Becca's Blog

Wanna buy 5 copies for my mother!

Actually, it's not my smiling face, and it's not the Rolling Stone:

But it is my design on the cover. (And my smiling face actually is inside the magazine...)

I have to confess that I have been haunting my local JoAnn store for most of the week, waiting for the hard copies to arrive, and today I grabbed a handful. And today I've been feeling like this guy:

 

I just finished a submission for the next issue, and I'm ready to start sketching some more designs.

 

 

One good thing happened last week.

Well, actually two. Well, really three not counting the fashionable flipflops whose purchase kept me from breaking down in sobs, but I'll just tell you about the two.

A couple of my photos will be published: in a book, with a credit. Jane's company publishes travel books and likes to spend as little money acquiring art for them as possible. We took tons of photos on our trip to Paris a couple of years ago, and one of Jane's employees had a book about France to find illustrations for. When your boss says, "We have some photos that might work," you don't say no. So we picked out a few appropriate street scenes and Jane took them in for consideration, a couple of months ago. I figured they would be tactfully forgotten, but last week the book went to the printer with several of our photos in it. I won't get to see which ones got chosen until I see a copy, hopefully in a few weeks. I don't think either of my favorite shots made it, since they don't really fit the theme. This is one of my favorites.

The other thing is that Jane did love the show posters, and wants to hang them in her office, as predicted. She likes the kind of scary-looking one, the one I almost didn't buy, better.

Oh, and tomorrow the Harlot will be in Berkeley.

Today was my half-birthday.

And today was the first day of the rest of my professional life.  Because I left my high-paying, good-benefits, reasonably prestigious job on Friday, to work for myself. I spent today working in my home office on an editing project that pays quite a bit less than what I was doing 72 hours ago--but I was at home, and setting my own hours, and learning something new. Totally worth it.

My only qualms are about keeping my aging pets in prescription meds and high-quality food. And no more sets of Addis for me for awhile...

Traductrice, c'est moi.

'Scuse me while I crow a tiny bit, about a small accomplishment. I just got some repeat translation business, and two translation assignments on two consecutive days. I'm not a formally trained translator, but I've been trying to do some translation from French into English as a side gig. Given the competitive nature of the business and my lack of experience, I'm feeling pretty good about knowing someone paid me to do this (and more than once!).  Of course, I'm jinxing my good fortune by announcing it to the universe, I know. At any rate, it's a tiny step toward where I want to be professionally (that is, my own boss, working on a variety of writing, editing, and translating jobs).