Category: Art

Preparing to publish a new book of poetry

Exciting news: After nearly a year without a response (hopefully, people saw my submission guidelines & took my advice about going the self-publishing route for electronic publication), Modern Evil Press finally received its first submission, and it was a good one. A poetry collection. Within just a few minutes of reading the poems, I immediately thought to myself, “Hey, I think this person actually read my submission guidelines – this is just the sort of poetry I’d publish! This reminds me of my own depressing poetry!” (My guidelines include things like “read my books” and “know what I publish” before getting to anything like technical requirements.) I continued reading, and continued to appreciate what I saw, and have been going back and forth with the author for the last several days, and it looks like I’ll be publishing a new collection of poetry soon. The title is Unspecified, the author is Yoshira Marbel of South Africa, and the poetry cuts deep.

As you probably know if you’ve been following my work (or this blog) at all, my publishing model (to be sure books are, if not profitable, at least don’t lose money) has two parts: 1) Electronic publishing, which doesn’t cost me much money, and I’ll do for any book I publish (eBooks and audiobooks, for free and for sale), and 2) Print publishing, which costs a couple/few hundred dollars for setup & initial printing), and I’ll only initiate printing after I’ve raised sufficient capital to pay those up-front costs, usually through the sale of the original artwork I design for each book’s cover. The time and effort it takes to get the book ready for publication is roughly the same whether I’m only doing one or I do both, and since I only publish books I either love or wrote (preferably both), I don’t count the time & effort spent to publish a book against its profitability. (Yet. Perhaps someday I’ll sell enough books to be able to pay myself a salary. Heh.)

As it is with my own books, so it goes with the new one. Yoshira and I would really like to do a print version of the collection, so while we’re still selecting poems and crafting their order, polishing the front matter and end matter, designing the cover and writing the copy, I’m getting started on the fundraising. Immediately upon reading her poetry, which hews toward themes of heartbreak and sadness, I knew I could use my painting ‘without you’ to raise at least part of the funds.

If you haven’t seen it before, yes, those are real razor blades. They really cut into the canvas. I actually forced red paint (no, not blood) through the cut canvas to get the drips just right. I painted it specifically to capture an emotion I was sure razor blades were the only answer to. Alas, it was not really appropriate for the cover of this collection… Still, it matches well enough with the book that proceeds from its sale are definitely earmarked for covering the costs of printing this collection. Continue reading Preparing to publish a new book of poetry

Twelve years working on technique

I’ve been making art my entire life, much longer than 12 years, but I thought I’d take a little while and write about a particular period of my work, from late 1997 to early 2010, which has largely been concerned with two-dimensional art, mostly acrylic on canvas. (Really, this post is about the first and last paintings of that period; as I post more posts about the work I did in between you’ll see more of the development of my techniques as they progressed.) For a few years before that, I’d been doing mostly murals, painting directly onto walls – of my bedroom, my friends’ bedrooms, even my church. Then, in the summer of 1997, I moved out of my parents’ home and across town to Tempe, where I was a physics student at ASU, and into an apartment. Where I was no longer allowed to paint on the walls. Thus, I began attempting to create art on canvases for the first time in the Fall of 1997. (I’d done a few not-very-good paintings on canvas boards at age 12/13, but that’s not exactly the same thing.)

Click any image for a larger view

The first piece of art I created after moving out, you can see at right. I’d been doing a lot of blue skies painting in my murals, and it carried over to this painting, in part. I was also interested in correlating colors to numbers and mixing them and laying them out according to simple mathematical patterns. In addition, you can probably see that I worked colored embroidery floss into my design, sewing right into the canvas. You can see that I was just experimenting, to a certain degree, playing with colors and shapes, with masking techniques, with so many things at once…

Continue reading Twelve years working on technique

A Problem of Confidence

I have a problem with confidence. Self-confidence. I became aware of it recently, when I noticed myself explaining over and over again to people (other artists) that I hadn’t done this, or that, I hadn’t, I wasn’t, I couldn’t… because I don’t have the confidence. The first time I said it, I noticed it, and as I continued to explain about my art (about all the things I haven’t been doing), it began to stand out like a sore thumb. ((Coincidentally, I have a sore thumb, too. I sliced open my thumb on the sharp edge of a can of soup late Thursday night, and managed to re-open it Friday night at the art walk. A very friendly artist got me a bandaid when, while talking to her about art/stuff, I began bleeding all over.))

A large piece of that has to do with marketing and self-promotion; it’s a real requirement of effective self-promotion that one displays self-confidence. I know it. I know it, and my self-doubt gets in the way of marketing my art.

There’s more to it than that, though. There’s not having enough confidence to attempt certain types of art, certain subjects. There’s not having the confidence to create large works. There’s not having the confidence to price my art high enough. Even my not having the confidence to do readings, whether poetry or prose, in front of an audience managed to come up Friday night.

I’m sure that, to a certain extent, this relates back to another thing I kept having to explain; I’ve painted 3 things in the last year, and two of them were book covers. The other is a commission I got week before last (which has been a series of headaches, lately; I have damaged & had to re-paint part of it several times, now, in several ways)… though tonight I managed to begin work on another new work of art, and as I keep saying (but hadn’t been doing), I want to get back to creating art again, this year. I had meant to take some time off last year, but not this long… I had meant to study some new art techniques (actually, to finish a correspondence art course I bought years ago and never finished going through – I can’t turn anything in anymore, but I got them to send me all the materials & books) and then get back to creating my own art when I’d got through, but that didn’t much happen, either.

In a way, that last intention was borne from my confidence, or at least my capability; I had reached a point with a painting (or two) where, even before the paint was dry I knew I had mastered my technique (with the tape/knife/paint thing I do, to create crisp intersections between very specific fields of color) and could go no further with it. I’d worked on it in most of my art for about 12 years, and now I execute it as though it were simple. Easy. I’ve mastered it. So I knew I needed to work on learning some new techniques. New things to start from scratch with and work on for years until I began to be happy with the results, then more years until I mastered them, integrating one skill with another and another until, someday, decades from now, I hope to be able to really begin to create art I can actually be fully confident about. So there’s a thing. Even my confidence (in my mastery of a particular technique) just serves to reveal a gaping void (of everything I don’t yet know and can’t yet do) where I only hope to be able to someday begin to fill it in with confidence a spoonful at a time.

I don’t know what to do about it, or whether much ought to be done about it. I know (and see in that last paragraph a reminder of same) that without self-doubt I might not grow, as a person, as an artist, into who I might someday truly be. That I have lived many years being accused of condescension to others, of seeming to believe myself to be superior, and that I don’t want to end up in that place – a place too much confidence can easily lead one to.

Alternatively, perhaps my lack of confidence has been holding me back from some kinds of success. The assumption that my books would never, could never, wouldn’t have ever sold more than a handful of copies … it’s built right into the foundation of my life, now. It’s a core concept behind my decision (years ago, yes, but ongoing with every book, every format, every hour, day, week, year poured into this) to start my own publishing company. It’s like gravity or electromagnetism or love; it’s something I feel all the time. I’m less convicted about my art’s destiny – I don’t have as deep a belief about the audience or market for the paintings, sculptures, and other visual arts I create, though I certainly have my doubts. Either way, these beliefs and doubts have led me along certain narrow paths in my life. I’ve never submitted, or really even seriously considered submitting, my art or my words to galleries, agents, or publishers. With my books I genuinely believe there is no good, Capitalist reason for a publishing company to take on my writing. With my art it feels more like … ignorance? Like I’m floating in space an uncertain distance from a world I can’t quite see, and I don’t know how to get there, or how to find out, or whether I’d be welcome if I tried, or really even what the point would be, if any – so I just pretend the art world isn’t really there, and when I create art I don’t even bother pushing it in their (still really unknown) direction; I just let it go, adrift in space, like me. I just let it go, and I hope.

I’m rambling. I’m writing this after sunrise, but not because I got up early. My sleeping has gone off the rails a bit; fully nocturnal tonight, though shifting by as much as 8 hours (at one end or the other) from day to day. I’ve been feeling pretty low, lately. Thinking about death. Mostly about my own death, which I’m not afraid of, though some thoughts about my wife’s death, which terrifies me… and always seems to lead back to thoughts of taking my own life; I don’t think I’d make it very long if she were gone. For so many reasons. In so many ways. I guess that means that right now I don’t really even have the confidence to live. I don’t have confidence in my own life.

Ugh. I’m going to bed, perchance to sleep. If that doesn’t work, perhaps I’ll go to church in a couple of hours. I’m not happy when my insomnia/insanity puts my schedule at odds with Sunday morning services. But there’s always that question: Is it God’s Will that things happen this way, or was it God’s Will that I choose, and His hope that I’d choose to do things another way? I don’t know. I’m going to bed.

My unfocused mind

In the heat of the moment, I’d nearly forgotten my plan for this year. In the busy-ness of the business of getting the Untrue Tales series written, edited, and published, then made into an eBook, and now into an audiobook… In the sudden long moment of everything involved in my Kickstarter project (My Life in the Future of Publishing) and its promotion… In thinking about (now planning the structure of, now worldbuilding) my upcoming vampire duology and in considering whether it’s a good fit to be made into a graphic novel… In signing up for, researching, and trying to decide on a project for Script Frenzy (which is like NaNoWriMo, but for scriptwriting – and I’ve next to no experience with scriptwriting)… Not to mention the beginning percolations of ideas for fresh art projects beginning to bubble up…

With all these projects and ideas and such burning to the fore of my mind, keeping me continuously busy for the first quarter of 2011 (and beyond), my initial plan for the year nearly faded from my thoughts. If you’ve also managed to forget it, it went something like this: My general goal is to write/publish 2 to 4 books per year and I’ve already done that much (with the Untrue Tales series), so there’s no real pressure (from my own goals) to try to finish any new books this year. This gives me the freedom to spend more time reading, to make progress on my “reading list,” as it were, not just books for pleasure but books for research (for several upcoming books I’ve got in mind, but don’t want to write without a lot of appropriate reading first). I’d also like to get some time invested in working again on my art, in taking it in a new direction, and in trying to produce beautiful artwork free from commercial concerns.

This last thought is perhaps the central one; to move to a place where the work I’m doing is no longer driven by commercial concerns. I think I’ve got our finances structured now in a way which will allow me to fully realize that mindset before the end of 2011. …though not if I continue to allow myself to obsess over things like getting funding, like promoting & marketing my creations, and/or like trying to learn how to write commercial/normal/formulaic books (or screenplays).

Anyway, I’ve been having some trouble keeping my mind focused, lately. I’m pretty sure the proliferation of projects preceded the present peripatetic propensity of my thoughts. Either way, it’s too many things, within and without. All things I want to accomplish, but I’m not confident a hurry in any way enhances or improves those accomplishments, so I’m going to try to slow down and take things one at a time. Try to focus on each thing in turn, if I can, instead of focusing on none of them at all. I’m significantly less stressed than I ever was working for someone else, or working for money, but those things are like infectious splinters, wedging their way into everything and poisoning even the good in life – and I am more stressed than I’d prefer to be because of them.

If my Kickstarter project gets funded, I’ll try to focus on that. If not, maybe I’ll try to focus on screenwriting for a month. Otherwise, I’m just going to focus on reading and on gradually developing the ideas, structure, and meaning of my upcoming vampire duology… while I try to adjust my frame of mind.

getting my mind right

I’m in the midst of working through something, mentally and emotionally. I’ve been working on this for a long while. This was a significant contributing factor to my taking some time off from showing at art walks & art fairs a couple times a month (though getting to a point of running in the red month after month (probably due to the down economy) was the most significant factor), which I paused in March of this year. It’s the effect of commercialism/capitalism on my creative output.

I don’t believe in capitalism. I hate money. I don’t like business. Accounting rules are literally insane. Marketing makes me nauseous. Sales, inasmuch as I can do it honestly, is moderately acceptable, at best.

I’m concerned with the questions of ‘why’. The ‘why’ of my art, of my writing, of my publishing, of my life – none of it has to do with money. I’m not interested in wealth. I don’t want those concerns to alter or infect the ‘whys’ of my creative work, or my life in general. When I need to address a question of ‘why’ I created this book or that work of art, I don’t ever want the answer to be something like “to make money.”

This has been easier to maintain with my books, possibly because they’ve never been “profitable” in any financial sense. They’ve always been works of love, the ideas behind them and the effort going into them based on expressing myself and writing the books I wanted to write rather than the books I thought were going to sell. For a long time, this was true of my art, as well. Then I began doing the art walks every month. Twice a month, at times. Investing as much or more time in selling my art than I was in creating it.

The mini-paintings were literally a money grab. The reason I bought small canvases (mostly 4×4″, but up to 8×10″) to paint was so that I could have items for sale under $20 at the art walks, where people often balked at paying realistic/appropriate prices for art. One problem with this was that, after a while, I would get down to a day or two before an art walk and -in a panic- paint half a dozen mini-paintings at once, almost entirely at random, just so I would have something that might sell. Another was that they became an overwhelming percentage of sales. In 2008, where I only did art walks for four months, they made up 28% of my unit sales and about 3.6% of my revenue from art. In 2009 where I showed probably 18+ times, they were 66% of unit sales and 25% of my art revenue. If I exclude the sale of the original artwork created for my book covers (and sold explicitly to people who wanted to support the publication of my books), for 2010, which I only showed at 3 art walks before pausing, mini-paintings make up 100% of my art sales. (Actually, looking at my spreadsheet, I also sold a crocheted mobius strip for $5 and a crocheted zombie to a fan of my books at Comicon, and I consider my crocheted creations to be sculptural artwork. If I account for those works, the mini-paintings only make up 71% of unit sales and 52% of revenue for 2010.)

So, even when I first began to create the mini-paintings, I was already uneasy about the significantly commercial nature of their existence. Certainly they were each an original work of handmade art, created with my own style and ideas. Just as certainly, I was creating them for the express purpose of making sales at art walks. When they began to make up a larger and larger proportion of both my creative efforts and my actual sales, it made me very uneasy. The point of showing at the art walks wasn’t really supposed to be about finding something that would sell and making that, over and over again, just for the sake of sales. The point was supposed to be that I already create art and the only way to sell it is if people know it’s available. I believe (though I’d have to go to my other computer and dig around in Quickbooks for a while to give accurate numbers) that I made more sales online via Twitter/Plurk/facebook in 2008 and 2009 than I did at art walks (not in volume, but in revenue). My art walk sales were mostly, then, works I’d created from a drive to have something to sell, rather than from a drive to express myself or to create what I wanted to create. Which makes me a bit sick.

My wife and I have been working on our financial situation fairly diligently for the last ~3 years (we’ll have been married 3 years on 12/1), and I’ve been working on structuring my “business model” for Modern Evil Press so that I’m not running further in the red the more books I write (see: selling paintings to pay for the cost of publishing, specifically the original cover art (and possibly interior illustrations, in future) for the book in question), and this year we reached a point where we’re slightly better than breaking even both personally and in terms of the business. I’ve got us on track, barring unexpected negative changes (apocalypse, housefire, expensive car repairs, pregnancy and the like), to have all our debt (was close to $45k when we married) paid off except Mandy’s student loans (another $40k) by mid-2013. That’s without Modern Evil Press earning another dollar. That’s without selling any more art. If I could make money from my art and books, we could get there faster, but it isn’t necessary.

This is what what I’ve been working on, mentally and emotionally. This is how I’ve been trying to get my mind right; to deeply realize that making money from my creative output isn’t necessary. With a model similar to what I did with the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut, going electronic-only (eBooks & audiobooks) until/unless sales (generally: the original cover art) cover the cost of going to press, I can write as many (or as few) books as I’d like. With the amount of canvas & paint & yarn I currently have stockpiled (from excellent sales at local stores), I’ll have a debt account or two paid off before I need to go shopping for real (expensive) art supplies again – so I’ll be able to afford it, even if none of the art I create between now and then sells. I need to fully return to a point of creating from inspiration rather than from profit motive.

I’ll accept profits, if and when they appear, but that isn’t -and shouldn’t be- why I work.