Category: Crafts

Under normal circumstances, this would be where you’d see the weekly episode of “The Adventures of Cynical Woman,” the always-exciting webcomic about my life as a geek mom. But today, I’m sharing something a little different!

As many of you know, November is the month for NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. During NaNoWriMo, writers all over bang away at their keyboards in an effort to churn out 50K words in one month, in the hopes of having the first rough draft of a novel which they can then edit into something actually readable during the rest of the year.

I am not one of those people.

I’ve done NaNoWriMo before, and I think it’s great. There’s something truly awesome about giving yourself permission to pull out all the stops on a project that you’ve always wanted to do. But I don’t want to write a novel this year. I’ve written novels before. And while I enjoy writing, for various reasons, it does not make me a lot of money. But there are other things that I do, and enjoy, that do make me money. So I am hereby announcing my personal pull-out-all-the-stops-to-get-it-done-in-November project.

It’s “Make an Evil Etsy Shop Month” (or MEESMo) here at CynicalWoman.com!

I actually started this over the summer, laying claim to the name “Cynical Woman” for the shop and starting up a profile. Then last month, when the Hubster was furloughed, I cancelled plans t go to all but two conventions this year and started working on patterns for some small toys I knew I wanted to sell online. Things sort of stalled, however, as other things in life (Girl Scouts, the kids’ school, etc.) reared up.

Then NaNoWriMo crept up and I realized that while I did not want to write a novel, I did want to work away at a project that was JUST FOR ME during the month. And I thought for a couple hours about what I wanted that project to be and I decided that I was going to get an Etsy shop set up this month even if it killed me (or caused me to kill someone else). So on Friday, November 1st, I went to the bookstore and picked up a copy of “How to Sell Your Crafts Online” along with “How to Make Money Using Etsy” and I got to work.

So far, I’ve polished my profile page and put together a GORGEMOUS avatar for myself…

It’s MEEEEE!!

I also put together a banner for the shop that I think sums up what I plan to sell pretty well, which is evil hand-made toys.

Love me, love my Etsy banner!

The next step will be to create my store policies and figure out how I want to handle shipping. While I do that, I’ll keep working on my first few toys I want to sell, then photograph them and list them on the site. I’m hoping that before 15 November, I’ll have my first items listed for sale. It won’t be much, but the store will be all set up and ready for me to list more items once I get to that point. Then I’ll settle down and work on making more evil stuff just as fast as I can!

If you want to see how the shop progresses over the month, the URL is www.etsy.com/shop/cynicalwoman. At least I think that’s the URL. Every time I plug in that URL, Etsy changes it to something else and I get either my profile page or a preview page of stuff I can edit for the shop. So do me a favor, okay? Go check out that URL and let me know if it works! Testing my links is part of this month’s MEESMo goals.

Anyhoo, I will keep you all updated on the progress of the Etsy shop, either here or on Twitter. You can follow me on twitter at @Cynical_Woman. Now I’m going to get back to work on my Etsy shop. MEESMo HOOOOOOOO!!