Kay Hudson

was not something I expected to enjoy.  I haven’t had cards for many years, not since my late husband and I had our own consulting firm, Cultural Resource Services.  Jack had unique cards made and remade for years, with a ghostly Spanish galleon in the background and a pair of Spanish colonial coins in the foreground (he was an expert on shipwrecks and artifact preservation).  We used the same motifs on stationery, until the print shop where the original negatives were stored burned down.  We never found a printer who could reconstruct the work without them.

Then we had an artist do some caricature sketches for us, and we used them on stationery and cards.  By then we were using computers, so we had the artwork scanned and produced what we needed on demand.  I still have the artwork files on my current computer, but they are in .pcx format and I can’t open them.  Was that the format for the old Paintbrush program?  I’m sure I can find something that will convert them.   I probably have a few of those old cards and letterheads somewhere in the house, but at the moment I have no idea where they might be.

I don’t have cards for my current job with The Scorekeeper, and I’ve never missed them.  Jo Anne (my friend, fellow writer, and owner of the business) has some, of course, very nice business-like cards, and I’ll bet she hasn’t reordered them in years.

But now we’re both going to the Romance Writers of America® national conference (oh, heavens, three weeks from Monday!), both finalists in the Golden Heart® contest for unpublished manuscripts, and we need cards that reflect book writing rather than bookkeeping.

A few weeks ago I stopped by the local Office Depot and looked through their sample book, full of perfectly decent business cards, nothing the least bit out of the ordinary.  Nothing with personality.  Business cards moved to the bottom of my To Do list for a while.

When someone on one of my writers’ loops recommended Zazzle.com, I went to look at their offerings, and found so much variety–and personality–that it took me a couple of hours to comb through their designs.  My Golden Heart manuscript (Paper Hearts) involves a nineteenth-century small town newspaper, and I found a design with antique newspaper ads on one side.  My current projects (Jinn & Tonic and Bathtub Jinn) involve genies, and I found a card with a bottle on the beach.  Played with the designs but didn’t save anything.

This past week I decided it was time to get serious aqbout the cards.  (The trip to New York the last week in June seemed a long way off on March 25, when we got the Golden Heart calls!)  So I went back to the Zazzle site, cruised around a while, and ended up with an entirely different card.  I tried several rather sedate designs, filling in my name and cyber-contacts, picking fonts, registering so I could save my design projects, but I kept coming back to a cheerful drawing of a typewriter, a blank sheet of paper rising from its roller, just the right light, humorous tone for my work.  I designed and redesigned the layout–I’m no graphic artist, but Zazzle makes it easy–and showed it to Jo Anne and my critique group.

When I had exactly what I wanted, about 10 AM this morning, I coughed up my credit card number and ordered one hundred cards.  Even popped for the extra five bucks for two-business-day delivery.  And at 10 PM this evening I received email notification that my order has been printed, packed, and queued for shipment.

Fun, fast, and I should know by Wednesday if the end product is as good as it looks on line.