News From Hawkhill Acres

I used to be a one-L Lil. Now, I’m a two-L Lill. (I know there are two L’s in Lil and three in Lill, but I don’t count the first L. Call me quirky.) Anyhow, the way this came about is a long, drawn-out, torturous story that can be summed up in two words. Things happened. A couple of months ago, I was blissfully birding around the Net, working on links in my affiliate network, when I came across a form that wouldn’t let me enter my first name with fewer than four letters.

If I didn’t fill out the form, I couldn’t register my domain name, which was “lilhawkins.com”. Hawkins is the nom de plume I use for writing and business (not to be confused with the plume de ma tante, which is the pen I use to write the checks for the bills I have that makes going into business necessary, but I digress or should I say sortir du sujet?) At any rate, I was stumped, but only for a moment.

I could have used my given name, which is a lot longer than four letters, but I didn’t want to. I’ve been Lil since my nephews and nieces began to call me Aunt Lil and it’s been so long that their kids are calling me Aunt Lil now. So, on a whim, I just added an “L”, thinking that one letter wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference. But it did.

Because I had changed my name on the form, I thought I’d better change it on the domain name. So I did. Now my domain was lillhawkins.com, instead of lilhawkins.com. So how could I represent myself as “Lil” if my domain name said I was “Lill”? It was like something from a Sci-Fi movie or the pink stain in Dr. Suess’s The Cat In The Hat. I was morphing into someone else and I couldn’t stop it.

As Lil, I had started Lil’s List, a list of companies whose affiliate programs I had joined, because I liked their products and their way of doing business. But now it was Lill’s List and the name of the site had to change to reflect that. Unfortunately, I had already sent out the URL to about twenty people, so I had to contact them and explain and give them the new URL, which, if they just glanced at it, looked exactly like the old URL, which confused them and resulted in quite a few emails back and forth between us until we got it sorted out.

I guess I’ll get used to being Lill, sooner or later. Or maybe I should just say the L with it and change my name to Jessica or Brandy or something that doesn’t go so readily with “Aunt”. Even to me, Lil, with however many L’s sounds like someone who knits and wears glasses and is bookish… Oh yeah, that’s me. Or, rather, it was me with one L. I don’t know if it’s me with two L’s. Maybe it isn’t.

Maybe Lill never reads anything but directions for making exotic drinks. Maybe she prefers to buy hand-knitted sweaters, instead of knit them. And just maybe she doesn’t wear anything but Sophia Loren designer eyewear, instead of glasses from the Sale rack. If so, I hope Lill’s Net venture takes off pretty soon.

It was such a simple plan when it started. Research affiliate programs. Join some that fit my philosophy, pocketbook and lifestyle. Share them with people, like I’ve been doing since Al invented the Net. Get a little blog going to publicize the business. But then I wrote a couple of blog posts and realized that I’d much rather write than sell. Oh, I still worked on the business sites, researching, tweaking, testing. (I’d rather research, tweak and test than sell, too, but that’s another story.)

So I’ve done a lot more writing than selling and haven’t even run the ads I was going to run on the blog. I realized that, except for my friend’s jewelry and an Alibris search box, ads don’t belong on the blog. That’s when Lill’s List was born. Or rather Lil’s List, but what the L. It’s Lill’s List now. Heck it’s a shame I’m not Welsh. I could make it LLill’s LList.

The ironic point in all this, is that I’m not even sure I want to keep the domain name now. Blogs are much easier to herd than websites are and lillhawkins is a particularly bad choice for an URL, I’ve learned. Small “L” and capital “I” look very much alike and also resemble the number “1″. Even if I managed to get my site into the search engines, the laws of probability are against almost anyone keying it in right and actually getting to the thing.

I’m probably stuck with the domain until my year’s lease is up though, unless someone improbably named “Lill Hawkins” comes along and wants it. Or, alternatively, maybe someone named “Lil Hawkins” will come along, add an L to her name and take it off my hands. I think I’m getting delirious. Or is that dellirious? Oh, bother.