My 2018: Achievements and Failures - Career milestones and mismanagement!

The deadline for @anomadsoul’s “Achievements and Failures” contest ends at midnight PST. I’m in the midwest, so I can still make this happen. I literally just posted my entry for @blewitt’s “Guilty Pleasures” contest, so I can retire for the evening knowing I did my part in continuing to churn the Steemit community engagement stew. This weekend, I’ll be announcing the winners for Trail by Comics’ theme, “Free Draw”, so with all this engagement happening, I say fuck you bear market! We’re doing just fine.

2018 was quite the rollercoaster. Based on 2017, this year hasn’t at all shaped up the way I expected. Cryptocurrency and Steemit was something I discovered through @mada and @lovejoy in the summer of 2016. My first Steemit post earned more than $1600. In addition to fully, blindly, loyally decided that Steemit would become a daily part of my life, it also set me up for wavering reality of what my future would look like going forward. It changes with the wind […or more accurately, fluctuation of the market].

Most of 2017, I was traveling and shooting nonstop. I’d signed a contract with @wcpublishing to publish my first photography art book. It would be titled Dark Pinup, my attempt to plant my flag in a genre of photography […a sub-genre of pinup] that I’d unintentionally created [Actually, I didn’t come up with the term dark pinup. People began referring to my work as that and it just stuck]. The book was to release at the Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend this year.

April 19th, 2018 was my greatest achievement of the year. One that’ll be hard to top next year, or for many years to follow. The book release party of Dark Pinup. The culmination of eight straight months of painstaking editing, design, writing and layout, and almost 20 years of exhausting travel and refinement of a skill and photographic voice that is uniquely my own. The book reflects that. Seeing it in print, even now, gives me a sense that I’ve made good use of my time here on earth. I have something to show for it all.

*Lovely @eveuncovered from her shoot and Steemit post, "I Got the Dark Pinup Book by @Kommienezuspadt".

I remember first discovering eBay around 1997. I bought a box of collectible pinup cards by painter, Olivia De Berardinis. One of the models was @masuimimax, who I went on to follow. I clearly remember having copies of Bizarre magazine with her on the cover in my apartment when I was 19. Fast forward to 2018, and she was headlining as the burlesque performer at my book release party! That is what I mean by “…this year is going to be hard to top.”. It still seems absolutely surreal.

But, you can’t have these wins without the occasional loss. Overall, I feel 2018 gave me more than it took, but it did take. I hate to pile on with the gloom, but my biggest failure of 2018 was mismanaging my earnings on Steemit and other cryptocurrencies. I am a HODLER, without a doubt. It’s not that I had intentions of taking everything out at the top and saying “….screw you, blockchains!”, but I do have a family to support. Am I still able to support them without cryptocurrency? Sure.

My plan was to take out roughly my annual income. With that money, I intended to spend less time traveling, more time with @vermillionfox and @guthrie, and finally focus an entire year of transitioning in to comics full time. I love photography, but as most of you know, comics and writing is where my heart is. The longer I’m unable to pursue that dream, the more resentful I find myself that I have to get on planes and fly to beautiful cities and photograph gorgeous women in lingerie [HAHA! I just imagine @anomadsoul reading that last sentence wanting to axe kick me in the face].

I know STEEM and the entire market is going to recover, and I know I’ll have my chance to get lost in comic book stories and graphic novels with @ghostfish, working on @coppercoins and other dark projects, but it won’t be this year. Tom Lee keeps insisting that BTC will be at $15K by the end of the year, so let’s hope he’s right and we’re all wrong, but in reality, I’ll have to face the fact that my inherent bullish optimism was […and probably always will be] my greatest failure of 2018.

Thanks for coming up with this contest @anomadsoul, and thank you @blocktrades for sponsoring it. I always stroll through Steemit during these slow times and make mental notes of who’s here, still participating. I love having so many friends that stand bravely against a bear market, continually coming up with ways to add value to this platform, regardless of the priceless, leadership or lack there of. Thanks for reading. For more photography, art, illustration and thoughts about life and Steemit, follow me here @kommienezuspadt!