Friday afternoon, Mandy and I were poking around, asking people on Twitter what we should do for the evening, and we were considering one of the (apparently several) regular poetry readings around town, but then we heard about a meetup of Podcasters and other social media types (whatever that means) from around the valley. So, we went down to Tempe Marketplace (fashionably late – plus ten minutes just to get into the parking lot from the turning lane) and met a whole bunch of new people (plus a couple of people we’d met at Creative Connect a week or two ago) and had a good time hanging out until we’d literally closed the place down. THEN, because Mandy and I weren’t done with our night out yet, we went to see Zombie Strippers at the Valley Art in Tempe. It was much more fun than we were expecting. Not to mention nudity, gore, zombies, and dark comedy, there was plenty of anti-GWB sentiment from even the first scene.
Anyway, as I do, I discussed my writing, my art, and my attempts and plans for making a living from it with the people we met. I’ve previously spent a fair chunk of time formatting and transferring photos of my art to my iPhone for just such conversations – people like playing with the iPhone enough that it’s fun to go through dozens of pictures in the midst of conversation – so I had the opportunity to share my art with several people. And my art really resonated with a couple of people. And long story short, they decided they wanted to buy Betty. So Mandy and I hand-delivered it to them on Sunday and hung out with them some more – they’re good people, and we all got along well, which is even better.
This is all good news. Very encouraging. Not selling a lot of books (yet – still working on getting the word out there), but that’s two direct book orders (five books total) and two art orders (five paintings total) so far this month, which is more than I sold all last year and the first quarter of this year combined. And there’s been additional interest in some of my other pieces expressed from a couple of corners, so perhaps we can turn that into sales down the road, too. Word of mouth is always good. And my “big marketing push” for Dragons’ Truth (my first audiobook, currently being recorded and edited) should start next month, so hopefully that will sell some paperbacks and a few CDs. Oh, plus I’m going to (finally) start showing at First Fridays in May. Just a 10×10′ space with the Roosevelt Row folks, but I’ll have my art, I’ll have my books, Heath will be there with his chainmail jewelry, too.
So, times are reasonably good, so far. I spent all day today (literally from 7AM until Mandy came home around 4:30PM (and a while afterward, as well) just going through stacks of paperwork and filing things, sorting papers, getting things organized into the “new” filing cabinet, and samesuch. Yet the table I’m trying to get cleaned up to use as a working area is still entirely covered in mess. More work on it tomorrow, but I’ve also got to take care of the Roosevelt Row paperwork tomorrow, so … maybe we’ll get done. Maybe we won’t. Having a couple extra days off the audio work is good, though, even if it is all business-side, mostly paperwork stuff.
You guys better love the audiobooks.
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, 
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”.