cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Plan Marches On Through the blizzard, through Christmas, through the constant whirring of family events and parties that followed, I had feared that I was getting off-track in terms of my career change. Now I'm on track. Things are good. I had a field dressing demo last Friday evening, which killed two birds with one stone. So to speak. It fulfilled my obligation to my Sunday night class and it allowed me to get audio for NPR. We did the final butchering class last night and everyone had a good time. That was absolutely a successful class and my students were great. About 30 minutes ago I handed the digital recorder to the NPR reporter/producer who is doing the story on me. It will run regionally in the next few days and nationally at some point in the next couple of weeks. I could use another sport of national media coverage, so this is well-timed. I now feel like I have all of the planning for my weekend intensive course well in hand. HBO is coming for that and I'm feeling good about it all right now. Meanwhile, I want to expand my horizons. I want to do some travelling for free this year, so I'm developing a new curriculum for a 4 hour workshop as well as a 1 hour speaking gig presentation. The idea is that I'm going to go teach and speak at slow food conferences and events. I think I can get myself booked as a featured guest at all kinds of slow food and local food events in Sweden, Australia, Germany and Japan. I've started by offering today to do a free workshop for a nearby slow food chapter. If they can't follow through then I'll just contact one of the other ones elsewhere in the state. The point is just to have something scheduled with a deadline that I HAVE to meet by having my different program together. Then after teaching it regionally I can tweak what I'm doing based on the experience and feedback and then use the connections I'll make in that process to teach the same workshop for the national organization, which is headquartered only a few hours drive from me. At that point, slow food event organizers in other countries will have heard about it and they will start coming to me. What I get paid for that shit doesn't even really matter. $1,000 or whatever would certainly be nice, but what I'm really after here is getting free air fare, hotel rooms and meals in order to take trips to interesting places around the world. This is a good plan. I think that it will work and that it will start to bear fruit in only a few months. Especially since the national slow food HQ for the US is within the media market for the NPR affiliate that is producing the piece on me. There's no fucking way that those people aren't listening to All Things Considered every day. So they'll hear the story twice and then when I email them about teaching a workshop through their organization then I'll get a fast 'yes.' 5:11 p.m. - 2010-01-04 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||