When Real Life Gets in the way of Second Life....

It's been a bit since I posted as I was sent overseas on a business trip for two weeks. It's not that I didn't have internet access. I was working very, very long hours. After that I had some other personal things that were time bound....so things got pushed back.

I did work on my Blender skills. I took a couple of classes from Eleanora Newell, owner of Tama products (SL address). I tend to take notes and do the class later when I can take my time. I have such trouble with some of the things...miss one little command and nothing works. Drives me absolutely nuts sometimes.

I am entering another long build contest at Dreams. This one has a theme of Camping...I won't give away my entry just yet...I usually do something a bit off the wall so I'll just leave it at that for the moment. These are my fun things to do. Sometimes it seems SL has become work.....and I don't want that.

I'm still looking at land on and off. I'm not going to hurry in buying any unless I see the perfect piece of land. At the moment, I'm just getting my list of criteria straight in my head. Also, a friend recommended I have at least 25 products before opening a store. That may be a while.....

Land or mall....store or storage....now or later....

I'm trying very hard to do this whole business thing the right way. Now the question is what is the right way?

My thought is to develop inventory first, then worry about a store front. Small hitch in that plan; I currently have a Linden home. That means limited prims - 40 to be exact. I can't do a durn thing with my shiny, new Beadrez in that space. So I end up taking my stuff over to a sandbox and working on it. It's so easy to leave things behind that way. It would be really nice to be able to leave things out.

Should I get some auction land now, just a 512 plot, and use it for storage without spending a lot of money? Should I wait and buy a bigger plot for store and storage? Or use space for storage and get a mall location and possible mall traffic? And what about all the rip offs with renting mall space and land I hear about? How do I know who to trust?

On paper things look simple; in reality it seems to be anything but. It really is the same as opening a real life store with less investment. Hopefully I figure something out - or I keep delaying which seems to be my tactic at the moment. Delay a decision and keep learning about Beadrez and Blender and whatever else.

My brain hurts.....

A Giant Leap Forward....with a lot of help...

Somedays things just work out well. When I was in SL on Saturday, I ran into Rita Munro. She hangs out at Happy Hippo. In this case, she teleported me to a great free dress - if I figure out where it was, I'll post the link. Anyway, we started chatting and I got to ask a number of questions about her business, Rita Munro's Touch It. She was very helpful with advice.

Another surprise came from Patty Pavlova. I had purchased some Byzantine jewelry sculpts from her store, Logo & Kin. She was very helpful and very kind. She offered to show me how Beadrez, a product of Xoph, worked as I've been considering buying one. It seemed to work quite well and she showed me quite a few things that could be done with it. She also gave me other merchant names for other aspects of business. Very nice, and very helpful.

Thanks to these two lovely ladies, I feel further along than I was by quite a bit. Now if I could find the perfect gold texture......

A New Day....A New Crisis

I seem to have a way with losing things in my inventory. I started, with serious partnership with Wat Denzil, building contests at Happy Hippo. We were closing out a weeklong contest and I was retrieving something for it and realized my entire contest folder was gone.....*&(*&((!!!! I still haven't found it and support doesn't give me much hope.

So today, I spent time backing up my most important things. Sadly SL doesn't have a good way of creating backups, or at least none that I am aware of. I'm just duplicating my important stuff in other folders. My inventory is quickly doubling.

I suppose on one of my sleepy nights, I must have accidentally deleted it. I just have trouble believing that. Regardless, time to recreate everything. Sigh....

A Concept...An Idea...A Purpose

I never thought I would blog. But here I am. Getting involved with Second Life has really expanded my horizons.

I've tried starting real life businesses - Tupperware, Quixtar, desktop publishing. I'm just not the live sales type.

But this place, this Second Life, it's different. I can DO things I could never do in real life. I can make things, nice things, things other people think are nice.

Maybe I can make a business here successful. I don't mean 'rolling in real money' successful. I mean 'break even in Lindens' successful. Maybe I can...I can try anyway.

What should I make? Wow, I find so many things already in SL. What could I possibly contribute? Wait, this is a virtual world. I'm not trying to save the world. I'm trying to have fun and, in all honesty, prove to myself that I can do this.

This week was an important step. I made my first sales in SL. I created a course for the Happy Hippo Building School (or here's the SL link). And people have bought it. The only bad thing about selling a take away tutorial is you don't know if people liked it or not. My test 'guinea pig' did so I'm hopeful.

At any rate, now I have more than two Lindens to rub together. I want to do this without putting in 'real' money. So I have a start. Wonder what happens now....