My Worlds Collide

Hi friends. Back in February, I launched my career coaching business with a separate WordPress site, EA Mentor along with separate social media accounts. It’s been a serious time sucking vortex to manage all the separate socials, which is why I haven’t posted the next installment of my digital photo basics. In addition, I felt my coaching posts lacked personality and were pretty boring. I was not productive, effective or efficient, which are my defining characteristics as an Executive Assistant.

The thing is, I’ve been a photographer & administrative professional since 1983. That’s when I got my first camera and took Office Skills Refresher course and started my career as a temp office worker.

These two aspects have run parallel throughout my life. Separating them feels unfulfilling and weird but the prevailing attitude is separate everything. My creativity greatly informs my administrative work, helping me come up with creative solutions to problems. In return, my administrative skills help me manage my artistic projects.

Take, for example Takashima: I used my admin skills to take a 2 page outline to a 60+ page graphic novel with 257 images:

• Open Office to start and now Notes on my Mac
• GIMP and now Photoshop CC for photo compositing & to run Photography BB actions
• Photography BB actions: From Dusk Till Dawn (to give it a painted look in 80s cyberpunk colors) and Comic Book Maker (to enhance the illustrated look)
• Procreate: to create the original storyboard from random cell phone images
• Numbers: a workbook with one tab the shot list and one tab for characters, including costumes and props (to figure out what needed to be made or purchased)
• Keynote: I have 3 slide decks: 1) Procreate storyboards 2) the shot list that served as a check list as I finished images 3) after creating around 20 images, I saved the shot list deck as a new file, The Silent Movie deck with only the final images.
• After each session, I ran the Silent Movie deck and listened to the Takashima playlist to monitor progress. The end of session slide deck review became the motivation I need to keep working on this project.

The current version is in the hands of reviewers for comments. My push goal is to publish “The Takashima Extraction” in May 2023.

While I wait for the latest round of comments, I’ll research publishing options.

This mood board all the characters, except the Hacker. Poor guy.

If you’re interested to learn more, check out the Takashima project page. Now that I’ve scrubbed the story of references to the Shadowrun RPG and novels, I’ve added a few paragraphs about the World of Takashima.

This post is the intersection of my work and creative life. Do I start cross-posting between the blogs? I’m still debating if I will integrate the EA Mentor & Tenukihandcrafts websites under my name.

For now, I’m content to streamline my social media accounts.

Stay tuned!