Filler and Fluff
An “online magazine for makers and creatives” reached out to me, asking for an interview. Usual puff piece, but a single question, made me pause and think after I filled out the brief questionnaire.
There are two components. First, when I was in school, I partially supported myself as a “computer consultant,” doing odd bits of digital work, plus some typesetting, as a form of supplemental income. So after graduation and on into graduate school, I was a self-styled “computer consultant.”
As a business backbone, and the appropriate tax set-up, I learned from that design. Landing back in Austin, I transferred that “consultant” model and style, eventually, to straight astrology. In the following years, I would do occasional technical consulting, as an adjunct, like I was building web pages, doing the back-end work. For tax purposes, the term “consultant” stuck.
So the framework for the business, loosely conjoined under the term “consultant,” I had a running start. The business side of the business was already in place.
Filler and Fluff
It’s that pesky second part that took a few years to figure out. When I bought, really just rented, the name astrofish.net? It was over a hundred dollars a year. URLs were expensive, and supposed to be tricky.
The whole “fish-net” thing?
The title, I swiped the title, “Fishing Guide to the Stars,” as I was applying it to a mentor at the time, his name, followed by, “Knows all, sees all, and Fishing Guide to the Stars!” Extending that? The idea was to combine fishing guide analogies and astrology. Car Talk for astrology.
Car Talk for astrology, filtered through an artistic Austin lens.
As the real auto-bio suggests, first published in 1987, online since 1993, weekly from 1995, and at astrofish.net since 1998. It started as a ’zine format, but quickly — organically — grew into a mailing list that then became the web-based home.
The drive, the artist’s urge to create, that gets answered as I chisel words out in a digital stream of consciousness.
The naming question, though, and this has happened several times, even recently, but I will walk into a place where I work, as an independent contractor, only to be greeted by the handle, “Astrofish!”
Searching the internet, popped into a search engine of choice? “Kramer Wetzel” yielded one Kramer Wetzel, me. Simple enough. If I could go back? I would go back and change the URL from astrofish dot net to KramerWetzel.com.
My handle, my byline, and the work itself has evolved over the years, but the name remains the same.
Filler and Fluff
The hardest part of this career path is that there is no “How to” available. Some years back, I hit upon an idea, Letters to a young astrologer. That eventually birthed my astrology notes, loosely collected over the years, but even then, the weblog, online journal, and the horoscopes themselves serve as placeholders for that data. Observations are scattered, but at least, they are all searchable now.
I’ve listened to experts, and I’ve watched as monoliths come — and go.
There was another laudatory survey like this one, more than two decades back. In that article, I was the only site mentioned that wasn’t backed by a major media corporation, although, to be fair, I did get mentioned twice, once as a part of the then-AOL monolithic branch, and also as the only stand-alone in the article.
Still, the biggest challenge?
There isn’t a handbook, a tutorial, a guide on how to do this.
Filler and Fluff
Two-Meat Tuesday
![](https://astrofish.net/aimages/ENBasse.jpeg")
