Day 340

I've been writing about things out of order so this happened quite awhile ago, back when I first started to get noticed. I was contacted by a woman from the UK about writing an article about me. She worked for Caters News Agency. They don't publish articles themselves though. Instead they write articles and collect photos and sell them to other websites or newspapers to publish. So there was an opportunity for me to make some money off of this. I had to answer a lengthy list of questions and since I wanted the article to be good, I provided lengthy answers. She also requested photos of myself with the crayons which I begrudgingly provided. She also asked if I had any videos of myself carving a crayon. I said no but would try to make one. That's why I made a video of myself carving Finn. I'll upload it at some point. A week or so went by and then the article appeared.

It was published on the website of the Daily Mail which I believe is the second largest newspaper in the UK. That was cool, however the website has so much content that I'm not sure how many people actually came across it. I knew Brits like puns for their headlines and they made one for the title of the article. Unfortunately, it doesn't make much sense. Coincidentally around the same time, Banksy was spending time in New York making street art. He called his residency there "All I Ever Wanted was a Shoulder to Crayon" (spoiler alert: I'm Banksy). Anyway, the article was a very condensed version of the answered I provided. It was almost like it was made of bullet points. I guess they wanted to keep it short so it'll be easier to sell. The only real inaccurate thing about the article was that it made it seem like I quit dental school to carve crayons when really I just stumbled onto it while pursuing other things.

Apparently, Maeby Funke is a reader of the Daily Mail. Anyway, a few weeks went by and I didn't hear anything from my UK contact. I figured they didn't sell the article anywhere. Then out of the blue, I got a invoice saying I made about $100 off of a sale to Hello Canada magazine and/or website. I couldn't find any article from them about me since so I don't now if they actually did anything. Nonetheless I was pretty happy considering it's practically free money. I think I'm also due another hundred from a sale next month but I don't know who bought it yet. The original agreement with Caters was for a three month association and I have another month left on that. I bring that up because oddly enough I was also contacted by another UK based news agency asking to write an article and perform similar functions as the first one. I might take them up on that to see where that goes. 

On a slightly related note (I don't remember if I've written about this), I was contacted via Tumblr by a guy from Disney Magazine in Malaysia. He asked if they could publish images of my work. I replied to the email address he gave but he never responded. Sad. Maybe I could have gotten the attention of the US side of Disney.