45 days to go

Thursday August 6th
46 Days until The Great North Run
Total Raised: £20!
Distance Run Today: 0km.  But then I do work in a pub after work on a Thursday, so shy of getting up early to go for a run there’s not a whole lot I can do about that.  And getting up to go for a run in the morning is something I have only ever managed twice, and they both happened in the same week so clearly something was wrong.  Suffice to say I’m not really building pre-breakfast runs into my schedule.

Touch of Madness
Progress today: Finally, some!  Nothing that will blow your socks off , but we have established a basic timeline for development and worked out what we want to have happened when.  You will be pleased to hear that we finally have an official launch date for the true Touch of Madness – Thursday May 27th 2010.  I’ve picked the 27th because we need about 9 months to get everything ready (you see, ToM really is our baby), and agreed we would launch in May of next year.  The 27th is because I had an idea when I was closing my curtains on Tuesday… I noticed that the moon was all but full, and suddenly realised when I would be sending out our newsletters:  Every month on the full moon.  A nice little touch of madness that one I thought.  Was a little disappointed that I was therefore left with less than 24 hours to get the first newsletter out, and justifiably so as it ultimately proved to be totally impossible (not sure how bad a thing that is, there really was never going to be a huge amount to say this month!).  Still, we now have a target date for our first ever newsletter – 4th September – we’re trying to think of names for it at the moment, so if anyone’s got any suggestions, they would be much appreciated.

By the time that newsletter goes out, we definitely hope to have something to write about.  We’re going to introduce some level of ecommerce into the site as soon as posisble, to drum up a bit of interest.  At the moment, there’s nothing for anyone to get from the site – we were hoping to get visitors’ imaginations fired up and be inundated with the ideas that I know people have (I haven’t spoken to anyone about ToM who didn’t immediately think of something that would be perfect for it), but unfortunately, that’s just not happened.  We were always going to develop the site as it stands now (‘Touch of Madness – Evolution’ Phil reckons we should call it, and I think he’s on to something), but we were originally going to save the fireworks for the grand launch next year.  We realise now that that was a little optimistic, and that we at least need to light up a few sparklers at regular intervals over the next nine months to ensure people keep talking about us.

I’ve even started composing my letters to celebrities and significant people in my life (especially old teachers.  It’ll make sense one day) – I think it will be a while before I send them, we’ll just get the site as we want it, but fingers crossed we’ll be able to drum up at least some interest in what it is that we’re trying to do!  Incidentally, when I say celebrities, I mean real ones, actors and the like, not the kind you see in a jungle.  They’re are not celebrities, seeing as most of them are in no way celebrated.  Anyway, I digress.  Basically, although we have nothing physical to show for today, we do have a white board covered in scribblings and a much better idea of what the next couple of months is likely to hold for us.  We needed to start somewhere!