They Say The Mind's The First To Go

So, in keeping with the whole business of trying to actually get my novel published, I sat down last week to sketch out what I think an author website might need to have. I went back and forth for quite a while about pen name vs. not and finally decided to just not because, really, why? (I couldn't come up with a compelling argument.) With that in mind, I went off to my sister's favorite webhost and checked to see if the domain name for my first name/last name was still available. I was incredibly bummed to find that it was not.

This then restarted the issue of pen name? Or .net domain? Or use my nickname instead of full first name? I kicked around the options on my own and with my sister and Tim and couldn't really decide on anything, so decided to let it rest for a bit and instead work on one of the submission packets for an agency that asks for more than a query letter and a few pages. (Those I had ready, but they want some other things like an analysis of competition in the last five years, so forth. Doable, but a bit of work.)

With that finally put together, I was chatting with my sister again about the domain name thing and she asked, "Wait...I thought you owned that domain?"

Not to my knowledge. I remembered that we had briefly kicked around the idea of registering it a million years ago, but didn't think that we had, and said as much. So she said, "Did you do a whois?"

No, of course not. Why would I do something that logical? And so I did a whois and there, happily smiling back to me as the registrar, was my sister's company name. Apparently we did go ahead and grab the domain name when we were talking about it.

I feel marginally ridiculous that I spent so much time trying to think of another domain name, but honestly, the idea that I might already own it did not occur to me. Tim laughed for about five minutes when I told him...you're free to do the same. This definitely ranks up there in my list of blonde moments (except, of course, that this one lasted for well over two weeks.)

In other news, I'm in the process of getting that set up - so if you happen to know my first and last name, feel free to take a look (though give me a few days, k? Right now there's not much there other than a default WordPress post and a header image.)