I have this “round table” with my good buddy Amelia Shea every Monday morning (check out her latest book, Flawlessly Flawed). This is very important to my accountability thing. She, after a beautiful disclaimer on how much she loves me, informed me that I have too much going on. I might possibly suffer from shiny object syndrome. When you try to do everything it all ends up half assed. The bottom line is I am doing too much.
I wish I could say this was the first time I heard this. Janice, of Beer-Thirty, has been saying this for years. My husband has also said it in that quiet way where he's afraid to hurt my feelings. Well, friends, message received.
"Beside the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone.”
― lin yu tang
At the beginning of this ‘my thing’ journey, I decided to throw everything out there like fishing lines and see what caught. I went hard on trying to promote my suns with the note cards and the notebooks, okay, here’s the truth, to this day I have sold 3 packs of note cards. My sister ordered 4 but she’s pissed at me so I’m not sure if I’ll get paid. A lot of time and money spent on that line and I haven't caught much yet. If history is any indication, I will always draw, paint, ink suns, because dammit, I just can't help myself. I am moving that to “hobby” status.
The blog seems to be somewhat successful as I have a good amount of followers and recently acquired advertising on it. My dad and my husband’s first response was, “Great! How much are you going make?” Honestly, I have no idea. My expectations are somewhere around 2 dollars for the quarter. I try to keep my financial expectations in the gutter.
I’ve also decided that I need to get published. I’m sending out articles, which you know, means query letters and bios…ugh. Just shoot me, but I will do it. I actually have to do it by Monday because I can’t look at Amelia with nothing sent in or at least give her something she needs to edit.
Speaking of publishing, where the hell is T-Rexy you ask? Right here on my f'ing desk. Trying to self publish a picture book through Amazon is proving to be out of my skill set. I’ve asked the husband, he’s got a week before I call an actual IT person. *Word to anyone else trying to do this, make all your illustrations exactly the same size and use a scanner not iPhoto.
I think I’m going to take everyones advice and focus on one thing…well, yikes, 2 things. T-Rexy and the articles. T-Rexy because I accidentally called my mom and she asked when in the world she was ever going to get this book. Honestly I'm sick of looking at it. I don't even like that little dinosaur anymore. Oh shit, wait, three. I'm going to focus on 3 things; the articles, T-Rexy and I want to keep the novel going...and the blog. Oh hell... May the gods and goddesses of publishing smile down upon me this week, or just a wink and a nod would be good.
I have a children's book and an epic book about all things sexual abuse...one needs illustrated. One needs massive editing. Sometimes I feel that I just had to do the best thing for my mind which was "get it out" so I wrote them both with much encouragement from others. They sit 0 tucked away 0 still quite relevant 0 waiting. I hear ya.
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