Friday, January 8, 2010

The good, the bad, and the squirrel

I have been very stressed out lately due to my new responsibilities at Joe. I am working with 3 of the 5 stores to get the drip bars up and running. (The drip bar makes one cup of coffee at a time to ensure the freshest and cleanest cup. The drip bar uses the pour over method.) So I thought I would have some time to get this thing going, but "someone important" is coming to one of the 3 stores to text out the drip bar next week. I do not know if I am allowed to say who so I won't, but let's just say something written could come out of his experience. So anyway, I had this week to get it all together. Usually this would not be an issue, but we are understaffed because the students are away, a taught two classes that I needed time to prepare for, I had to get the designs out for the new tote bags (yes new and awesome totes), and I needed to print The Ugly Sweater for a literary agent interested in seeing it.

All these things are exciting, but time consuming and I have not had to deal with real stress since graduating PC.

I was waiting on the Ugly Sweater from Lulu and it was very anti-climactic. The process takes about 2 weeks; which is a really long time in my world, and when it got here is was completely mis-paginated. Their online publishing program is not very intuitive and there is no one to tell you if you have done something wrong (unless you want to pay a lot more) so it just did not work. I might try again, but I was pretty bummed. I was trying to avoid printing it myself.
I was recently told one cannot get a book published without having a literary agent, so I was getting ready to compile a list of agents and have Ester help me write query letters as she has done it before and is rep'd by a very fancy literary agency. As I thinking all this over I received an email from a gentleman at a fancy literary agency who said he saw my work up at Joe, saw I referenced a children's book on my website, and wanted to know if I had a literary agent.
So, I have been halling ass to get him spreads of the book so he has something to look at and so I can stop thinking about it.
By the time this day is over I think I will not have a brain left in my head.
I am excited, but I do just want some time to paint. I have been doing all the leg work, which sucks away all my drawing time. Also, once this is out I have to keep working to keep my mind off the possibility of failure. The folks at Penguin publishing looked at my portfolio and thought "my animals read better than my people" for children's books. I know this does not mean the end of the world, but really what demographic does my work appeal to? Oy, I could go in a circle with this thinking.
Ok, enough self doubt, off to be productive for the sake of my sanity.
If anyone has ideas how I become the next Paul Frank of squirrels let me know.

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