My promise to this email list was that I would only send to it when I have something worthwhile to say. Well, it looks like it's been a pretty boring six months on this end. Some of you may even have forgotten about me, and that's perfectly fine. If you don't want to be on my update list anymore, scroll right down to the bottom of this message and you'll find a happy little unsubscribe link.

Go ahead, I'll wait right here and enjoy the sunset here in San Pedro, Los Angeles ❤️

Now that I dabble in cell phone photography, expect to see some of my pics peppered throughout these emails.

And now, on to the business of the day! Here's the big update:

The New Job

I was taking marketing consulting gigs for most of the year, and I spent a few months actively looking for another Marketing Director role, but a few things combined to make me rethink my position:

1. My new financial situation (all the kids are now out of the house, so I can afford to make less money)
2. The terrible job market for my role
3. Some frustrating health stuff
4. The fact that I'm just pretty tired of doing the marketing thing for agencies/startups

With all this in mind, I've spent the past three weeks getting back into something I was doing for fun early in the year: serving as a story editor to writers, helping them bring their worlds to life using the AI tools I've developed. Except now I'm charging for my time and tools, and guess what . . . people are still requesting sessions.

In the past three weeks I've done eight sessions, all with fantastic results, both for me and for the client. Most clients are now referring others and/or requesting more work with me, which is great.

I won't get into it all here because I don't want this to be a huge email, but here's the elevator pitch for the brand I'm building (the Talemaiker name with alternate spelling connotes AI-powered storytelling):

Talemaiker Storytelling Tools

What Photoshop does for artists, Talemaiker does for storytellers. The platform houses a suite of custom AI tools that drastically accelerate and amplify writers' creative output while rapidly exploring and expanding their story universe.

It is NOT a writing tool. It's a powerful world-building engine for novelists, screenwriters, and video game developers.

You can check out exactly how I work with writers and the kind of stuff we produce here: Explore and Expand Your Story​

If anyone reading this email wants to jump into a session with me for anything they're working on, let me know that you came from here, and I'll knock $50 off any session you want.

Here's a little taste of what we can do together - this is from a client session last week where I helped bring two of her main characters to life with some sketches:

If you want to hear my philosophical perspective on AI and writing in general, you can read my last article: AI For Writers: Learning To Love Again. Spoiler alert: I think writers should write, and AI should not. But it can really really help you in some other ways ;)

So that's the big update - I'm going to go full-time on building these tools and consulting with novelists, screenwriters, and video game developers to help them with their projects, and see if I can start earning a true part-time income from it by the holidays, with full-time income starting early next year.

If you or anyone you know needs help from someone like me (story editing, custom AI development, generalized marketing consulting, etc), hit me back and let me know!

I plan to do these updates more regularly now that back doing something creative again, so expect to hear from me in the next week or two, probably.

Nate

PS - Since it's been so long, feel free to reply back and let me know what you're up to! I'd love to hear from you :)

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(If you ever stop loving these emails, just unsubscribe here - no hard feelings!)