Heavy clouds but no rain…the Build Up is here, and we’re all stewing in our own sweat like plump pomfrets.
Living on a houseboat, it’s sometimes really tempting to go for a quick swim…cool off in the water…but sightings like this one curb that longing. Between 10-12 feet long, or thereabouts; big enough to do some serious damage already. Curious about the surroundings, this lizard clearly has not learned to be wary, yet, so it will be in a trap soon enough. My personal first sighting of the season (though by no means the first in the creek! It’s the ones you can’t see that are the real worry…)
The leaves in the foreground are my own pot plants…so yes, it seemed to be stalking me, actually.
Here I am, carving a rubber stamp for next letter’s hand-printed envelopes…this is the one and only test video I made for Patreon, before my iPhone went for a swim in the saltwater harbour (*sob*)
The motifs are directly from Ta Makuende Yaya, a key book about Palo Monte, the Congo religion that slaves brought with them to Cuba. It was one of the first books I bought and read while I was in Venezuela, learning Spanish (June-October 2015).
In Venezuela, Palo had been given a bad name because it was linked to a rash of grave robbing. Residents in the capital of Caracas claimed that many of the graves at Caracas’ Southern General Cemetery had been pried open to have their contents removed for use in Palo ceremonies.
The relationship between this juicy snippet, and my letter, is one of very loose association:
I write about my quest to a Colombian cemetery for a specific ingredient, and how a misunderstanding with the gravedigger results in my coming home with something unexpected…
There’s still time to become my subscriber on Patreon, and be among the people who will receive this crazy story as a beautiful letter in the mail, along with a freshly-printed new postcard design: Voudoun’s Baron Samedi!
Kinda by accident…I was hovering over the LAUNCH button, thinking, “I should read it through just one more time…” but oops, touched it, and ZING! A screen of confetti announced that the page was live. Darn. Oh well…no time like the present!
And guess what? There was already one patron there!Nine hours before I launched, somebody had signed up. HOW COOL IS THAT?! My very own personal Medici. I feel all warm and tingly! What a compliment! In Philippine culture, she’s the one we call the buena mano, literally ‘the good hand’, my Lady Luck. It’s awesome to not have to start from zero!
I couldn’t be prouder if I’d just got myself a snazzy apartment. Please drop in some time…even if you don’t want to join up, just have a look around and tell me what you think of the set up. Were you familiar with Patreon before this? Do you support some creators on there, already? Who are they, and what do they do?
Yeesh! I’m excited!
* Launched much later than I had planned, because of a little accident today… I fell into the sea…with my phone in my pocket. It’s dead. Like, ‘dead’ dead… Pretty upset because I promised videos and stuff on Patreon. I am working on a replacement…luckily I have savings, but there goes the travel fund! *sniff*
If you want to read and enrich both your time and mind, skip The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and read the authors of real literature, whose names are merely mentioned in passing by this pretentious novel:
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights)
Thomas Carlyle (Past and Present)
Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales)
Charles Dickens (The Pickwick Papers)
Charles Lamb (Selected Essays of Elia, and More Essays of Elia, and Selected Letters)
Wilfred Owen (The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen)
Rainer Maria Rilke
Seneca (Letters from a Stoic)
William Shakespeare
Oscar Wilde
I’m happy to find justification for disliking The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society in this quote, gleaned from the pages of the very same novel in question:
“Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Found this old-school filter (real one, that you attach to a camera lens) in a drawer of camera gear I was cleaning out.
It’s made to counter the greenish tinge of fluorescent lighting, but I found it gives the sunset an intense amethyst glow, and can turn water into wine. Like Jesus. 😉 A miracle.
I’m just a few weeks away from moving The Scarlet Letterbox to Patreon.
I like that artists created Patreon for other artists (Jack Conte is, together with wife Nataly Dawn, one-half of the band Pomplamoose…music that I was somewhat obsessed with, 10 years ago).
As “beautiful monthly letters combining my art and creative writing with postal paraphernalia”, The Scarlet Letterbox is well suited to Patreon’s ‘pay per project’ plan: You can sign up for as little or as long as you want, and pay for each letter, one at a time (rather than several months up front.) It’ll be easier for me to organize each mail-out, because Patreon keeps track of the activity surrounding each letter issue. Patreon can help create a better rapport between artists and their supporters.
At the moment, aside from the actual letters, I don’t share much with my subscribers because Etsy is a conventional online marketplace…it wasn’t designed to process recurring payment, or to nurture community. Patreon, on the other hand, is all about community.
I don’t mean there’s some ready-made crowd of pledge-happy “Patreon community”people waiting for me! Patreon is not a promoter or social media “influencer”; it’s not a team of marketing experts who will selflessly volunteer their time to spread the word about me; it’s not their job to care about what I do, whether I sink or swim. They won’t be getting my work “out there”, or attracting potential patrons to my Patreon page. Patreon is a subscription-based payment processing site. That’s it.
It’s my job to find my own supporters, to spread the word, to advertise, to care and hustle and be passionate about it, and make it grow. In order to make this work properly, I have to dedicate much more time to The Scarlet Letterbox.
As luck would have it, my employers are cutting my work down to 9 hours (about $160) a week. While the pay’s not great, it’s the waste of precious time that really disturbs me. I row, and then cycle, to work: I’ll spend nearly an hour getting there and, before I know it, it’ll be time to cycle and row home again…a two-hour commute in order to work for three. Sometimes the huge tides trap me ashore for half a day, and I have to wait till there’s enough water to float my dinghy. I can’t afford that kind of dead time, sitting on land, waiting for the sea to turn around and come back! It’s not as though I knit!
This is the push I needed to quit my day job and do my own thing, I guess. I can’t fall much lower than the proffered $160 per week, after all…there’s not that much of a distance left to fall! At least, by writing stories, illustrating, painting, embroidering, bookbinding, and creating beautiful letters, I’ll be doing something that I love, full time.
My Patreon page is set to open sometime around the first week of October (which is also my last week at the day job.)
More information on this blog, closer to the date.
I hope that if you’ve ever been interested in The Scarlet Letterbox, you’ll consider taking a second look at what I’m doing, now that
fabulous letter = the price of a coffee and croissant, per month
