Will typhoid Sheryl strike again?

I was working a job I hated, for the possibly worse lawyer boss on the face of the earth, and decided to try a career of typing up transcripts for the Court Reporters. I knew one reporter, from my secretarial job, and she needed someone to do her typing. Things were going well and I was thinking about marketing and expanding, when they came out with a computer program that did it for the Reporters. Thus, ending my job.

Then, being an artist who loves painting people, I looked at my market and decided to do Native Americans. I was really tired of painting deceased children. This is what my "paint people" marketing was bringing in. It is a depressing thing to do on a daily basis and most of the parents, I was meeting, just did not seem to be ready for it.

I had a love of the Native American culture and was raised to believe I had Native heritage. I started exhibiting at Pow Wows and marketing my work in the Western artist market and before long, I was exhibiting in National shows, being asked to do things like deceased actor Will Sampson's (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) portrait. I was also getting written up in SouthWest Art Magazine. Then, as I start selling a large original every month, the bottom drops out of the native market. Shows started closing and frankly, I was out of marketing money, having made a bad decisions, based on SouthWest Art's Magazine add salesman. Sometime I will tell you about my opinion of advertising salesmen. Another career bites the dust.

We moved to Wyoming and I begin putting together my pottery studio and man that stuff sold so fast I could not keep up. I could barely keep up with the sales of my animal drawings and had a list of commissions to keep me busy. The time came when, Casper, Wyoming being a city, at the time of around 60,000 people, I realized that I had pretty well reached my clients. I could branch out into other states but my husband's health was deteriorating. So, when I was downsized at the College, we decided to move back to Indiana.

We decided that the artist town of Nashville, Indiana was our target. It had an active community of artists and was only three hours drive from daughter and husband's relatives. We moved, we remodeled a horse barn for my studio, I joined the local art guilds and the Brown County Studio and Garden Tours 2008. Actually, I joined the tour of 2004. That year I made more in sales than I had in two years in Wyoming, and my income doubled the next year and again the next year. Had I, at last, found my niche?

Some unknown illness was beating me down and I was gradually unable to do pottery. I quit the tour to build up my health and I, are you ready, began making eight inch tall polymer clay fairies and selling them on eBay. My last one sold for $700. That was about six months before emergency heart surgery. Recovering now, I could go back to doing that but since prices on eBay have dropped well over twenty-five percent, and still going down. I do feel I have again hit an occupation just as it was falling into the great abyss.

I refuse to believe I caused these things to happen. I just seem to have a knack for getting into things at the wrong time. I stay away from the stock market because, well- I can't afford it, but also it is in enough trouble already.

Now, my final edit is over half done and I am working on some marketing, and a lot of research to do the best query I can. So, it was with some delight, that I recently read The 26th Story: George Jones Q & A . This was actually a link on Nathan Bransford - Literary Agent blog. George Jones is the President and CEO of Borders Group, Inc. And, news is not so bad.

So, I hope you excuse if I am not posting as often as I would like, but I gotta hurry before the bottom drops out. Hopefully, with the confidence of Mr. Jones, it will stay strong for us and break my streak.