This week continued to be very wild in my personal life. In regards to my writing and this webpage as a whole, there are several exciting news, so let’s get going! In case you are interested in just a specific section, you can click on the links down here:
Tagline
As I was looking at my webpage and formatting it to my needs and playing around in the settings, I realized I didn’t have a tagline. Some weeks ago I just decided to use a very descriptive one (that I’m a writer and that this webpage is for various writings that come to my mind). I bounced a few ideas off of my wife and she suggested I should perhaps think of a latin saying.
And of course, she was right. I mean, I am obsessed with ancient Romans anyway (my cat is the roman goddess Flora and my dog is the roman goddess Diana), so of course that makes sense! I immediately thought of some of my all time favorites. “Audentes fortuna iuvat,” or the iterations thereabout. “Per aspera ad astra”, “Aleia iacta est”and so on and so forth. And even though I really like them all, they just didn’t seem to be quite fitting what I was looking for.
Finally, I picked up a booklet of latin proverbs and translations that I have (I mean, is anyone surprised? I have like 3 of those). Reading through it I stumbled on one particular quote that I loved before and just kind of forgotten, and everything clicked:
VERBA VOLANT, SCRIPTA MANENT
Literal translation: spoken words fly away, written words remain. This was, of course, perfect to me as a writer. Even more so because at this point I was toying around the idea of having a logo and this tagline fit perfectly.
Logo
Together with the tagline, I was thinking about what logo to use. WordPress suggested I check out Fiverr and so I did! I played around with their beta logo creator and looked around at various artists. I did some sketches and decided what I want. A phoenix (my favorite mythological creature) flying out of a book. My tagline would fit perfectly as well, awesome!
I thought about drawing / sketching it myself, but I didn’t want to pay $20 / month for Adobe products (subscriptions, subscriptions everywhere). So eventually, I decided to bite the bullet and because I was indecisive, I put an offer for a Gig on Fiverr. And the results were … absolutely terrible! The offer system is riddled with all sorts of acounts spamming about “ThE bESt LoGO mAKeR” and similar automated text. Nobody actually even read my description or the files I attached.
Until this young fella from India contacted me. His name was Masum and here you can find his Fiverr Page. He was new to the platform, but actually visited my website, read my description, checked the supporting files and contacted me. He was willing to do the work. So I decided: you know what? Since this is the only person who actually responded like a person and not an automated spam bot, what’s the worse that would happen? Me spend $35 and get nothing usable out of it? Well, I’m sure there are worse things in life than that.
It turns out, he was amazing. Do check him out if you’re in need of a logo design. There was some back and forth communication, but very quickly he was able to understand what / how I wanted the logo to look like and delivered four different versions. Here’s the two that I decided to use on this website, my very own logo as a writer!
Webpage Colors
Since I haven’t (yet) earned very much with my writing, I can’t really afford to pay for a WordPress plan that would allow me to modify the website with CSS and other things. In essence, I am right now somewhat limited in how I can chose the website-wide colors and how to format the webpage as a whole, but at the very least I was able to make it so that the titles and links now appear blue. That should pop up more and be easier to use!
So if it’s not a title, heading or subheading, it’s likely a link that you can click – like this one that will get you to my homepage.
Short Story – Lovestruck
I began sifting through my old material, because I wanted to at least re-publish some short stories from my old blog (and finish some unfinished ones). After reading the first one I quickly decided to take some time rethinking it and completely rewriting it. At the time, this was an untitled (but complete) story. I jotted down some thoughts and ideas in my Rocketbook (best notebook ever btw) and was eager to get going.
The result? Well, judge for yourself by reading Lovestruck here, but personally I’m really happy with how it turned out!
More short stories (at least one) in the upcoming week.
30 Second Reviews
Last (and least), I keep doing these mostly for myself. Although who knows? Maybe in the future someone else will get a kick out of reading them.
Anyhow, only one recent watch, called “Well Groomed” and otherwise a few series that I’ve watched some time ago or recently, depending. Attack on Titan, Battlestar Galactica, Mob Psycho 100 and One Punch Man. Check them out, it will only take you about 30 seconds!
Tomo Umer 
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