This week it’s all about catching up on blogging. There’s been so much going on for the last few months, yet I haven’t been able to post any of it due to my stupidly ineffective mobile broadband contract. 

By the way, I spoke to Gus last night (he’s been away travelling on business, hence my decampment to Inverness) and he reckons the 3 dongle works perfectly from a Holiday Inn near Halifax. It remains to be seen if this is a local pocket of high performance, or if things will improve when we move house at the end of June (we wonder if ancient stone-walled tenement might be having an adverse effect). Perhaps it’s worth delaying my angry letter onslaught until we find out… 

But back to what’s been going on lately, and why I’ve been doing practically nothing for the last 3 months. 

After the shocking, depressing write-off that was the second half of 2008, we were sincerely hoping for a bit more luck in 2009. Promisingly enough, we got an offer on the yawning money-pit we used to call “home” (that’s before we started calling it “that place where everything breaks”) and I started to feel a bit better about the whole baby-making business after our horrible miscarriage in August 08. 

I’m sure you can imagine how flummoxed we were then, when the house sale turned into the most ridiculous and drawn-out, nit-picky, over-demanding, “let’s make the vendors pay for another survey because we suspect there might be a sneezing pixie that will cause the house to fall down” type processes I’ve ever been through in my life. 

Honestly, if I ever see their surveyor again, I will shoot him on sight – you seriously have to question the intelligence of a man who will demand to see the builder’s warrant for a sinple bathroom refit, and the electrical compliance certificate for a shower that runs off the combi boiler!! You may laugh, but we had to pay £65 plus VAT for a letter of comfort from a highly confused bathroom surveyor to confirm that neither piece of documentation was remotely necessary. 

Anyhow, between that and the sad loss of our second baby at the end of February (right at the height of house nonsense) we were feeling pretty sorry for ourselves again by the beginning of Spring. What was this? 2008 was following us into the next year, bringing all its bloody nonsense with it! Surely that’s against all the rules… 

But Spring is a great time of year (it’s always been my favourite season) and things with the flat sorted themselves out eventually. We’re now going to be moving to a cutesy wee house in the West of Edinburgh – in fact about 300 yards from where we used to live. It’s got a South-facing back garden, with patio doors from the living room and decking for the many, many barbeques we’ll be having this summer – come rain or shine. The nightmarish sale is well and truly behind us now, and we’re just looking forward to getting our keys and moving in. 

Also, I ended up pregnant again on my first cycle after the second baby we lost and am now 11 weeks, 3 days and counting… A few early scans have confirmed all is progressing well, and despite some truly demoralising morning sickness (serious misnomer if you ask me – I felt vomitous all the bloody time!) and tiredness, I’m doing really well. I think I’m starting to come to the end of the icky part now, which is nice. I’m feeling a lot more energetic, and have even been able to contemplate whole days without a nap in the middle. 

So it’s back to work for me now! I’ve had a lot of time out to think through what exactly I’m going to be doing with my life, and have come to a few conclusions about Top Cat Copy as a business. 

Firstly, I’ve started to question why I’m restricting myself to copywriting, when (a) my skills extend much further than that, (b) nobody wants to pay for business writers during a recession, and (c) sitting in a wee room by myself writing gives me much less of a kick than getting out into businesses and solving problems for them. 

I’ve recently been doing a bit of consultancy work with an Edinburgh business called Anthyllis – see www.anthyllis.co.uk – helping them to rationalise and improve their website, and giving them advice on how to take advantage of the various online marketing opportunities open to them. Apart from the fact that I just LOVE their business and products (gorgeous organic, natural skin/bodycare by Dr Haushcka and Spiezia), I’ve also really enjoyed sticking my nose right into their business and using my problem-solving and marketing skills to come up with ideas for them to manage their brand and raise their profile. 

Yes, copywriting will form a part of the service I’m providing, but it won’t be the main product. I keep forgetting that I’ve actually unusually technology and web-savvy for the average small business owner. I’ve caught myself assuming that my copywriting clients know how to structure a website sensibly, how many pages their sites should have, how they should be optimised for search engines, and how they can be backed up with less traditional marketing tools such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, link exchanges…. the list goes on. 

In fact, one of my clients didn’t know any of this at all. More importantly, neither did the client’s web designer – which made me think that there’s a bit of a gap somewhere in between the small business owner who wants a website, and the web designer who knows how to write the code. There’s a need for someone tech and web-savvy on one hand, but creative on the other, who knows how to take business requirements from the technophobes, and translate it into functional specification for the build bods. 

Think about it, how how often must losses in translation between end-users and techies contribute to websites that just aren’t fit for purpose? It must happen all the time! 

Anyway, these are my musings thus far. Hopefully the aforementioned gap will prove to be Elaine-shaped, and I’ll finally have found my niche. In the meantime, I’m going to continue musing and pick as many brains as I can until musing turns into an actual plan.

I’ve just got to hope that this will all happen a bit more readily now that I’m not constantly fighting the urge to be sick on myself and fall asleep. God bless pregnancy; babies are wonderful, but growing them doesn’t half take it out of you! 

By the way, one decision I’ve definitely taken is that  in light of the above-mentioned diversification, my company name will shortly be changing to Top Cat Communications. 

Now how’s that for progress?