After treating writing and photography as a hobby for most of my life, I finally took the leap and formed a company (TJ Hapney Artistic) for those endeavors. Time to treat it like a business so I will not be so lackadaisical in my approach. I will also do some bookkeeping and editing work to keep things rolling, but I am ready to work for myself. I am hoping it all goes well. I am sure there will be some stumbling blocks, but there is no time like the present and I have been threatening to do it for years. The time has come. I have over 30 years of experience in corporate America in accounting, editing documents, analyzing contracts, etc. in addition to other tasks in legal, engineering, and finance. I am sure some of those skills will help me along the way with this project.
I am not sure of all the topics I will end up covering here, but I am trying to get back into the habit of freewriting every day and this is as good a place to do that as any. Maybe someone who is afraid to take that chance on themself will read this or later posts and feel inspired. Hopefully, I will not scare them away from it. ROFL.
For today the plan is to get my domain pointed to my website so I can start promoting it and order business cards. I have approximately 2,000 photographs shot in Raw to go through from my month of travel and process or discard as suits. Lastly, there is also a rather long short story to finish that I have been writing and need to do a final edit on as well as another I have started. There are also the beginnings of three books all of which I am more than 40,000 words into. Lots of work to do.
All of the paperwork has been done for a while, but this is the first real day of getting the company going now that I spent the last month increasing my portfolio and am about to start posting writing projects on Amazon and get my storefronts launched. I wanted to take a second and note that as much for myself as anything. I will post the link for the website and such once I get the domain pointed correctly and whatnot. The photo shown here is from my recent trip to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. This is one of the views from where I stayed. The jutting-out piece of land is the runway at the Cyril E. King Airport there.
I worked as a drywall finisher at this airport more than 30 years ago when it was being constructed and the dreams of today were just beginning to form. So many changes over the years, but those were good times that opened my eyes up more to the world and I would not trade them for anything. The Virgin Islands are beautiful and I decided to revisit to shoot some photos to add to my website. This is simply a shot from the porch the first night I arrived. The sky was gorgeous and I could not resist.