German publisher knocks on my door

On Friday I received a Facebook request from the rep of a German publisher asking me to send him my contact details.

The publisher wanted to publish one of my articles in a textbook under development, and they wanted to send me details.

Within hours, the whole process was ironed out: they’d already worked out how the story would be used and had a draft lay-out of the page.

All they needed was to finalise the legal stuff and find out if I was happy with the way the piece was used.

It was a lovely experience, and improved my mood tremendously (I was very angry because I’d been robbed that morning/previous night).

Birthday celebration

Saturday Baby took a couple of her girlfriends to the movies. They eventually decided on Night at the Museum 2, as none of them had seen it before.

They had a lot of fun – lots of popcorn, slushies, sweets and McFlurry’s. Ja, I wanted to sneak in something nutritious in the mix, but the girls wouldn’t have it. And it was a birthday celebration, so I let it slide.

The girls spent the rest of the afternoon window shopping at the mall (under parental supervision of course). Baby used some of the birthday gift money to buy herself 2 DVDs – Beverly Hills Chihuahua and 5 episodes of the Mew Mew Power cartoon.

One of the mothers sent a big bottle of Givenchy’s YSATIS as a gift. She must have forgotten about Baby’s birthday (and felt guilty about not buying a gift).

I had a lot of fun trying to talk Baby out of it. Eleven-year old girls who still watch Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Mew Mew Power don’t need YSATIS, do they?

Baby wouldn’t budge: it was her gift, even if it was inappropriate and the fact that I wanted it so much must mean it was a good thing. Eventually, I managed to negotiate some usage priviledges:-)

Marketing is critical to business success

We spent most of Sunday with a good friend of mine and her daughter. My friend is a very versatile, talented artist and has recently finished doing artwork for a big hotel (artwork in my post was in line with interior designer's brief).

Unfortunately, she’s terrible at marketing herself, operating from the premise that all she has to do is produce good art and the work will come in. Hah!

Thankfully, she recognises that business doesn't quite work out that way ( and she has to be to a business person in addition to being an artist). So we spent a lot of time talking about how she can get her name and work out into the market, given the difficulty she has putting herself out to people.

I think it would be really lovely she could find a business development manager/artist’s rep who would take care of getting clients and doing the business management end of things. It would free my friend up to focus on what she does really well.

But I have no idea where she can find one ( not being in the business myself) and suggested she do a lot of internet research. Hmm. We’ll see if something comes out of it.

OneLove Poetry Competition: The call for love poems continues

Over the past month, we received a couple of entries (poems) for the OneLove Poetry Competition. Not as many as we need, or what I hoped for. So we’re going to run the competition again for the next couple of months.

So if you write poetry, please submit your poem to the competition? The theme is love and respect.

You can submit the poems directly on the comments page ( which no one had done:-) or you can email me at admin@onelovesouthernafrica.org ( as some people have done)