Bites Has Stuff

So in my mad dash last month to try and get business cards together through someone legit instead of ghetto-styling it, I signed up with VistaPrint and I ended up getting blasted with all their promo emails as a result. Well one of those emails ended up being a promo to get a bunch of free stuff so I figured what the hell. I'll try it out. I didn't want business cards now since I only use them at BEA but I wanted to try out some of their other products and see what the quality was like.

For designs I ended up purchasing the two kits that Danny used to create my current blog theme and I started slapping stuff together. Here's what I came up with (click to enlarge the images).

Magnets (25 free)


A Pen


Postcards (100 free, the prints have Bites and website info on them)


A Notepad (my favorite of the bunch)


Address Labels (140 free, privy stuff removed for obvious reasons)

Not including the cost of the kits, I spent $23 and change, including shipping costs. According to the website, I saved over $83. VistaPrint tends to get you on shipping costs which, I guess, is how they can offer stuff at such reduced cost. But for this all I paid was shipping and upload costs. The costs of the kit came out to be $10 and change. Not too bad. I planned on throwing some stuff into packages when I mail them, for bookmarks or whatever. And I tend to write little notes when I ship books. Now I have my own note pad!

The stuff should come in either tomorrow or Thursday. I'll give an update when I can evaluate the quality of my stuff.

Why I Don't Twit, Twat or Tweet

Or have a Facebook fan page.

Or a MySpace page.

Or any other number of social networking tools for this blog.

Because I'll be damned if I can remember them all. When I was 18 I had a slightly drunken nose to chin collision with a guy twice my size. My nose crunched like a piece of styrofoam and exploded in a torrent of blood. When I woke up the following morning, my head was screaming but I still went to work. Under florescent lights for roughly 45 minutes, I ended up sprawled out at the front of the drug store I worked at screaming. An emergency room visit later and I had a concussion and I slipped into Vicodin land for the weekend. When I emerged from my haze, I left my memory behind. For the following three months I lost a good 80% of my short term memory. After that it slowly came back but not fully and it doesn't function as a normal 26 year old memory should.

Even if I could remember to keep on top of all those social networking thingies, I wouldn't bother with signing up for them. I think Twitter would be excellent for a type of emergency response system but for normal every day people . . . I just don't give a shit what you're eating, if you're in the shower (which is really fucking stupid, by the way, why not just hang a sign on your front door that says, I'm vulnerable, come rob me?), if you're going grocery shopping or whatever. And I'll be damned if I share that kind of stuff with anyone. It's not necessary.

And, in my eyes, it's not necessary for this blog to be linked up all over the place like Facebook and whatnot. Why? Why am I marketing my eyeballs out of my sockets? So I can shill more ARCs from publishers? Nah. So I can get more followers? If people haven't figured out by now, that number is insanely superficial and doesn't accurately portray just how popular any blog is or isn't. To get money? I lose money on this site and I have nothing I want to sell. So why am I going to pimp myself all over the place? Word of mouth has worked just fine up until now so I think I'll stick with that.

Plus, it's time focused on an area of my life where it shouldn't be. I'm a writer. I need to spend my time writing and editing if I want any kind of hope of getting published. To essentially waste my time promoting my book review blog in all of these places would take away my writing time. I procrastinate enough normally without all those distractions. Now if I were promoting my writing blog for the sake of my book that's coming out, entirely different story. This blog is a hobby. If other people want to join me in my hobby, great! If not, oh well! No skin of my back. But I'm not going to stress out over promotion. If I get found, I get found. If I don't, I don't.

So no, I will never have a Twitter. It's hard enough for me to update my personal Facebook page status once a day let alone having to stress over keeping a Twitter account updated. This blog will never have a fan page on Facebook that I create. If someone wants to create one for me, super! But I won't do it. Why? You guys come here. I'm not going to say anything different there that I wouldn't here. Redundancies are time wasters in my eyes.

I am on Goodreads. I do have my site tracked by some blip sites. I comment on other bloggers' posts that strike me as wanting to comment on. I email back and forth with bloggers and publicists and authors. I host a couple of events simply because I want to. But that's about as interactive as I'm going to get. If you want to contact me, feel free! I'm not going to stab you with a fork. But for the most part I blog in a bubble. I do my own thing and I only get involved in things that I feel passionate enough to get involved in. Everything else, meh. I'll leave it to the super passionate book bloggers to handle. They're much better at it than I am.