GM everyone and happy Monday! Hope your year has been great so far.

I am not gonna ask you about your New Year resolutions, since probably 9 out of 10 of you have already given those up. Hopefully you have not given up creating, even though the market has been slow in the past month.

Not sure if you’ve read it or not, but back in the days when I minted my genesis piece I shared the whole journey and lessons learnt (you can read the post here) back then. I thought that maybe I should do something similar for the Stuck Elevator collab piece, since that one has been my highest priced NFT sale so far.

Ok, let’s start.

As you probably already know I am not a visual artist. I am a writer, so I primarily use stories as my main artistic expression. This means that unlike visual artists, I had to figure out how to “translate” my writings into NFTs. I still have not found a good way to do that with stories and novels (but I am getting close to a nice solution it seems).

I have found a solution for my poems though.

I turn them into a multi-format digital storytelling pieces. For that I am collaborating with visual artists and musicians. To imagine what I mean - check what we’ve made so far here.

The poem Stuck Elevator (originally titled simply Elevator) was written ages ago. I started my writing journey in my teenage years with poems and unlike my stories and novels, never formally published my poetry. So few months ago I went back to the archives and chose few poems that would be suitable to be turned into NFTs.

Stuck Elevator was one of the first ones I chose, but unlike the BOLD, which I immediately knew that would be perfect to create with Pinxx based on her art’s vibe and style I put this one on hold. I was not sure who would be best to collaborate with for it.

Just like most of my poems Elevator too was probably written in 5-10 minutes. Back in those days I would write in the evenings, with music blasting in my headphones, sipping beer straight from the bottle. And the birth of the written version of Stuck Elevator was hand written, long before I ever used a computer and way before the Internet got mass-adoption.

Just like with almost everyone else in the NFT space we connected with Calvn on Twitter. To be completely honest I had not seen his art until he launched his Impostergram series. When the first one showed up on my Tweet thread I loved it. It stood out, because it was different, it told a story and it spotlighted an important social issue. The quality of the piece was top notch too.

When I saw it I immediately thought - “This style fits the Elevator poem!” and send him a DM.

I sent over the poem and …

Although it took quite a while until we reached the end result (life, job, etc. kept getting on the way), the process was very smooth.

We had an initial call to make sure that we are on the same page on how we imagine it. Then we kept sending ideas on how would the characters look like and spend quite a bit on the choice of their hairstyles and clothes. I guess we wanted them to feel real and relatable. Luckily we were on the same page and there were no arguments whatsoever.

Then I kept procrastinating about the recording. I knew it was gonna be challenging. The hardest part was going to be striking the right balance, since if not narrated well enough we were risking it sounding cheap, funny or inappropriate…

Took me around 10 takes. I hated all of them equally and could not choose. So I ended up sending all 10 over otherwise the recording would have become a never-ending process…

Then it was Calvn-s turn to do his magic. And I was super impatient and curious to see what he would end up with. At the same time I did not want to pressure either…

the result was so much better than what I imagined/expected to be honest!

Check it yourself!

We had our first bid within the first hour, there was no bidding war and the piece was sold within 25-ish hours after minting and listing.

We both were extremely happy and not because it sold for 1 ETH but also because we got a great collector (super grateful!)

Hope this was helpful.

Have a great week Rebels!