Teel – Page 67 – Teel McClanahan

Hand-advertising; posting flyers

So, as I mentioned the other day, I designed a flyer to advertise modernevil.com – This weekend, Mandy and I selected a paper color (goldenrod, not too yellow, not too bright, eye-catching but also differentiated from the fluorescent yellow and orange flyers everyone else is posting), found some cheap copies (2c/copy at the UPS store at Dunlap & Central in Phoenix, if you pre-pay for 1k), and spent several hours cutting the little tear-off strips at the bottom of 250 pages. In the unlikely event that every strip gets torn off every flyer and all those strips convert to new readers, that’s 3,000 new readers. If some of them actually buy books – hooray!

Of course, that’s all dependent upon finding 250 places to post the flyers. (I’ll ignore for a moment the hundreds or thousands of people who will walk by each posted flyer without even seeing it, the dozens who will see it but not be interested, and the few who will be interested but lose the tiny strip of goldenrod paper they shoved in their pocket. First it has to be somewhere, and only then can it become ineffective!)

Yesterday, after stopping by the bank and Discount Tire (to pay for the tires I ordered – I get to go back Thursday afternoon and wait for them to actually get put on (ooh – I won’t really have internet access there to distract me, maybe if I take my laptop (or a pad of paper) I can get some work done!)), I started driving around a few places to see if they’d let me post the flyers. And to stop in to any independent book stores I saw, to see if they’d carry my books. Continue reading Hand-advertising; posting flyers

“Process” of painting ‘audacity of hope’

audacity of hope - process step 1 As part of my efforts to not just write and paint full time, but to actually get my work out in front of people, visible to the world, and hopefully engage people’s interest, I am going to try to document my “process”… Whatever that means. In this case, it means that I have taken a series of photographs of the painting I created this week, ‘audacity of hope’, showing each step along the way from basic background to completed painting.

You may have seen the first image, which I posted Monday night, which is pretty basic. I painted a simple, nearly cartoonish background. Blue sky, green hills, using the style I’ve been developing for creating interesting, dynamic backgrounds. This, in itself, is pretty straightforward: big, soft brush, lots of water, usually just one color and white – though sometimes I’ve used multiple colors, and often I’ll pre-create the hue I want from multiple inputs – this time I wanted a pretty basic palette, so I used the pure blue and green that Utrecht gave me. That was actually all I did with the painting on Monday.

audacity of hope - process step 2 Tuesday, it was time to begin the real work, so I booted up Photoshop and iPhoto, and got down to the digital part of the project. I took the photo from the previous day, and adjusted the image to “pop” the painting itself out of its background and into square, plus appropriately proportioned for the actual canvas size, as pictured at the right. This itself is a pretty straightforward thing to do, as long as you keep in mind that you don’t want PS to be creating any new information about your image – which is to say that all dimensions should stay the same or get smaller, never bigger. After this step, I cropped down so I was only working with the canvas, and then switched to iPhoto to find my “reference material”.

Continue reading “Process” of painting ‘audacity of hope’

First real day of MEP full time

So, today was my first real, full day of running Modern Evil Press full-time. Mandy had last week off for Spring Break (she teaches High School, remember), so I worked on and off and tried to use the week and half between leaving ICE and today to transition myself mentally and emotionally for this. I worked on putting together a semblance of plans and goals and … I don’t know, action-item lists… Is that what they call To Do Lists these days? Trying to have some idea of how to go from where I’m at to making money from my books and my art, so I’m not merely floundering. The general day-to-day plan, for time-management sake, is to get up with Mandy and work (at least) as long as she’s working. So, M-F, 6:30AM to 4:30PM.

So to get off to a good start, I started with a painting. I’ve been meaning to document my “process” better, so I also took a quick shot of the first coat of paint with my iPhone and threw it up on flickr (thumbnail at right). It’s a sort of a landscape right now. The image I’m planning for this background, which I will now describe as a “…monster with a robot head…” is not what it sounds like. Maybe I’ll post some more images tomorrow, when I’m working (digitally, of course) on adapting the sketch for the canvas. I sortof jumped the gun on the composition of the background without doing proper previsualization, but it’s no problem to work the elements together on the computer screen before I apply any more paint.

Ooh, thinking of it, I actually took a photo of another painting first, while the sun was still quite low. It’s one of four paintings I finished last year that I’ve only just put on wretched creature: ‘what… and why?’ was today’s photo, and I’ve been working on getting ‘it’s the internet…’, ‘without you’, and a (currently) untitled one with a face … Okay, admittedly, when I finished it I had a name for it, and I didn’t write it down or put it on the site right away, so … I can’t remember it right now. I’ll update it later, in the event I can recall the full name.

Continue reading First real day of MEP full time

plaintext can suck it

Okay, so I figured out this weekend how to get plaintext files to function properly and across both Macs and PCs and even survive uploads. The most frustrating part of the process (which is quite complicated and frustrating, overall) was discovering that if I upload my plaintext txt files via FTP in txt mode, they turn into browser-crashing garbage and if I upload them via FTP in (forced) binary mode, they transmit correctly. Hooray for the internet!

Also of note: the Amazon Kindle can suck it.

Anyway, plaintext versions of Lost and Not Found and of Dragons’ Truth are now available at the “new” version of the site which, since it isn’t yet at the primary URL, we’ll call … beta. yeah, it’s in beta. prose.modernevil.com

Video Games // Spending

I like the idea of video games. I like having them available. I like feeling as though, if I had the time and decided to, I could be playing an awesome and fun game. I like having Super Mario Galaxy on my shelf, though admittedly I haven’t played it more than twice. I like having Assassin’s Creed, though I know I’ll disappear into it for several hours if I start it up at all… So i don’t. There are several other games out there I want. The Darkness. Professor Layton and the Curious Village. Rock Band. et cetera. But mostly what I want is the potential to play them. To know they’re available. Now. Or later, if I want. Or if I had a friend, to play with or show them to. And it’s very similar with all these DVDs, and to a more … Virtual extent, all these books. I like them available. I don’t want to wait hours or days or more and to spend silly amounts of money renting them for brief use, or waiting for netflix… Because when I want to watch something all of a sudden, waiting 4+ days isn’t satisfactory.

Well, I’m off to see a movie in theatre.