Shipping Hiatus: June 11 - July 1

by Ariela

Chibi Ariela is buried under boxes, just a hand protruding, saying “A little help, please?”

I’m moving in a few weeks. The thing about moving house when you run a business from home is that your business moves, too. It also means you have a lot of business accoutrements to move. So all of our stock and equipment is getting packed up in boxes and transported to a new location and while that happens, we won’t be able to get to it to fulfill any orders.

We will still be accepting orders during this time, but we won’t be shipping out any of those orders until July 1.

Terri Appreciation Week: Hufflepuffs, They Get The Job Done

by Ariela

Happy Passover to all of you celebrating out there!

The last full week of April, that would be this week, is Administrative Professionals Week in the United States of America. ‘Round hereabouts, that means it’s Terri Appreciation Week.

It’s very easy to see what I do—I put pen to paper and make pretty art—but it’s much harder to see what Terri does.

Hufflepuffs, they get the job done.
Chibi Terri smirks with her arms crossed, wearing a Hufflepuff House scarf and says “Darn right we do.”

Terri is a Hufflepuff. She is hardworking and extremely loyal. (She is also an American badger, so don’t effing mess with her or her loved ones. She will defend her own with sharp teeth and claws. Seriously, why do Brits think of badgers as cute and bucolic? They’re scary.)

A short, non-comprehensive list of things that Terri does around here:

• Looks for art shows for us to send our art to

• Investigates other venues for selling our art (mostly our Judaica)

• Fills out paperwork (So. Much. Paperwork.)

• Itemizes every single, solitary expense the business had

• Writes most of our product release blog posts

• Handles most of our product release social media

• Comes up with ideas for art

• Blogs

• Manages the business schedule

• Monitors my workload and keeps me from overcommitting and burning myself out

• Deals with customer inquiries

• Deals with wholesale inquiries

Terri is more than just a “manager.” She’s an agent, an editor, a manager, and an assistant all rolled into one. Geek Calligraphy is not my business, it’s ours. We founded it together. She’s my business partner. And before she was any of that, she was—and continues to be—my best friend.

There are very few awards for administrative professionals, in part because what they do is very rarely visible to anyone outside their respective businesses. (Also in part because we live in a society that devalues support work, whether administrative or emotional, but we’re here to celebrate Terri, not protest the sexism and Capitalist values in our social order.) Part of the way that we change that is by publicly talking about what they do.

Terri is awesome, her work is valuable, and she deserves to have more than a week celebrating her accomplishments.

Chibi Terri holds out her Hufflepuff scarf and muses, “*sigh* These are really not my colors.”

---

Chibi Terri holds a sign saying “Will Wrangle on a Contract Basis.”

Does what Terri does for Geek Calligraphy sound helpful? Do you wish you had someone to do some of that for you? You can!

Terri also takes clients on a freelance basis.

Some things Terri can do for you:

• Invoicing

• Yelling at People Who Need Yelling At

• General Unsticking

• Social Media Plan

Visit her website: ArtistWrangling.com

Calligraphing Out Loud

by Ariela

I don’t talk much about my day job over here. 35 hours a week I work on the technical back-end of email marketing and on website analytics for the Union for Reform Judaism (I’m not Reform, I just work for the institution, in case that wasn’t clear.) I take inspiration for my tech-related calligraphy projects from it, but otherwise I assume that no one is coming to the Geek Calligraphy blog to hear me blather about non-profit marketing or database integration woes. But this time I am going to talk about my day job, because I am doing something over there that has surprising applications to calligraphy.

For the past few months I have been doing a professional development program called Working Out Loud. I started it because lately I have had trouble focusing on long term projects and have found myself instead reading news coverage of the dumpster fire that is the world instead. Not that staying informed is bad, but this wasn’t healthy news consumption, and it wasn’t resulting in much action on my part; I just read and read and felt nauseated and distressed. I wanted help getting my focus back. I was initially reluctant to give it a try – I am deeply skeptical about corporate professional development programs – but a coworker whom I trusted vouched for it, so I signed up.

The five elements of Working Out Loud are relationships, generosity, visible work, purposeful discovery, and a growth mindest.

I was surprised to find myself far more inclined to apply the lessons from the program to my calligraphy work than to my day job, and not in the ways that might be expected. Yes, Geek Calligraphy is a small business and a “startup,” but instead of causing me to get more business-y about it, it wound up encouraging me to go the opposite way, particularly on Twitter, in two significant ways.

First, I decided to share more of my responses to things I am reading on Twitter. Mostly that takes the form of telling authors when I am reading and enjoying their book. I didn’t do that much before because I figured that authors get enough noise at them on Twitter, they didn’t need one more person up in their mentions. But the Working Out Loud exercises on “the gift of attention” inspired me to start. Most of those posts have gotten likes from the authors, so I guess they don’t find it annoying after all 😊 In one case I even took a selfie (I never think to take selfies, and when I do I am terrible at them) to show exactly how gobsmacked and touched I was by a certain passage in a book that resonated with me very deeply.

Second, I decided to make more of an effort to share process shots on social media. As a perfectionist, I find the idea of sharing images of my work in progress scary. How can I let people see anything less than my best finished product? But the exercises in being vulnerable, and above all the encouragement to work in a visible way while in community with other people, i.e. “working out loud,” encouraged me to give it a try. In September I shared process shots of a piece on Twitter as I was working on it, and I was surprised at the positive responses I got. Given how much I enjoy watching work-in-progress videos from my favorite artists online, I suppose I shouldn’t have been so shocked, but it never occurred to me that others would view my work the way that I look at theirs.

We just did Week 8 (of 12), and it contains a Habit Checklist. My circle leader, Larry Glickman, suggested printing it out but, ha, I wasn’t just going to print it out! I don’t do boring printouts on my walls, I do calligraphy. And, in the spirit of the Working Out Loud ethos, I want to make it available to anyone who will find it helpful for their personal use.

Download a printable PDF of the calligraphy. Feel free to print it out for your own use. It’s black and white for maximum friendliness to workplace printers. (No commercial reproduction, please.)

Would I recommend Working Out Loud to other people?

Yes, but with two caveats.

First caveat is that the program assumes that participants have a certain safety margin in their personal circumstances. I mean that in a financial sense, in a physical safety sense, and in an emotional labor sense. On the financial side, the program doesn’t require a significant outlay of money, but it does require time, and of course, time is money. In terms of physical safety, Working Out Loud encourages public vulnerability, which can be dangerous for people of marginalized identities, both in the physical world and online. For survivors of abuse or violence, it can be a panic-inducing prospect. WOL does emphasize that each exercise is always up to you and you should never do anything that doesn’t work for you, but the repeated calls for voluntary vulnerability could be very off-putting for those for whom vulnerability is not optional. In terms of emotional labor, the program encourages participants to be generous with their time and their expertise, which is lovely, but very hard to do when the world already expects you to work for free. Of course it is different to choose freely to give of yourself, but for some people and in some professions that needs to be preceded by a cost-benefit analysis of “will doing this for free once cause an expectation of free labor ever after?” Again, WOL doesn’t demand that you do any exercise that doesn’t work for you. But these are some things it is helpful to be aware of so that you can choose whether Working Out Loud will be a good program for you.

The second caveat is that I haven’t found any awareness in the course that, for some, the program will run up hard against structural inequalities. If your main resource is your network and your community is struggling deeply, they will have fewer resources to help you get ahead. Study after study shows that unconscious bias is alive and well, to say nothing of conscious prejudice, and it will make expanding a network and demonstrating work much harder for some people than for others. Expecting a self-improvement program to overcome systemic inequalities would be totally unrealistic, not to mention unfair. But awareness of the limitations in the face of such problems is crucial.

I do still recommend Working Out Loud. I am even making plans to start my own circle with some friends in the geeky professional community after I finish my first circle.

No Matter How Much You Love It, Work Is Hard

by Ariela

We're generally pretty cheery about our work process here at Geek Calligraphy on this blog. But today I want to pull back the curtain a bit and talk about some of the ways in which it is challenging.

Geek Calligraphy is a side gig for me. I have a day job that I work 35 hours per week (and only 35 hours, thank you, labor union). I create all the Geek Calligraphy art, write my portion of the blog posts, take commissions, and do scribal work around the edges of that. This means that I have financial security while I work on building up this business.

With the recent addition of scribal work to that load, however, I have started to strain the feasibility of this arrangement to the breaking point. There are only so many hours in a day, and aside from shifting more of the blogging burden onto Terri, I haven't really cut back on any of the other work associated with Geek Calligraphy. We still do a product release every month. I have a backlog of commissions that's over six months long. (Sorry people who don't have definitive deadlines! I promise I have not forgotten you!)

I have more work than I can feasibly accomplish while maintaining a full-time job, but not enough that I could quit said full-time job. (Also, my spouse is a grad student. That day job is what keeps a roof over our heads and food on our table.) Someday I would like to ditch the day job and do calligraphy and scribal work full time, but I am not there yet. Reducing my hours at my day job is not currently an option, and finding a new one that would cover our expenses, include benefits, and not require more hours is as likely as finding a unicorn grazing in Central Park (if you see one, it's probably a hoax).

Nobody is forcing me to do this. I could quit anytime, but I don't want to, because I love doing art and I love getting my art out to people who appreciate it. I don't want to stop doing scribal work, or product releases for Geek Calligraphy, because both of those are important groundwork for that elusive someday when I might be able to be a full-time artist. So I work too much, get out too little, and keep saying to myself "someday!"

And right now, I feel like this:

Gif shows Barry Allen on a treadmill.

There's a New Way to Support Our Work!

by Ariela

There are lots of ways to support creators you like. Up until recently, the only ways to support us have been to buy our art and to spread the word about our art. Today we are adding a third option: buying us "coffee."

Ko-fi logo

Ko-fi is a free service that allows fans to give money to creators in small amounts, amounts roughly equivalent to buying them a coffee.

Y U No Patreon?

Patreon is probably the best known crowdfunding service for creators, but it has never really been an option for us. Patreon's reward system tends to depend on offering special perks each month for the highest donors, either in the form of early releases or additional content. Our content doesn't tend to be sequential such that getting access to it early would be particularly enticing, and we're already working to our maximum capacity to get each product released each month and complete commissions so creating more content isn't an option for us right now.

That's why Ko-fi is a good model for us. We recognize that there are plenty of reasons why someone may appreciate our work without wanting or being able to buy our art. But we hope that people will be inspired to support us in other ways.

So, will you buy us a coffee?

P.S. Some of you may be finding this a little ironic. After all my loathing of coffee is legendary. I don't have anything witty to say about it other than to shrug and say that I am not actually being paid in coffee, so I can use it to buy tea, or, more likely, matboard for art. Also, Terri does like coffee, and she is half of this outfit.