Author: Kittytreets
I create!
Birds! Flights of Fancy 2018
This past month, I have been able to produce a lot more art. I’m trying to improve my skills in a more painterly style. I am focusing on subtle backgrounds and love to paint animals. The art prompt I joined is called #FlightsofFancy2018 and has been a blast! I am learning to paint much faster! Please check out my bird paintings! I hope you like them!
Self-publishing journey, update.
Since I last posted about my decision to self-publish, a publisher I had been wanting to work with opened their submissions back up to unsolicited manuscripts. I HAD to submit mine, one final time, for review. I am still presently waiting their return. Also, I had submitted a children’s book to an emerging artist contest back in July, and am still waiting the results. All of these things should drive me mad, however, I am too busy to notice! Once I hear back, then I will be able to move on in some way, or another. Let’s hope the magic happens for me.
A lot of magic has been happening in other areas of my life, and I feel a huge part of that is because I have finally found a groove that works for me. With transcription, yoga, and art, something clicked. I hope it continues because it feels really good. I have a sneaking suspicion that yoga started the whole change! If you’ve been interested in my journey, I appreciate it. Thank you for staying tuned. I hope to have exciting news in some form, very soon!
Namaste.
FREE month of OmStars!
Hello friends!
For the past few months, I have had the honor of working with the OmStars team in a marketing internship. It has been a lot of fun getting a behind-the-scenes look at this company, and learn more of the yoga lore I love. This internship wasn’t just about adding more cool stuff to my resume. Yoga has become a great addition to my life, and I felt that this would allow me to surround myself with unique teachers. I love to learn, and will always seek more knowledge.
OmStars is an online yoga TV network, created by Kino MacGregor, specifically for teaching yoga to the world! Kino’s passion to share the spiritual practice of yoga drew me in, and has made me feel at home within myself. What impresses me the most about OmStars is the amazing, diverse group of teachers that get added to the instructors list every day. There’s a perfect course out there for everyone whether you’re like me, and can’t get enough of Ashtanga, or you want to learn how to meditate. Perhaps you’re strictly into trying new classes all the time, well, you can’t go wrong there either!
This past week I was given a promotion to start helping out the social media team, and I could not be more thrilled! I have been wanting to expand the social media e-commerce experience I have from my own business, and put it to use in the yoga world.
To celebrate the fun, I wanted to remind my friends that you can get a free month of OmStars, access to all the amazing classes by my Guruji, Kino, and more, by using the coupon code: JODIYOGA.
And feel free to check out @omstarsofficial as well as @kinoyoga on Instagram so you can participate in some absolutely amazing yoga challenges that are put together to support charities. I hope to “see” you there!
Namaste.
documenting The Journey
After my post yesterday, I am thinking it might be a lot of fun to document the process of self-publishing my first EVER book.
There are a lot of tools I am going to be learning to use because the book I am working on presently is the first of a series. I will need to know how to do everything for the following books, so why not do it all myself.
I do not know how long this will take.
Right now, I am working on the art for the cover. I love it. This is exactly why I decided self-publishing was the best route for me. I get to do all of these exciting things to make the book happen.
Because of my sewing pattern design background, I already know how to layout pages, but I really want to learn Adobe’s InDesign because it looks like a lot of fun. So, I will be learning that. Who knows, maybe I could post some tutorials along the way to help others like me–one of my favorite things.
We have the ability to make our books our own in entirety…why not? That said, I am having others proofread and/or edit my manuscript. It’s pretty clean as is, but that doesn’t matter. You need other people looking over it too. Also, read it out loud to a friend or your cat. It works. I polished my novel that way. I saw all of the problems out front like they were on a billboard! It was awesome. Now, the person editing it for me will hardly have anything to do. ;o)
During the querying process, I already wrote barf-text trying to sell the novel so that’ll work great for the back cover copy. The synopsis I wrote will be helpful, too. Mostly for myself. I am not going to post that anywhere because it has major spoilers.
When you work on a project of this size, you have to look at the entire process and appreciate what you went through. Sure, I spent a lot of time querying, but because I set my limit, I only spent the amount of time I needed to see what I truly wanted was self-publishing. Maybe I needed that to feel confident going into it. I’m SO beyond excited about this right now. I am sitting here with Clip Studio Pro opened up on my other monitor with, what I feel, is one of my best pieces of artwork, for the front cover. ;o)
I hope many of us who are working on our own books, from cover to cover, can come together and share the fun. Please, let me know if you, too, are working on your own. It’d be fun to chat with you.
