Reply To: When employers won’t, or can’t help

[Patte Rosebank]

@Evelyn, you find work by networking…which is something we tend to have trouble with.  You talk to people working in your chosen industry, and ask them for advice and leads, and so forth.  And you ALWAYS fully investigate any online job postings, before getting involved.

But before you can start looking for work, you need to find out what your competition is doing, and get your own skills and presentation up to that level.  Otherwise, you won’t have a chance against the people who are already working in that industry.  And THEY have a hard enough time finding work!

To be treated as a professional, you have to present yourself as one, even if you’re just starting out.  This is hard, when you’re used to “the impostor phenomenon”, which makes you feel like you’re just pretending to be a really good ________, and you’re in constant fear of being unmasked.  It’s this fear that often leads us to procrastinate, as a way of avoiding being judged (including by ourselves) on our work.

 

I know how daunting big projects can be.  That’s why I have such a long trail of half-completed ones.  But they’re easier once you know the difference between a project and a task.

Digitizing your artwork is a project, made up of lots of little tasks.  So, make a checklist of those tasks, and schedule a block of time to devote to tackling a couple of them, with no interruptions.  Then, when the time comes, set a timer, and just work on two of them.  When the timer goes off, if you’re on a roll, then keep going.  If you run out of steam, schedule a block of time for another day.

This works for me.  When I remember to do it.

 

I’d like to see your website.  There are quite a few of us who work in creative fields—photography, advertising, writing, comedy, costumes, voice work, blogging—so you’re in good company.

 

If you want to make your own audiobook recordings sound better, you can jerry-rig a studio at home.  Mine is in my storage closet, which is so full of costumes that there’s no echo in it.  You can get a similar effect by hanging up a lot of clothes in your bathroom and recording in there.  No matter how ramshackle it may look, all that matters is that it works.

You don’t need a special microphone, but if you decide to get one, I use a Blue Snowball USB mic, because it’s good and it’s cheap.  You can get a used one on Ebay for under $50.

I connect the mic to my laptop and use Audacity as my recording software.  It’s free at http://audacity.sourceforge.net.  It has a lot of “toys” to improve your sound, but if your computer is too slow, your playback will sound like a 78 at 33 1/3.

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