Getting your ideas across is a complex process, especially when you have an incoherent concept that you are in the process of rendering coherent.
I have only made any effort to go public at all because I (and even this sentence is a struggle to write) felt I had touched on something that Wolfe either did not understand, or had made a life choice not to understand, and for some intangible reason it was very important to make sure I made as many efforts as possible to get it across to him. Not so much a matter of getting my claws in, as opening a door for him and letting him do whatever he wants with it. In addition, there is a smattering of potentially valuable knowledge scattered throughout if one chooses to pick it up. Most of my feedback has indicated that people take the emotional hit, and depart satisfied without really examining why they feel better, but this is a sign of success as far as I am concerned.
I am in the process of widening the net, in terms of publicising Ina Disguise, in preparation for the completion of Best Adventure Ever. I see that for many sites, the blog posts themselves are too personal, too opinionated, and do not contain as many pictures as they should. Everything has to have a kind of reader’s digest uniformity, for many sharing sites, and I stick out like a sore thumb, as per usual. My lizard self tells me that I should edit, rewrite and add pictures to fit in with this ethos and get my work out, and my actual self tells me I would be losing my USP. As an advanced reader, headlines and pictures actually put me off, when reading, but I see that this is another example of my being out of touch.
Somebody very kindly interfered with my Alexa ranking, and has replaced my keywords with ones which are less to do with me, and more to do with getting me more hits. Thank you to whoever it was, as they have rendered the website much more attractive to search engines etc and have increased the value of the website by quite a chunk. I am not sure what the intention was, but I got a nice surprise when I saw that it had been done and why.
I am quite happy to write articles separately from the blog, I have managed to get quite a bit of material down now, so it is not a huge hardship, but I think it is best for the blog to be the blog, for good or ill. Journalistic stuff is really for a separate section, so perhaps I should insert an invisible page and stick them there. I will let you know how this process goes, but so far the products page has raced up the leaderboard overnight due to the large pictures, so I surmise from this that large pictures are what people are responding to. In the meantime, I am going to get the blog up on youtube as it is, before I start editing if this is necessary.
So now I have the problem of describing my work again.
What is Ina Disguise all about?
Joining the dots in terms of your intellect, your emotional state and your ability to convey your ideas is not something that is really encouraged in Western society. There are many good reasons for this, the main one being that you can trap yourself if you do not keep these things separate, and things like your magnum opus being abandoned for several years because of being stupidly in love with a stranger happen. A bit like choking on a smoothie when you have had bad family news.
If you can manage to pull it off, however, it leads to far more engaging and arguably important work. You are only as good as your level of passion, and your need for connection and engagement. Expressing a rather primitive interruption of this flow has been a major feature of the work so far on the Sheep in Wolf’s clothing project.
On the plus side, it meant that taking something traditionally used for another purpose – I made rather advanced textural pieces in two dimensions prior to this unfortunate episode, as can be seen with Saxophone, and On the Beach, but it was clear to me that two dimensions just were not enough to satisfy my visual communications in relation to Wolfe. This has led to a kind of naive sculpture which also means I have strayed into the realm of interior decor and fashion, which has been rather fruitful in terms of encouragement from appropriate interest groups. I also quite like the fact that there is no real reference point. This makes me challenge myself more, since I am the explorer in my current creative field.
In terms of the books, I notice that although I have written at some speed, spilling whatever I have to say out as it comes to me, that I have approached them in the same way one approaches a philosophy essay. There are several possible readings you can make of the same book, and you get a consistent number of points each way. Superficially, they are just rather entertaining cartoon stories, but you can pull different things from them depending on how you read them. So I think we can safely say I picked on the right muse on this occasion. Time will tell if a decent reviewer picks up on any of it, since I am still very lazy with marketing. We are at the point where I need to put a week or two into expanding the audience however, so this is what I am doing as I work on the next collection whilst listening to programming lessons.
Describing what you do is immensely important to your creative work. A good bullshitter is often far more successful than a moribund master of the arts. Finding a more mercurial person to devote themselves to the bullshit side of things is, therefore, invaluable for most creators. Twisty often likes to tell me that I need an agent, but Twisty is himself the world’s worst for not promoting his work, so I think perhaps he needs one more than I do.
To conclude, any spare time that you have left when creating needs to be spent on exploring the world of marketing, especially if you want to keep your overall costs down. I am fortunate that the magazines devoted to the rich and famous came to me, but not everyone is that lucky. Be shameless. Be positive, and do not allow your own cringing to grind you down.