I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Marketing, I research, plan, and evaluate my marketing and promotion activities.
I’m working on a conceptual art project that pairs personal essays with abstract paintings. The project is called Things Men Gave Me. Each essay shares a gift I received from a man (tangible or intangible) and the lessons I took away from the gift, and what happened surrounding it.
My plan is to complete three pairings and then launch with a new Substack newsletter.
While right now my focus is on completing the first three pairings, I also want to in tandem make a plan for the launch.
What I’ll need to complete before the launch:
- Three completed essays with three paintings. Essays will be up to 2000 words in length and will be modeled off of Modern Love essays from the New York Times. Each painting will be 24″ H x 18″ W (or landscape format, same dimensions). Each painting includes my signature blocks of color, writing and mark-making with china marker or art crayons, iridescent or metallic elements, scumbling, and many layers of color and texture built up over time. Each painting includes symbolic elements and abstracted representational elements.
- A landing page here on my website where I can direct people, that includes a link to the Substack. Plus an update to my website home page that features TMGM as the main current project.
- A Substack ready to go with the three essays featuring photos of the paired paintings. Substack also needs an About page, a welcome email, email headers and footers.
Then at launch, I will do the following:
- Write essays on my two other Substacks (Greensborough Drive and Incantata AI) about it
- For Incantata I will write a post about how I use ChatGPT to help me critique my paintings and get suggestions for improvement
- For Greensborough Drive, not sure yet
- Share via an art bio card to the WCACO Facebook page
- I am also planning to put it on my profile on reddit and start participating more actively on r/datingoverfifty once the newsletter is ready.
- I will also see if there are any Substacks focused on midlife dating or relationships that I can cross-promote on
- Maybe I need to make some recommendations on my Substack for such Substacks
- And participate in comment threads
One thing to ask myself: Do I want to have someone review the work before I do the soft launch? I’ve been using ChatGPT as my editor and advisor, but it can be overly validating. Still, I think I can just launch with it without any review. I can use the early preview to get feedback.
It’s ok to be a bit reckless with this project, I think. From Day 178 of my year-long reinvention project, in which I wrote about Carl Jung’s idea of enantiodromia (the turning to the opposite at midlife):
In my mid-forties, I was reckless in love in my pursuit of a permanent partnership. Now I feel called to be reckless with my art instead, putting my money, time, and heart towards something that, like a passionate relationship, may never work out in the way I imagine.
I’m glad I found that old post. A bit of recklessness could be helpful with the launch of my project, once I get ready for it. Also, I forgot about the concept of enantiodromia until now. In Living Your Unlived Life, Jungian Robert A. Johnson describes it this way:
Enantiodromia occurs when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up in unlived life. At first it interferes with conscious performance, but in time it breaks through conscious control. Chinese philosophy formulated this process as the interplay of yin and yang.
It is as if key aspects of our personality teeter-totter become so one-sided by midlife (unlived life reaches a critical tipping point) that the personality attempts a correction to restore balance.
My TMGM project is part of my personality’s attempt to restore balance. After a lifetime of focus on pragmatic creations—software systems for tech companies—now my focus is on art that transforms. But it can’t transform or offer insight unless I get it out into the world, hence the importance of developing a marketing plan.