Creativity Friday: Halloween Tarot Salon and App Sale

Busy time here! In the past week, I’ve finished the use case spec for the Goddess Tarot iPad app (above). (A use case spec used to programm an app.) On top  of that, I designed and submitted three e-books to Apple, Amazon, and BN.com—THE GODDESS TAROT guide, THE FIREBIRD, and one other project to be revealed later. (Yes, it’s a secret!). I’ve also designed a book cover and have been immersed in revising and researching THE LILY MAID. Oh, and more.

So no surprise, but I’ve come down with a cold. Regardless, Halloween is my favorite holiday, so the show must go on and all that.

First off, tonight at the gallery, I’ll be hosting a tarot salon featuring myself, tarot reader Rene Collins, and masseuse Fran Dunston. We’ll have chocolate, wine, and that certain je nai se quoi. The salon goes from 7 until 9:30 pm. Readings and massages are available at a variety of prices, but admission and refreshments are free. The gallery is located half a block from the Newkirk Avenue Q and B station in Brooklyn.

If you can’t make it tonight, we’ll be having a family-friendly Halloween party at the gallery tomorrow, Saturday, October 30th. We’ll have bobbing for apples, pumpkin carving, and fun for ghouls of all ages! Thea plans to dress up as a hamster. If that’s not an enticement to attend our party, I don’t know what is.

Finally, to celebrate Halloween, I’ve placed the full version of the Goddess Tarot iPhone app on sale! It’s now $0.99, down from its usual price of $3.99. This price is good only through the weekend.

US residents

UK residents

Canada residents

And Happy Halloween!!!

• Filed under events, iPhone apps, retail therapy, studio and gallery | No Comments

On the Road of Bones open house

We hope you’ll join us for an open house reception for our new exhibition at the gallery. Here are the details:

Friday, October 15, 6–10 pm
ON THE ROAD OF BONES: Ghosts of the Siberian Gulag Along the Old Kolyma Highway
Art Exhibition Open House and Reception

An evening of celebrating Russian and Siberian cultures with champagne, northern cuisine, native arts and crafts, and live “chat” with the photographers in Yakutsk. Children welcome. Suggested donation of $5.

Through photography and mixed media, this exhibition reveals the secret history and natural beauty of Kolyma, formerly the land of Soviet labor camps and the coldest inhabited region in the world. Stunning new works by young native Siberian photographers Bolot Bochkarev, Nastya Borisova, and Ajar Varlamov trace the remains of the vast highway built across the taiga, tundra, and permafrost of North Asia by Stalin’s prisoners. “On the Road of Bones” juxtaposes the events of the hidden past with the power of the frozen landscape and the contemporary lives of people in the far north. Learn more

Visit the official website at OntheRoadofBones.com.

Read more about this exhibit on the Ditmas Park Blog:
http://ditmasparkblog.com/news/siberia-the-beauty-and-the-beast#more-7195

We hope to see you there! For directions to the gallery, click here.

• Filed under events, studio and gallery, the art world, the world around me, travels | One Response

Creativity Friday: Creative Women’s Networking Salon—and a great review

This has been a crazy week here for me work-wise. I’m in the midst of a giant iPhone 4 Goddess Tarot app which necessitated my enlarging every single graphic for the retina display. There are over 500 graphics in the app—need I write more on how labor-intensive this is? However, the good news is that, along with this graphics update, I’m adding a new feature to the Full version. Soon users will be able to e-mail their Goddess Tarot app readings to each other!

More to come on this soon, along with news about the Goddess Tarot iPad app. But one can’t be all-work-and-no-play all the time: The Creative Women’s Networking Salon is back from summer hiatus tonight.

Here are the details:

Friday, October 8, 7-9:30 pm
Creative Women’s Networking Salon

Are you an artist, writer, or creative entrepreneur and practioner? Come out and meet other like-minded women for conversation, inspiration, and wine. At previous salons, we were joined by photographers, crafters, publishing people, designers, artists, writers, and illustrators. Suggested donation $5 for food and wine.

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In other good news, my two new Doomed Queens-themed card decks just received a euphoric review from The Magical Buffet, a website where spirituality, politics, and pop culture collide most entertainingly. For example, they titled their article about  my decks,  “We Are Not Amused, Actually We Are.” Fun!

Here’s what they wrote:

If you’ve been a regular reader of The Buffet for any length of time you have no doubt heard me shout about how (insert item/person/event/other) is the most awesome thing ever. Every time I feel I’ve encountered what will surely be the coolest thing to ever cross my experience, something new comes to light. That said, today we will be looking at what is surely the coolest, most awesome, most fan-freakin’-tastic thing ever! The Doomed Queens Royal Playing Cards and the companion Ask the Queens Advice Card Deck, both by Kris Waldherr and published by US Games Systems…. Both “Doomed Queen” decks are unique and so much fun! Alone or together, they would truly make gifts that keep on giving.”

Read the rest of the review here. Learn more about these card decks here.

• Filed under creativity, events, queens, tarot and oracles, the world around me | One Response

Stuff I like: NaNoWriMo

Now that we’re at the tail end of September, is it too soon to consider the approach of November? I think not. After all, November is National Novel Writing Month, better known by its jaunty abbreviation of NaNoWriMo. That alone makes me happier about winter’s approach. (I dread winter’s cold and dark days.)

NaNoWriMo challenges writers to write a novel—50,000 words—in a month. Last year there were 167,150 participants. Think this is impossible? It’s not. I did it last year and “won.” So did 32,177 other writers. I finished with 50,590 words of THE LILY MAID’s first draft (since extensively reworked and expanded to over 100,000 words).

Would I have gotten it together to start a novel otherwise? Perhaps, but doubtful. Knowing myself, I’d just put it off until a future date. Or until I felt more confident as a writer. In other words, probably never. The good people at NaNoWriMo acknowledge that most people have these same excuses reservations. They offer these wise counterarguments:

1) If you don’t do it now, you probably never will. Novel writing is mostly a “one day” event. As in “One day, I’d like to write a novel.” Here’s the truth: 99% of us, if left to our own devices, would never make the time to write a novel. It’s just so far outside our normal lives that it constantly slips down to the bottom of our to-do lists. The structure of NaNoWriMo forces you to put away all those self-defeating worries and START. Once you have the first five chapters under your belt, the rest will come easily. Or painfully. But it will come. And you’ll have friends to help you see it through to 50k.

2) Aiming low is the best way to succeed. With entry-level novel writing, shooting for the moon is the surest way to get nowhere. With high expectations, everything you write will sound cheesy and awkward. Once you start evaluating your story in terms of word count, you take that pressure off yourself. And you’ll start surprising yourself with a great bit of dialogue here and a ingenious plot twist there. Characters will start doing things you never expected, taking the story places you’d never imagined. There will be much execrable prose, yes. But amidst the crap, there will be beauty. A lot of it.

3) Art for art’s sake does wonderful things to you. It makes you laugh. It makes you cry. It makes you want to take naps and go places wearing funny pants. Doing something just for the hell of it is a wonderful antidote to all the chores and “must-dos” of daily life. Writing a novel in a month is both exhilarating and stupid, and we would all do well to invite a little more spontaneous stupidity into our lives.”

I can attest that all of this is true. NaNoWriMo is life-changing. It’s also a lot of fun, which is reason enough to participate imho.

Though I won’t be participating in National Novel Writing Month this year—instead, I’ll be doing a private National Novel Editing Month as I revise my novel—I’ve been encouraging all of my writer friends to participate. I’m envious of the wonderful time they’ll be having, but it would be difficult to abandon THE LILY MAID at this point to jump into another narrative—like leaving a baby in the bathwater without supervision.

So, think you have a novel inside you? (Of course you do!) Are you ready to jump into a month of literary abandon? (I hope so!) Can you stand so much creativity? (Mais oui!) Good news: the 2010 NaNoWriMo website will be live at the end of the week for you to sign up for free. Then you can use October to outline or research your novel in preparation for November.

Let me know if you do. I’ll be cheering from the sidelines.

ETA: The 2010 site is now live!

• Filed under The Novel, be-mused, creativity, events, stuff I like, the world around me | One Response

Tarot Salon!

On a related note to my previous post, this Friday marks the return of our tarot salon to the gallery after a summer hiatus—hope to see you there! Here are the details:

Friday, September 24, 7 – 9:30 pm
TAROT SALON – SEPTEMBER EDITION
Free admission and refreshments.

The gallery’s most popular event! As featured in Time Out New York, the Village Voice, Brooklyn Based, the New York Post and more.

This month, tarot readers will include Goddess Tarot creator Kris Waldherr and New York City’s urban shaman Queen Mama Donna Henes. Massage therapist Fran Dunston will also be in attendance offering massages at $1 a minute. Readings are available on the question of your choice and at a variety of prices. We also have a hauntingly beautiful new exhibit up of photographs by native Siberian photographers. So come have a glass of wine and see what new wisdom the
new season has to offer!

This event takes place at:
Kris Waldherr Art and Words studio-gallery
1501 Newkirk Avenue (entrance on Marlborough Road)
Brooklyn, NY 11226
347-406-5811
click here for directions

• Filed under events, studio and gallery, tarot and oracles | One Response