The latest totems are up, and like all the rest, they’re my very most favorites ever!  Click on them to see the full menagerie and their stories.

These loverly beasties belong to Open Roads Coaching, Stitch Circus, and The Social Caterpillar.

I’d hoped to have the last few totems done before I posted the announcement, but alas, alark and woe,  a summer cold and a very sickly grumpy spouse have conspired against that plan.  But if you’re among the final few, never fear… they’re coming soon!

Having spent the last few days in a summer-cold-coming-on haze, I’ve had plenty of time to think. It’s not been a very productive think, but it’s been a very long one, so there have to be a few gems in there, right? This is my Dayquil enhanced attempt to capture a few of those gems, in their rough and unpolished state.

Being a successful Quirkipreneur is more than just throwing your henna’d hands in the air and celebrating your weirdness while perching it jauntily atop your head like a set of off-balance antlers. (although I have to admit, that IS fun)

Being a Quirkipreneur means approaching your unique oddities and creative strange-ness with intent. It means honing your presentation and message until your weirdness evolves into a highly marketable & palatable brand.

Knowing just how to hone that presentation? It means understanding and accepting not just your own quirks, but the quirks of your Right People (and probably those of your Wrong People, too.)

Because as a Quirkipreneur? It’s not all about *you*.

The brain has not been cooperating this week, and this morning? Yeah. It’s threatening to explode in a fit of dandelion fluff.  I’d draw you an illustration of what that feels like but, well, the artistic ability of a fluff brain is fairly limited.

But if you are missing my ramblings? Never fear! I wrote a guest post for Jade Craven’s LaunchWatch – it’s all about what I learned from launching my totem promotion, and you can find it here:

5 Lessons From A Launch That Went Wrong
(In All The Right Ways)

Since I didn’t ketchup over the weekend, you get your ketchup on Monday, this week.  And it’s a limited, brief ketchup, just dealing with Totems!

After a wee struggle with some tech issues, we’ve got a brand new way of displaying the totems & poles, and four new totems in the menagerie. Click on them to go to the pole, and read their messages:

Running your own creative business will stir up every neurotic impulse you’ve ever had, and then it will invent a few new ones just for fun.

You’re not alone in this; even the most experienced, qualified, and talented entrepreneurs struggle with doubt, fears, crippling and crippled egos, performance anxieties, over/under confidence, gambling too big, risking too little, yadda yadda into infinity and beyond.

Left untended, those neurotic quirks can cause big problems for your business.  A minor anxiety about finances can lead to avoiding record keeping which leads to tax nightmares.  Feeling less-than-confident about your writing can mean you avoid answering emails and miss sales.  Your over-compensating ego can mean you won’t even consider advice from experts and are forever re-inventing the wheel.

Letting your psyche run roughshod over your business? It’s just bad for business.

You already know all of this, I’m sure.

I know that you’re an astoundingly self-aware bunch who regularly takes a non-judgmental (if informal) inventory of personal strengths and weaknesses. You’ve thought hard about how your shortcomings might impact your business, and you’ve decided that you’re just not going to let that happen.

And your plan for not-letting-that-happen is…. ?

The Ketchups are my newly revived, mostly-weekly ritual, a fret-free way to assure that I post once a week, even if it’s not pure awesome-sauce. If you’d like to play along, just add your ketchup (or a link to it) in the condiment section below.

Whoa. This week? I got stuff DONE! Go me!

We have a new About page! I’m still scared to go and re-read it just yet, but I thought it was pretty rockin’ when I wrote it.

And writing about myself? I hate it so much that I avoided it by logged into LinkedIn and updated my contacts there – something I’d not done in 2 years. And I seriously hate LinkedIn, because it’s so formal and there are so many blanks in my resume and and and…. well. You get the picture. But my About-Page avoidance wasn’t quite severe enough to make me update Facebook.

First Things First! Two more Totems have been added to the Menagerie! They belong to Gordon Remey and ShivaMonster, and I had a lot of exploring both sites (stage magic and Shiva Nata.. does it get any better?) Click on the images below to see all 5 that have been completed.

(the three previous totems belong to Christy Bower, Taryn Blake and RainbowSpiritGoddess.  How cool are they?)

Second Things Second: The first-round of Totems are, sadly, sold out while I dig myself out from under 20+ orders in 36 hours.  That 20 sold didn’t surprise me, but the timing? Yeah. That seriously surprised me. I had to close the offer way early, for fear that I’d be making people wait months for delivery!