HAPPY NEW YEAR!

My resolution this year: cut my Death Note usage to just five names a day (and ALL CRIMINALS, AARON).

KInd of wriggling things around here at heartshapedskull.com at the moment, doing a little Almost Spring Cleaning and suchlike. (Man, how long was that radio thing dead?) I’ll probably be adding things (hey, banners!) and shifting bits around for a little while yet, but nothing too drastic. The next big site update won’t happen until Vol. 3 is ready to roll out.

I decided to ditch most of the Google ads and go with Project Wonderful instead, mostly because they let you pick and choose which ads to allow on the site (“Yes on 8?” No on Google). If any of you guys use the PW, advertising here is super-dirty-cheap at the moment, so by all means, let’s get something cooler than Amazon up there.

I’ve got a couple of other money-making schemes in the works here, too, all in pursuit of what I like to call “living the dream.” Which in this case means “sitting in my own home, at my own desk, getting all my bills paid doing nothing but drawing Serenity Rose comics (preferably two a week) and maybe a few fun little sketch commissions every month, and never having to worry about getting any freelance work ever again.” God, it’s so close… I only need like $600/month to live right now. It’s like the dream is just barely pokable right now, but juuuuuust out of grasping distance. You guys have been just amazingly supportive of me and the comic, but I need to come up with some more interesting stuff to offer and some new strategies for bringing in more eyes…

Grasping schemes (upcoming):

1) PRINTS. Goodbye Crestfallen will definitely be published in paper form as soon as it’s done, but will it have all the color intact? Yeah… pretty unlikely, at least for now. So I thought I might offer full-color, hi-res prints of individual pages either through this site or something like etsy. Some new color prints would be lot of fun, too, if I could carve out some time. God, that’d be awesome.

2) NEW ORIGINAL PAGES. Several decades ago I promised to auction off some of the new Goodbye Crestfallen pages on good ol’ ebay. THAT TIME HAS COME. By the end of the month I’ll have a batch of four or five pages up for any and all possible bids. Requests?

3) LOCKETS. Heart-shaped skull lockets. Metal ones. I would dearly love to make this happen, but I just haven’t the speckiest of a speck of an idea how. We’ve thought about making them ourselves, but man, there just isn’t enough time in the day. Anybody have an idea?

4) ADVERTISING. Did I mention I made proper, I’m-serious-about-this, grown-up web proprietor banners? IT IS SO. One of them even has a little animation tucked in. If the Project Wonderful thing works out okay, it’d probably be a good idea to throw that money back into advertising on other folk’s sites, too….

5) COMMISSIONS. Oh wait… I’m already doing those! And hey, I have some pictures, even!

More stuff all up in the commissions gallery.

Anyway, if you’d like to commission your own wee drawering, send your request to serenity@heartshapedskull.com. The base price is $50, and $30 for each additional character on the same page. Shipping is all kinds of free within the U.S., and a mere $3 to parts beyond.

You could even etch it on your body permanently:

Calvin Tattoo

AWESOME.