Avon Van Hassel

If you’re new to my website, welcome! But if you’ve been here before, you may notice some changes in the last couple of days. Let me walk you through the changes.

First of all, after almost two years on the internet, I finally bought my domain! Yay! This is the first ‘.com’ I’ve ever had, so that’s exciting to me.

Second, I’ve redone practically everything. I have a new theme, new style guide, and new home page and header.

All of the site pages have been rewritten and the blog post featured images that weren’t my own photos have been changed and spiffied (I will finish editing the ones that are mine shortly).

I made myself a new logo and commissioned a friend to make me another. You can find her awesome art here.

There are also a couple of mailing list campaigns going now, as well, one of which gives you a free chapter from my unpublished book, Magic Beans. I even got cleared to affiliate my website with Scrivener, the most amazing writing programme money can buy.

So what prompted all of this? Well, to be honest with you, it’s long overdue. I’m not the best with getting organised and staying motivated. I had noticed that my blog post ideas were stale and flat, recycling old things. I got thinking that I needed a planner, so I did a little digging, commissioned one from a friend and got a free printable for the meantime. Then my friend told me about Wonderlass. (This isn’t a promo post, I swear.) If you’re an entrepreneur, I recommend checking her out.

I started watching the free videos, took a couple free or cheap courses, filled out some workbooks. I even bought a Panda Planner to get myself sorted out.

The day I decided to take this seriously, my friend Katrina, who I mentioned up there, referred me to a mailing list viral promoter for fairy tale retelling authors like me and fans of the show, Once Upon a Time. If you’re interested in that, don’t panic. It starts on March 20, and if you follow me on any social media platform, trust me, you will know.

So it was all looking pretty serendipitous for a while.

Until…JURY DUTY.

I lost two full days waiting around doing that, and when I was finally released, I ended up with, like, four days worth of work to do in 18 hours. I don’t even know how I did it. The image on the homepage alone took me three hours.

I still have a lot of work left to do, but it’s all behind-the-scenes stuff from here out. I’m working on a mailing list series for worldbuilding, a list of questions and concerns new and aspiring writers have, and even working on setting up a little shop where I might sell themed jewelry and custom scents that pair with my books, and may even offer my services as a beta reader.

I’m interested to see what you guys think about the rebrand, and what I can do to better serve you.