Cleaning out

I was cleaning out this large portfolio of artwork I've done over the past 20 years or so. Lots of fun stuff, but some of it was very very weak. Hopefully what some of it gets recycled into will become paper for a better artist than myself. Shouldn't be too hard. Basically if it was uninspiring, I tossed it. If I could do better today, I tossed it. If it was sentimental...I kept it.

Business Cards:

This thread over at tentonstudios.com got me thinking about my own business card situation, which is very sad indeed. My last business card said, "comic artist" which is fine, because at the time of it's arrival I was very much trying to push myself as one one. But having quit that dream and moved on I find myself wondering, really what the hell am I? Yeah, technically I'm a graphic designer for my day job, but I really want to be a professional writer. And then there's the artstore that my wife and I have started. Maybe I should have some titles with check boxes on the front of the card that says "Pick the me you want." Then they can check off art supplies, writer, designer, loving dad/husband. Whatevever they want. I'm not entirely sure how much of me is kidding about this idea. Eh, moving on.

Also:

Selling your creations is an awesome feeling. I guess just giving them away to people who actually want them would be an equally awesome feeling, but I needs the money right now, yo. So I sold a few copies of my new short story "H3110" last weekend at a comic convention me and a bunch of the Ten Ton guys were attending. It was a fun little show. Good crowd. I brought the art supplies with me and sold some of those too. I also submitted the story to Asimov's sci-fi magazine. According to their website its still in "open" but "received" status, so that's still better than "closed" and "rejected."

How's the weather?

It looks like it's going to be an awesome day today. The boy (19 months old) has gotten really good at throwing the ball back to me. If it's a big enough ball he can catch it pretty good too, if nothing else is in his hands. We bought him a bike helmet yesterday so we can ride him around in the bike seat we found being thrown away. So far he doesn't like the helmet at all, but he's just going to have to get used to it because there isn't going to be any compromise on this issue.

Okay, that's it for now folks. Word up.

Also, have your lady friends check out my wife's blog at ksaintp.com.

Things I need to work on.

Okay, I'm putting this list out there for some of you suckers to hold me accountable on.

A.) My website. I'm not looking for a complete redesign or anything. I think my mainpage is strong and just works well enough for what I do. It's the "what I do" part I think that needs the help. Some of the links have been festering for awhile now, we're talking years and what's even amazing is as long as they've been that way, as I'm typing this out I'm getting ideas. Perhaps that's the power of blogging? I've written in my journal about this stuff but perhaps it's the whole "putting it out there" aspect of blogging that is getting my gears turning a little bit. Whatever it is, sweet!

B.) I need to do way more fiction writing. As guilty as I am I'm actually feeling good about the amount I've produced over the past year and I'm off to the best start this year than I ever have been. I've also just agreed to provide some content for a Zine my good friend Kurt Christenson is working on, so there's a little fire under my butt to work on that stuff.

C.) I need to stop getting irritated at people that call it "The Mac Store." Yes, it's called the Apple Store. Yes the sell Macs. Do these same people call Victoria Secrets the Bra and Panty Shoppe, or Barnes and Noble the Book Store? Okay, probably they do on that last one, but I've heard it enough times from too wide a demograph of people to simply sum it up to only stupid people saying it. As a Christian I can only ask the good Lord to forgive them and also accept his forgiveness myself for getting so aggravated over something so dumb.

Might it be a marketing flaw from Apple themselves, if that's even possible? (The answer is yes, it's possible) A branding problem? It's hard for me to think of it as a problem when I see how popular they are. But also, it's usually cheaper to get stock macs from Amazon. And to those who don't know it, they carry the same warranty as Apple Store bought macs and yes, you can still do the whole genius bar/help desk thing.

D.) The Bible. I know I'm probably losing some of you with this one, but oh well. I needs to be reading me some more Bible. Life things just seem to align themselves better when I'm on point and devoting some time to this stuff.

E.) Get more of me out there. Success isn't so much about how the world sees you, it's about the amount of acceptance you have for yourself. You can have nothing, and if you're happy, to me you're successful. It's not to say I'm not happy...but I can easily say I'm not satisfied. I know there is more to me than what I allow out of myself. I'm capable of so much more. So that's really my new goal. More. Better. More and better. Sometimes more, sometimes better, sometimes both at the same time and reversed and upside down and sideways. But hopefully never something with neither, which I think would be nothing.

Never nothing again, forever and ever, amen.

- S

Intuos4 Hmmph...

So, my Intuos4's micro-USB port stopped working this morning, which was expected. The day I first got it (May 09') I was surprised at how non-snug fitting it felt when I first plugged it in. Thankful that Wacom was considerate enough to include an option for them crazy left-handed folks. Without delay I plugged it into the other usb port and my little function button blinked back to life. I then called WacomUSA and they emailed me an RMA that's good for 90 days and the fantastically english speaking customer service rep assured me that she was 95% sure that my problem would be covered under the warranty. Luckily my wife has a Bamboo that I'll have to get by on while Tessie is in the shop. Yes...I named my Intuos Tessie

My iPod's name is Salt
my Macbook's name is Space

If your life is a conversation, let's change the subject.

My name is Scott St. Pierre.
I am many things to many different people, but how many things am I to myself? And of those things which ones are you happy to be? Which ones are you you great at? Which ones do you only want to be better at because it means strengthening your career path, which in these hard economic times is very important but at what cost to the strength of your family time?
See, I've been doing some thinking, and it's the kind of thinking that gets people in trouble. It's the "is who I am who I'm supposed to be" type thinking. But I know who I am, and who I'm supposed to be is the guy who does the things that brings in enough money so the bank don't take the house and the gas people let us stay warm and clean and the electric people let us see at night and give power to or charge the batteries of our electronic-distractyoufromyourtruedestiny-devices.
Don't let that last sentence fool you. I love technology. I really do. I get excited when I read about giant leaps in processor speed or the crazy methods of data storage that some scientists are researching. But I guess I'm just starting to wonder what it's all building up towards. Why did we all actually need "a computer in every home?" Why now do we need 2+ computers in every home?
I don't have many answers for these questions, so if you're reading this looking for some great insightful way to find some kind of meaningful solution that you can then apply to your or life, I apologize for that now. I think a first step is to downgrade, if only in our minds, the usefulness of these machines that we depend on for so much. If we don't slow down, someone is going to end up creating a widget that cross references the local temperature with traffic patterns to what was on TV and then to a database where it looks up a personality profile so it can determine what sort of mood your wife is in on any given day so you won't actually have to ask her how her day was. Yikes.
In closing, I think for the weekend I'm going to give this computer thing a rest till Monday morning. Maybe get some reading done. Draw a picture with an actual pencil on actual paper, and bust out the crayons and not have to give a shit if that shade of color named Purple Mountains Majesty from the ole 64 color box of Crayola's is in RGB or CMYK. If anyone needs me, you can FedEx me or go the green route and send a carrier pigeon.

Things Done Changed, Kid.

Seeing as how my last post was issued in July, it seems I have quite a bit of catching up to do as far as informing the adoring public as to what I've been up to.

We'll pick up where we left off last time.

July - Came and went.
August - I'm sure something fantastic and brain stretching happened in August, I just can't remember what it was. Oooh, maybe my Wedding Anniversary? Sure, why not?
September - Okay, this was a big one. See, sometime in August I asked my Boss if it would be okay to let me try working from home a few days a week to help myself and him get a feel for how it would be if I was to start working from home for the company full-time. (Not Freelance) I had done loads of research on the subject and printed them out for him to read along with a brief proposal. A few weeks went by with no response and finally one came. It wasn't a no, but it certainly wasn't a yes, yet.
What transformed it into a definite yes was nothing short of a motorcycle crash. No not literally. To make it literally a motorcycle crash I'd had to have been on a motorcycle, but I was on a scooter and if I was to only walk away from that experience with one new nugget of knowledge it would be that hitting the pavement at 35mph and surfing it for 30feet into a curb, you realize that the asphalt, gravity and it's buddy inertia really don't give a shit what sort of vehicle your body fell off of. It had your ass and it was going to do to you whatever it wanted to. It chose to slide me into the curb on Valley Road in West Orange, NJ. It didn't even care that it placed my bike in a no parking section after the crash and kids, when I opened my eyes after I realized I stopped moving the face of my helmet was pushed right up against the curb and even had the yellow "no parking" paint scraped right across it. I only broke my pinky and my favorite expensive windbreaker (only cost me $45 but retailed for $300+) somehow didn't get a damned scratch on it.
The night before (Sept 1st,) I had sent my boss a reply to his "not no, not yes" reply to my initial proposal. So, he received that email and the very next contact he gets from me is me telling him I'm in an ambulance being taken to an emergency room. I sat in the ER for 12 hours before my surgery and 16 hours after I left my house I was finally back home. I just realized the tone this posting has taken and I'll have none of that.
Fast-forward to today, but not just yet. Sept 1st was the last full-day I've worked in the office. A week later I went in and he OK'd the trial, but it was 5 days a week. Better than I expected. My hand was in a full cast for two weeks, and then a half cast for four weeks after that. Sometime before Christmas I was deemed full recovery by my physical therapist. My Boss has never asked me "when I'm coming back" and I think my work somehow has vastly improved. I don't know if it can be attributed to the non-45minute commute, the non-constant distractions of the average workplace or perhaps it's just the regular course of my professional development but I know I'm definitely working harder. It's not about work output, for me it's about the quality of that work and of proving to them that I'm actually working. My eyes are constantly glued to the screen in the event they email or IM me. I do not want to let them down or ever make them think I'm not working when I should be. I've become addicted to accountability.
I think one of my coworkers even IM's me in an attempt to try and catch me off guard. Which adds to the stress of constantly being on lookout. My gateway to the company is using Microsofts Remote Desktop Connection, which means my entire office work screen is windowed with no sound. So I try to maximize the window and resize all my other App screens to be just above the taskbar of my office connection window. Sometimes I forget to resize the apps and if I'm lost/zoned-out working in Photoshop/Indesign/Illustrator I sometimes lose track of time and might be 10-15min late on a notification. That stuff freaks me out even though morally it shouldn't because I know what I've been doing, but again, they don't so if I'm ever questioned it's going to be impossible not to sound over defensive. So all I really can do is to make my work speak for itself.