Offbeat Bride may not be in bookstores for another month, but offbeatbride.com simply can’t wait another day. So, I’m decreeing 2007 The Year Of The Offbeat Bride and unveiling the website.

There’s a lot here — the requisite book information, but also what I hope will become a pretty robust batch of content, including this blog, an advice column, wedding porn, bride profiles, vendor profiles and links, and a bazillion other ideas that I’m scheming.

There are still some kinks being worked out (ug, I see the typo in the header image, and there are some navigation and design tweaks coming, and of course I’m still proofing copy all over the place) but I’d love your feedback. Everything work the way you expect? Anything broken? Pipe up!

Very special thanks and adoration to both my designer Carol Chapman and my ever-helpful webmaster, producer, and coder extreme J.M. Dodd.

(Cross-posted on Electrolicious)

If you’re looking for incredibly bad-ass, one-of-a-kind wedding invitations, then holy fuck, you owe it to yourself to commission Seattle artist Ellen Forney.

Ellen is a balls-to-the-wall graphic artist whose awesome comics have appeared in The Stranger and the LA Weekly and a bazillion other publications. You may have seen her book, I Love Led Zepplin, at bookstores.

Anyway, Ellen does these custom wedding invites that were voted “Hippest Invitations” by Seattle Bride Magazine last year. And as she says, “Cool enough for you and your friends, and elegant enough for your great-aunt.”

Custom work from an established artist isn’t cheap — rates start at $300 for a portrait and go up from there. But get this: Offbeat Brides get a 5% discount! Just let Ellen know you found her here.

So, if your invitations are going to be one of your big ticket items (and you want to support an awesome independent artist), Ellen should definitely be at the top of your list. Check her out.

According to Amazon, 40% of the people who view the Offbeat Bride page end up buying a Mr. Bento.
(Thanks to Patty for pointing this out to me!)

I’ve been chewing over publishing trends, the Dooce suit, my own book coming out in a few months, and the emails I’ve gotten with book questions … this is to say, chewing over bloggers becoming authors. I’m hardly an expert on the subject other than my own personal experiences (my book and Columbia Publishing Course), but still … I’ve got some thought about bloggers becoming non-fiction authors. (Fiction is a whole different beast that I know nothing about.)

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Hilarious: Men Don’t Care About Weddings? Groomzilla Is Hurt

The traditional wisdom remains that a groom (like a child) should be seen and not heard. Real men, the logic goes, don’t care about weddings. And that hurts Groomzilla — that makes him cry. But only on the inside. He doesn’t want to streak his self-tanning lotion.