Your future is here today!

[chipotle]

While digging through another box in the living room that mostly revealed still more comics (including a couple rare ones of perhaps dubious value, such as "Equine the Uncivilized" #1 and the first and only issue of Phil Foglio's "D'Arc Tangent"), I found a hard copy of the print advertisement for the Ishtar AFS.

The what, you may ask? In my now once again languishing novel In Our Image, part of the projected future--the part that's most integral to the story--includes "GMMs," genetically modified mammals, with a bit greater intelligence, dexterity, or other theoretically desirable features. The AFS series was a military project to create soldiers, later branched off into civilian versions of the extremely human-like cats.

When the earlier version of the story ran in YARF! this ad ran in a few issues before the story started, uncredited. I'm told they got a few queries about it.

Since I don't have the PageMaker original anymore (at least in a readable disk format), I scanned the ad and saved it as a relatively web-compatible graphics format. You'll have to excuse the moiré pattern in the grayscale, though.

Ishtar AFS ad

Comments

[chastmastr.livejournal.com]

I may still have a copy of that ad... :D

And it's still very well done.

I think you could have an excellent future in advertising, but I think (knowing your personality) you'd have to believe that the product is worth promoting to do it -- which is not a bad thing, it just means you'd have to be selective about who you work for. (I'm sure you probably could do very good ads for products you don't believe in, but I think you'd hate it very very quickly, as would I, and get burned out by it, as would I...)

Hmmm. If you could live on a smaller budget, and do some kind of job which allows you to do freelance work when you choose, that might be a very good thing... I could see you doing ads for Apple very very easily...

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

While I'm open to freelance work as a concept (in fact, the only job lead I have so far is a contract position, although I expect it'll be onsite work that runs a few months), advertising is really pretty difficult to get into that way. Before you get freelance ad work from anyone who can actually pay you enough to live on, you need to have a track record--which you get by working at an advertising agency. And, of course, when you start at an ad agency, you start at the bottom, and "pick and choose clients you believe in" is not an option.

I'm registered with a freelance web development web site called 'CreativeMoonlighter,' but because I haven't forked over a registration fee with them, any bid I put in on a project gets held for 72 hours. So far the site has been more useful in theory than in practice. :)