Style is self-plagarism.
—Alfred Hitchcock

So, the truth is all of zeta is anxious to hit the ground running. I, at least, am terribly anxious to make money. Considering the amount of hardware and crap I had to request to work for them, and knowing that they are regular joes like me, I feel it is my duty to do so. I'm also kind of excited to be working again.

Just went shopping for a few books on the subject of money. I actually found a few that look like they might be useful. Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing and Ethical Guidlines looks like it will be pretty helpful. If not, it was $5 bucks on half.com. I'm also keeping my eye out for How to Price Graphic Design and Dtp Services, but I'm hoping Guidlines will answer most of my questions. I also hope to find out more info from AIGA, but they seem to be having coldfusion problems this morning.

While I was looking I also subscribed to How Design magazine. It's one of those free issue deals - so we'll see how helpful it is and worth the $30 a year. Their Insider Advice: Vendor Relations and More looked like a great resource.

I also started looking around for competitions to enter. I don't know. For a lot of the graphic design ones, your work needs to have been published. That is totally fair, but I don't think any of my current stuff would make the cut on some of the bigger shows. I guess it is something to keep in the back of my mind though, for next year or the year after. Even if I'm getting shot down, at least I'm making the attempt to be active in the design community.

I'm doing an awful lot of layout these days. I'd like to dust off my fine art skills again. Maybe if I can get my hand in I'd feel more confident about it. These skills, like my viola, have been sitting by the way side for the better part of a year. Part of that is I never found a good creative space in the new apartment. Mostly it is because I've been busy getting established. So I started rolling around the idea of committing to a weekly drawing submission on one of my websites. This idea came up a few months ago when I first started really reading MT and PA regularly. I'm not so interested in publishing a comic as I am interested in stretching my creative muscle. I think it would be a good for me and help me to focus on what is fundimental in my work.