Meet Dottie

by Sue Viders

 

Branding. Marketing. Standing out from the crowd.

These are todays problems for the writer.

 

Not the writing. Not creating a fascinating story. Not creating memorable characters.

 

No. It's all about name recognition. Or as they call it now-a-days... "branding." I hate the word "branding"...as I always think I'm a cow waiting for the numbered tag to be stapled on my ear. I much prefer the word marketing. That I can handle.

 

So when I decided that I should begin marketing my name and what I do, the first problem I faced was how to separate my blogs and my identity from all the other hundreds of bloggers who wrote about writing.

 

I needed an image to put with each blog. As an artist and former art teacher I always notice the pictures, images, photographs bloggers use. Some are interesting, some are blah, and some, well most of them, hold no interest for me at all.

 

Plus the images are always different. I'm dyslexic. I have a hard time remembering names so I cope by remembering visual clues. But since most bloggers change their pictures with each blog, I can't keep track of the blog, the site, or even the writer's name.

 

I wanted an image that people would remember, for better or worse, when they saw the image...they would think...a blog on writing from Sue Viders. What image to use? I spent days looking through microsoftclipart.com to see what I could use...well I'm too cheap to pay for a picture every time I write something. It needed to be free. For hours I searched. Nothing looked right.

 

Fast forward a few days when my youngest daughter called. Could she come over for lunch? Of course. As we worked on a tossed salad she began telling me about one of her "jobs" coming up...she did caricatures. She was going to do them for several birthday parties and for our city on the nights we have "music in the park." I told her about my futile search for an image. "Not a problem mom. I'll create one for your blog."

 

Back to the search. After going through literally thousands of pictures, photographs, illustrations and even cartoons we decided on a mouse. Why a mouse? Should be obvious, we writers use a mouse on our computers...grin.

 

My daughter spent several days drawing mice. I threw in my ideas and together we came up with a drawing of a mouse trying to write a story. A female mouse with a "mouse" earring and a very big pencil...and three dots, because I use dots all the time. I absolutely hate commas, semi-colons and especially plain colons.

 

So...Dottie was born! I'm planning on using her when and where ever I can...heck, I may even put her in my email signature line.

 

Look for Dottie. And when you do see her you'll know Sue is at it again... writing something about writing.