm still waiting for them to trickle in from our friends and family who all acted as photographers for the occasion. You'll see that I did end up wearing my glasses and I found a dress with sleeves, yay! Also the dress is a Lela Rose, which I found on Shopbop for 70% off. This was really exciting because I had lusted after a Lela Rose dress from the very beginning but had assumed it would be out of my price range. The quality is incredible and now I'm looking for other fancy occasions where I can wear it. New Years?

I'll definitely do a more comprehensive wedding recap later on. We did a pretty non-traditional, low key wedding and I don't think there are enough online resources for how to plan a celebration like this.

I Want More

I adore everything Maria Vessette does, so of course I'm crazy in love with the new website and blog for her creative studio, More & Co.

It's filled with lots of amazing behind the scenes (and food) photos, as well as a look at her collaboration with bloggers Stephanie Congdon Barnes and Brian Ferry for a Starbucks campaign that actually makes me want to drink Starbucks. Read how that collabo came about here.

Our New Home...Almost

Over the weekend, Matt and I went to our new house that we'll be moving into on September 1 to coordinate plans for our move with the current tenants - friends of ours who are going abroad for a year. 

It's a super cute little ranch house with mostly hardwood floors but there's carpet in the bedroom. I'm thinking I'd like to put a rug over the carpet because it's kind of blah.

These flat-weave rugs from Wisteria are calling out to me.

We have a bunch of FLOR tiles that are still in great shape and have served us well through three apartments, but I'm ready for a change.

Bought This For the Packaging

Citron Green tea from Harney and Sons. I love their little tins and that triangle shaped sachet. Does anyone know where I can find empty sachets in this shape so I can fill them with my own tea blends?

Making A Deal

My computer is dying.

It overheats like crazy, is noisy, the keyboard sometimes jams up, and - most heartbreaking of all - it can't maintain an Internet connection longer than 15 or 20 mins at a time. This means I've resulted to major use of my phone for Internetting and use Matt's computer for blog posts. Typepad doesn't have an Android app, otherwise, I'd be tapping out these suckers on my Swype keyboard during my bus commute.

Even though a sick computer is annoying it's not the worst thing to have for someone who's trying to finish writing a novel. I'm not going to lie, the Internet is a major distraction, so knowing that I can only stay online for 15 minutes, with another 15 minutes of downtime before I can connect again, makes random Internet surfing seem much less appealing. When I sit down at my computer now, it's only to write.

So, I've made a deal with myself. No new computer until I finish this book. I think this will actually prove to be quite good motivation.

Save the Date: 11/11/11

It's been a while since I posted a wedding update and there's plenty to report. Actually, though, the title of this post might be a little misleading. Don't save the date. Because you're not invited. We're keeping our November wedding very small and low-key with only seven attendees: our parents and siblings.

By keeping the wedding small, we're also keeping the budget small, even by splurging on nice things like fancy hotels and gourmet meals. 

When: Friday, November 11, 2011

Where: Chicago, IL. We'll be 94 floors up in the John Hancock Observatory for the ceremony.

(Image credit)

Afterwards, we'll have dinner at a local restaurant, Tru, which had a semi-private dining room just the right size for our party of 9. Other options only had rooms for large groups so we were very happy to stumble upon this after some Yelp research.

It was fun to ask friends for Chicago recommendations as we planned. It's such a massive city with so much to do, we needed some experts to help us navigate. There's no way we'll be able to do it all in the three days we have for the wedding, so I foresee many Chicago trips in our future. We haven't been once since we moved to Michigan, only 4 hours away. And Matt has never been!

This weekend I made some major progress on the planning front. Buying our Amtrak tickets for the trip, purchasing my dress (!)(more on that later), and getting in touch with friends from my 48 Waltham studio days in Boston to hopefully make my ring and announcements (invitations aren't really necessary when you have 7 guests, but I still wanted pretty paper). It's finally feeling real.

7 Summer Photos

I recently got my first smartphone and it's opened up a whole new world. Especially since my laptop can no longer hold an Internet connection longer than 15 minutes.

I now check my Twitter and email primarily from my phone. Google Reader, too. Probably the most fun thing about my new phone (it's a Samsung Galaxy), is the camera. There's no Instagram for Android yet, so I'm using Vignette, the next best thing. What do I take photos of?

Homemade pizzas, made using a Mario Batali recipe from my newest cookbook.

Summer is festival season in Ann Arbor, which means Main Street is closed occasionally for Art Fair....

...Or a vintage car show.

We took advantage of a wine sale at our local grocery store to try something new. A rose with a label I liked.

Enjoyed some meals at new dining options in downtown, Mark's Carts....

...And Mani, probably my favorite restaurant in Ann Arbor right now.

And, of course, lots of quality cat time.

That Hair! That Dress!

Just two images I recently saw in my Google Reader and liked.

Via Curly Nikki and All The Mountains

I Want to Live Inside the Room and Board Emails

Room and Board is one of the only companies whose email list I voluntarily subscribe to. Not because I'm in the market for tasteful midcentury-inspired furniture (I wish, but my current budget doesn't allow), but because I just really like looking at their product.

I love how they style the images as well. They're these inviting living rooms and patios that make me wish I lived there, or that a friend lived there and we would sit on the deck enjoying some sophisticated cocktail and homemade flatbreads just luxuriating in our extremely tasteful decor.

In high school I wanted to live inside the J.Crew catalogs.  I like the current J.Crew catalogs but they're completely different from the ones I remember from the mid to late 90s. I'm not lying when I say images of attractive people in roll neck sweaters under crunchy autumn leaves probably played a major role in my decision to go to college in Connecticut.

The Design Sponge Book

Congrats to Grace Bonney on the upcoming Design Sponge book! I find Grace's trajectory from full time worker with a little Blogspot-hosted blog to multi-media powerhouse to be incredibly impressive and inspirational. This might be a weird thing to say, but it makes me love the Internet. The fact that it allows someone to completely follow their dream and bootstrap a blog that goes on to be a major force in the industry.

She seems to manage it all with (ahem) grace, too. She and I participated in a panel on blogging a looong time ago (sidenote: I guess it was only 2008, but it feels like forever ago) and when she returned to Boston a few months later, I remember being surprised and flattered that she remembered my name and our conversation. It was about making rounded corners in GIMP, which also happens to be the most visited post on this blog, by far.

Lately, I find myself more interested in what she is doing herself and with her brand than the content of the blog, though I did really enjoy this behind the scenes look at the design of the book cover. And the book trailer looks really great.

It's The Voyeur In Me

I love this post on Jeana Sohn's blog in which she took pics of her friend Heather in front of her closet wearing various items from said closet. I would totally read a blog that only consisted of posts exactly like this. People wearing their own clothes from their own closet. It's the voyeur in me. Does this blog exist? Someone start it!

Also, what is it about this type of photo layout that it always makes me want to consume. It's the uniform-photos-all-in-a-row type of look. Uniqlo and Baggu do this really well and it makes me want to buy buy buy! 

The Wedding Day: Glasses or No Glasses?

I mentioned the other day how I need to tone up and start exercising to look cute for my wedding. And since we've opened the Pandora's Box of my personal vanity, let's just keep digging in!

I wear glasses everyday. In college I tried to be cute and only wear them in class and then go without in social settings (made for very awkward interactions in the dining hall when I literally couldn't tell who the person waving at me was until they were within an arm's length).

But my eyesight is much worse now. I shudder to think what the widespread use of computers, smartphones, tablets, 3D glasses (p.s. DO NOT see Transformers 3. It's terrible), etc is doing to the eyesight of the Millenial Generation. 

I'm not super comfortable with eyedrops and touching my eyes, so I've never worn contacts, but I've wondered if I should look into them. Not only for a more mature and professional look personally, but also for the wedding day.

I do think it depends on the type of dress. A strapless gown with a full skirt would probably look a little off with glasses. But I could probably get away with it with the more cocktail-type dress for our smaller wedding.

Did you wear glasses on your wedding day? Do you know a bride who rocked them and looked awesome?

Image via Warby Parker

My Weight. My Age.

How to put this delicately?

I'm gaining weight.

It started when we moved here in 2008 from Boston. In Boston, not only did I have a commute that involved extensive walking and subway riding (which I call commuter's interval training: walk briskly to station, sprint down stairs and through closing doors of train, stand on train and tighten ab muscles to stabilize your core, sprint to an open seat, clench legs to avoid touching your neighbor, dart out of train and up stairs so you can cross the street without getting get stuck at the red light; repeat several times a day) but most other activities in our lives were accomplished without a car.

Grocery shopping - which, granted, is a GIANT pain when you have a half walk mile back to the house with cartons of milk and OJ, and who knew canned beans could be so heavy and why did I buy these again...? - dinners out, visiting friends, going shopping. All of these were accomplished without the use of a car on a regular basis. 

Then we moved to Southeast Michigan, the birthplace of the automobile, and while Ann Arbor is really transit-friendly as far as this part of the country goes, we still found ourselves using the car more and more, mostly because we had to. 

Now I have a traditional full time job, I take a 50 minute bus commute - which involves very little walking - or drive or catch a ride with Matt - which involves no walking - and sit on my butt for 8 - 10 hours a day. The end result is that I'm heavier that I've ever been. Not fat, but big for me, a 5'2" small-framed person who's never had to worry too much about diet but now given the rapidly approaching 3-0 and my sedentary lifestyle will have to make some changes.

High cholesterol and diabetes run in my family and that's something I've always been aware of but never made permanent lifestyle changes to address. Now, however, I'm feeling the urge. 

The reason? The wedding.

Basically, vanity is now forcing me to do what family health history could not. I need to start exercising and I need to stick with it because I want to look cute on my wedding day.

I don't want to spend money on a gym membership but I do own a bike and have large indoor spaces to jump rope, lift weights, etc. How do I start this exercise thing? Any tips?