Category: Journal

I love what I do

Truly a gift and a blessing that few are able to share, I love what I do.  I love painting.  I love writing.  I love being able to craft my ideas into experiences other people can share.  I love that I get to spend all day, all night, all my life doing what I want to do.  I love the total freedom.

Freedom to paint a strange abstract representation of my anger without thinking about the fact that pink, purple, and glitter might not be what other artists are using to express pent-up frustration.  Freedom to write novels that don’t follow genre conventions, aren’t anywhere close to being thrillers, and which expect their readers to actually think about what they’re reading.  Freedom to read dozens of traditional zombie books as “research” and then turn around and write several books that ignore tradition almost entirely; to write the zombie books I want to write.

I get stressed out about money.  I worry when I don’t make enough sales.  Sometimes I even let the stress and worry compromise my artistic integrity or block my ability to create freely.  I don’t like business, or marketing, or ‘profit motive’, or any of those other stupid things I have to do to be able to do what I love.  But still, I love what I do.

Things I’m not doing, Labor Day Weekend, 2009

A few things I’m not doing right now / this week / this weekend, which I would like to be:

No, I know, I couldn’t possibly be doing all of those things at once.  Probably not any two at once.  Luckily for me, between not having any available financial resources to undertake such a thing and having so many things I am doing (list below) right now / soon, I didn’t have to make the hard decision of which one of these things I would like to do.  Except maybe I’ll go ahead and try to write a book in three days, even though I forgot yet again to officially register.  Did I tell you I wrote 95% of Untrue Tales… Book Three over a Labor Day Weekend?  The things I am doing:

What are you not doing this weekend?

Ignorance of professional writing

“Love it when I run face-first into my own ignorance. Will work on another blog post, soon, about something new I just learned I didn’t know.” – me, on Twitter

So, as I sometimes do, I followed someone’s intriguing link to the ISBW site a little while ago.  I haven’t yet been intrigued enough by what I saw there to want to actually listen to the thing.  (I basically stopped listening to podcasts 18 months ago, when I switched from working a boring day job that gave me 40+ hours/week that didn’t engage my mind or give me anything else to listen to … to being a full-time creative.  I can’t listen to podcasts while I work on my podcasts, or while I’m reading (books, blogs, news, et cetera), or while I’m writing, or while my wife is home (because I’d rather not be ignoring her during the few hours we have together, awake, most weekdays), and that doesn’t leave any regular (ie: available every week) time for listening.)

Anyway, scrolling back through the ISBW posts (half of which … I don’t get, because I never listened to Mur’s book, I guess) there was one that included the following:

The fabulous tool Story Tracker is now available for your iPhone/touch. I used this tool a lot when I was actively working on short stories for many markets, and it’s invaluable. It takes a lot of work on the front end (listing your stories, the details, sales, rejections, income made, trunked status, etc, not to mention all the details for the markets you submit to) but once you have all the information it’s so very useful. Highly recommended. (Thanks to Tobias Buckell for blogging about it and alerting me to its existence. You’re reading Toby’s blog, right? RIGHT?)

Immediately my awareness of my ignorance was expanded.  That paragraph is like a list of things I didn’t know.  First:  There’s software specifically for authors’ tracking of their short story submissions?  How many authors need such a software for it to constitute enough a market that people are making iPhone apps for them?  I followed the links to the software’s site and the blog in question and in the comments on the blog post discovered two more software products and two additional web services that perform the same function.  Seriously?  How many authors have so complex a situation re: short story submissions that there are (at least) 3 different softwares and 2 different web services to address that need?  A couple other things here I don’t know: What is “trunked status”?  Who is Tobias Buckell?

In the blog post, by way of explaining why the iPhone app wouldn’t work very well for him, Buckell said “I have an excel spreadsheet with 650+ submission entries on it, tracking 130+ short stories or so, I don’t see sitting in place and keying these in by hand into it.”  — What stood out to me first about this sentence was my inability to think of anything near enough places that even publish short stories to accommodate that quantity of submissions.  I had no idea.  On the Duotrope site they “list 2580 current markets, plus 1246 closed/dead/removed/DNQ markets” – where by ‘markets’ they mean … places that publish short stories (or poetry), I assume.  The list of current markets for fiction includes 2121 listings, right now.  I had no idea.

In addition to which … 130+ short stories?  I’ve written 2 or 3 dozen short stories in my life.  Of course, that might have to do with the fact that I didn’t know there were thousands of potential publishers for short fiction, which implies even more readers – someone must be buying what those publishers are putting out, right?  I had no idea.  I’m aware of maybe a handful of places (read: publications) I might go to if I wanted to read short stories, myself.  Not dozens, not hundreds, certainly not thousands.  As far as I knew, from my personal experience as a reader, short stories were vastly in the minority -both in terms of number of stories and in volume of writing overall- compared to other available fiction, perhaps a fraction of a percent.  Since I didn’t read much short fiction, and wasn’t aware of much short fiction, I’ve never spent much time thinking about writing short fiction.

(Of course, until I started reading through industry reports (ie: after I started my own publishing company, in 2007) I had no idea that fiction was only a small fraction of the overall book market.  Fiction gets all the visibility, most of the press, and most of the big advances…  I just hadn’t thought about it.  I’ve never been very interested in writing non-fiction, so I just didn’t look into it beyond by interests as a reader.)

I just … I guess it comes down to approaching writing not as a profession, but as a calling.  Instead of ever bothering to look into what other writers do to make a living, what markets exist to sell the written word into and what they’re looking for and will pay for, I just wrote what I wanted to write.  I wrote the stories that I had to tell, in the way they wanted to be told.  I wasn’t trying to write to make money, to build a career, or even just to follow in the footsteps of other writers.  So many other people who label themselves as writers are on such a different path from me.  They want such different things.  They write all the time, they write with specific markets in mind, they are aware of and follow genre conventions, they collaborate with each other, they build their “platforms”…  I noticed recently that there is a further distinction being made, automatically by people classifying themselves as such – that people who are writing blogs, writing journalism, writing short fiction for specific markets, writing non-fiction, working on most any commercial writing… they say they are a “writer” (or that they are an aspiring writer).  I am an author.  I’m not in this to write.  Writing isn’t the point.  It’s all about the stories, the ideas.

Also, my perspective on publishing itself is a bit skewed, since I know I can put together a collection of short stories and publish it as soon as I’m happy with it.  I can publish even an individual short story as an “eBook” to the kindle and via Smashwords (which is apparently about to start selling through to B&N and its subsidiaries) as soon as any individual story is done, and not wait until I have enough for a book.  I could even put together chapbooks and sell them by hand & through my site, if I had the urge to sell physical copies of short works – individually or as collections not large enough to warrant becoming a paperback.  I hadn’t thought much about submitting short stories to other publishers, since publishing them myself is so straightforward.  I don’t even really know how much money people are able to make from writing and selling short stories to those thousands of “markets” … and I think I’m only wondering it in the context of “how many copies do I have to personally fail to sell for selling to someone else to make sense,” since I’m not really motivated by money – just curious how the different models compare.  Maybe I’ll look into it, now that I know that the short-fiction-publishing world is so much larger and more complex than I’d suspected.  Perhaps I’ll even start writing (and/or reading) more short fiction.  But I have trouble holding back finished writing because it’s the industry standard way to do things, so … I doubt I’ll ever have use for the sort of softwares discussed above.

Thinking (personally) about money

I do a lot of thinking about economics; about value, money, trade, debt, earning, business, equality, fairness, and on and on and on.  That is not (exactly) what I’m writing about today – that’s mostly big-picture stuff.  Today I’m thinking about how I think about my own money. I am aware (though I don’t really understand why it is the case) that it is considered a faux pas to discuss personal finances, and that doing so makes some people uncomfortable.  If that’s you, hey, don’t read on. Whatever.

I noticed something in the last day or so about a line of thinking I’d been mulling over.  The thinking went in this direction:

My household is currently running “in the red.”  My wife works full time as a teacher and I work full time as an independent author & artist.  Her work brings home a regular salary.  My work generates a less stable source of additional income.  Last year (depending on how you look at the accounting) my business was within about $100 of breaking even…  This year, it isn’t so close.  The economy is down, summer months are hard, I’m anti-social and averse to marketing; whatever the reason, my end of the income hasn’t been particularly stable or sufficient, lately.  So I was running some numbers, trying to more accurately target how far into the red we’re running – how much more I need to earn just to keep groceries in the cupboards.  We’re already running pretty close to the bone around here, eating a lot of rice, a lot of spaghetti, going to the library instead of book stores, no new DVDs or CDs or video games (maybe 2-3 (mostly used) so far this year), not eating out… there’s not a lot left to cut out, anymore – though we’re still generally comfortable, pretty content.  We’re just running a few hundred dollars short every month in order to stay comfortable & content.

In months I make good sales at the art walk & online we’re less short, but between the cost of doing business (art supplies, space rental at the art walk, publishing costs, screen printing costs, et cetera) and the best month’s sales this year bringing in less revenue than the size of the deficit it’s not quite enough.  There’s a large measure of faith in this, of hope in future sales, even of believing that the economy will recover soon.  Faith and hope don’t buy groceries, and deficit spending can’t go on forever, so I started thinking about supplementing my income.

Most writers and artists I know, even the so-called-successful ones (the ones with the book deals from major publishers, or prestigious gallery exhibitions), seem to have day jobs.  Not only to have day jobs, but to proclaim loud and proud to aspiring creatives looking to them for guidance that they shouldn’t ever expect not to have a day job.  If my family ever actually gets to a point where we’re in danger of not being able to pay our bills, I’m certainly willing to give up this experiment in making being creative (and a househusband) my “day job” and look for more traditional work.  Depending on how sales go in the next few months, we might be reaching that point pretty soon.  And unless sales really start kicking…

So, after putting together a spreadsheet with money in, money out, and working out exactly how much extra income I need to reach break-even, I started calculating how many hours & days of work at minimum wage I’d have to do to get that spreadsheet to reach zero.  I started thinking about how many days a month I’d have to give up to day laboring in order to be able to live this life the rest of my days, about what I need to do to be able to work via one of the couple of (legal) day-labor places in the neighborhood.  I even twittered about it.

But here is the thing about that thinking that I didn’t notice until a day or two later:  Unlike (apparently) normal people, it didn’t occur to me to try to get a proper day job.  Or that I might want to aim for more income than just barely enough. – You see (and I keep forgetting that this isn’t “normal”): I’m not motivated by money.

Not by money, not by power, not by fame.  As I posted recently, just thinking about|correlating my creative work with the money it may/may-not bring in works counter to my motivation.

I wish the world wasn’t going the other way.

Creativity, Commercialism, ?

It isn’t that I want to be intentionally anti-Commercial, that I want to produce art so-much-for-art’s-sake that it has no chance of being sold. Rather, I want to avoid creating art for the sake of money; I don’t want to be creating simply to sell it, because I need the money (which I do; don’t get me wrong about that), but to be creating what I am inspired to, to follow my heart, mind, & dreams – and then hope that others share my heart enough to want it hanging on their walls.  (And then maybe enough that they’ll pay money to put it there.)

It’s difficult.  Partially because I do need the money, so the commercial aspect, the idea that I’m making art I’m going to try to sell in order to buy groceries, is constantly in mind.  When I get in the neighborhood of thoughts like ‘what can I paint that will sell?’ and ‘what sort of art do people want?’ I tend to get stuck.  Like writer’s block, but for artists.  Well, like writer’s block for writers whose block stems from not wanting to “sell out,” anyway.

I have no interest in freelancing, or in getting a job as an illustrator, designer, journalist, pro-blogger, or any other such thing.  I don’t want to write the same book over and over again (ie: formulaic fiction, or process-wise, most non-fiction).  I don’t want to paint/create the same image over and over again.  I know, yes, verily I know, that these are core ways writers and artists are able to “establish” themselves and their “style” and to build a career.  To build a base of buyers who want to read another one like the last one you wrote, who are comfortable with your art because although each swirly tree is different, they can at least count on you to still be painting swirly trees the next time they need something for their walls.  And buyers would be nice.  Repeat buyers would be even better (and I have a few), but I nearly never want to be painting the same thing I’ve painted before.

((Technically, my not-very-publicly stated policy on the subject of re-creating an original work is that the base price multiplier for each successive recreation doubles.  I have a formula (an occasionally altered one, but fairly consistent for the last few years) which accounts for a work’s size and quality to determine price.  It is intentionally tweaked to give quirky prices.  I like them.  But imagine for recreations that formula is multiplied by 2n (where n is the number of times I’ve been asked to reproduce the image).  If created in quick succession, at the same size and quality, prices would quickly rise, say from $60 for the original to $120 for the second, $240 for the 3rd, $480 for the 4th, $960 for the 5th, $1920 for the 6th, $3840 for the 7th, and very quickly someone asking for the 8th copy is paying 128 times the cost of just buying something different instead.  Luckily, people don’t often ask me to paint something I’ve done before – and when they do, I simply tell them how much it would cost & see if they want it that much.))

But it is hard even to paint something new, if all I can think about is wanting to avoid painting something that won’t sell, because the bills just keep coming, even when I have a couple of dry sales months.  I’ve even been stalling a little, lately, in working on my next novel, which is intentionally an experiment in writing a formulaic (or at least recognizable) zombie novel – because although I’ve come up with a story I want to tell (and in my research of what makes a formulaic zombie novel fit, I’ve discovered that my novel won’t be as formulaic as I’d hoped… which is part of the problem), both writing a novel in reaction to people’s negative reaction to my last one (which is what motivated this experiment in the first place) and knowing before I start that my experiment will be a failure (ie: my novel will fail to be a cookie-cutter zombie novel, or to follow the ‘rules’ of commercial fiction) give me pause in pursuing it.  Even though it’s a story I want to tell, a book I want to write.

I am having trouble both because I don’t want to write commercial fiction and because I fear my attempt to do so will be ridiculously far from that blasted mark.  How can I be properly creative with this dark and complicated cloud of commerce always hovering over everything I do?