Teel McClanahan

Did pretty good. Gave away two promotional copies of LaNF I’d promised people six months ago, which was good. Sold eight books (3xLanf, 3xtVC, 2xD’T) while visiting with twelve people over the course of Tuesday. The average person who bought books bought two books, but over half of the people I visited didn’t buy books at all. Overall, pretty good, I suppose. I haven’t quite made back the almost $250 I spent ordering the books, but I made enough to help pay the credit card bill for the card I put it on. I’ve still got the rest of the books – 13 remain after the two I’m keeping for myself – available for purchase at any time. You can pick them up in the store in the big log cabin here in Pine (email me for directions), or if you let me know you’re interested, I’ll probably be in the valley again in a couple of weeks, and can bring the books to you.

And, as always, you can order the books online. Click here to order books online.

Back in Pine now, of course. Still a little tired from the trip, but feeling good overall. I think I’ll go down, do some breakfast, and see if I can’t get some furniture work done.

It’s supposed to be “Focus On: Art” right now and for a four-month period, where I spend most of my creative time working on things like drawing and painting and otherwise creating works of art. I’ve done some of this.

I have some limitations. The money I’d hoped to have earned in the last four months, making furniture, never materialized. So I don’t have money for new canvases. I have a couple to work with (one thanks to a generous friend), but that won’t last me long. I have a bunch of drawing to do, but I keep procrastinating that – my room is beginning to look clean again though, which is nice, and may help. At the very least it will help because once it’s entirely clean I won’t be able to use cleaning it as a procrastination tactic.

I’ve been doing some work on the art project I started during Focus On: Writing, which basically amounts to drilling thousands of holes at this point. Soon I shall have to contruct a complex series of stencils, and I’m not 100% sure of how I’ll do that. I have to run some tests, see how different materials stand up to the spray paint I’ll be using, and then spend dozens of hours manually cutting out the huge array of stencils I need. I shall almost definitely require new printer ink to complete that part of my task. And perhaps some spray adhesive, though I believe I may already have some of that lying around. But for now, I have another couple thousand holes to drill, and the raw tediousness of that operation makes me want to avoid it.

There is also the matter of the correspondence Art course I signed up for, am still paying for, and stopped doing any assignments for, months and months ago. I plan to complete the entire rest of the course within Focus On: Art (that is, before the end of Exober). But it’s the third week of Triober starting today, and I haven’t even pulled those materials out yet. I need to get on that, ASAP. I hate wasting things I haven’t finished paying for. (Like the Bowflex that sits out there collecting dust right now.) So there’s that.

And then there’s last night.

I didn’t get much sleep the night before – I woke up early (for me) because I expected to have to go out at a certain time and cut down a big tree with my father. So last night before midnight, I was tired – sort of. Anyway, I got offline and went to bed and … well, I couldn’t quite sleep right away, so I grabbed Dude, Where’s My Country and read the final chapter. My eyes were pretty tired and my mind was wandering (as I described the other day), and though I did my best to reign myself in properly it took until about 1AM to finish the chapter. Which was fine.

But by then my mind was really active and awake, even if my eyes wanted to close, and though I tried I could not quite sleep. There was a story in me, waiting to get out. It started (and then ended, which I thought was nice) with the sound of a woman’s shoes click-clacking against a hard surface as she walked. I wrote and wrote and half-way through I realised I was not on track to reach the length I wanted, that I was writing another short-short story, and I paced around in my empty room for a while, already wanting to re-write it from the beginning, already coming up with ways to expand it without just fluffing it up. But I decided, finally, to finish the first draft before I started work on the second. And with only a little hiccup where I lost track of the point of view for a sentence or two, I managed to write the rest of the first draft. And it came out to a reasonable length. I shall have to see how long it comes out to when I type it, but based on prior works, I expect it is around half the length I was aiming for. Which may be okay. It is the first story in an anthology of ten, and it may be a good thing for the first story to be a quick hook. Certainly it needs to be re-written. There are details missing here and there, and the writing style shifts a little bit, back and forth within it, and it shouldn’t. But it’s a good first draft. Parts of it are very poetic.

And after I wrote that, I flossed and brushed and used listerine. And as I was brushing my mind was still working, and it forced me to sit down at my computer.

And I wrote an article for Comixpedia. And I edited it and re-wrote it and over-checked it, and emailed it to my contacts there. And from the looks of things this morning, there’s a good chance they’ll publish it.

Which is so weird. What’s wrong with me? I’ve never written articles before… I’ve never even considered that I might be able to. But there I was, writing 1000 words on how compartmentalizing the different jobs required to keep an online comic going can increase its success across the board. Are there more articles in me, waiting to get out? Written for a particular audience, on a particular topic? It was only Friday I was discussing with someone the fact that I’d never considered myself capable of such a thing, that I didn’t think I could take the write-magazine-articles path to publishing success. And there I was, uncontrollably writing exactly what I thought I couldn’t.

So last night I spent three hours writing, when I should have been sleeping. Or should have been working on Art. Because my health is important, and because it’s supposed to be Focus On: Art right now.

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll try drilling some holes this afternoon. Hey, does working on ME24 count as Art? I was planning on putting together another week or two worth of strips, too. Sigh.

Oh, and I’m supposed to be working on furniture, too. I’ve got it down on my list of things to do here to find a piece of manzanita to make another floor lamp, for some reason. Maybe I’ll do that today.

I received my shipment of my books today. Hooray! They look good – the only problem I could have had control over is so minor that I doubt others will notice it.

It looks like I will be heading to Phoenix Tuesday/Wednesday with my father, so if you are interested in buying (or already owed) a copy of one of my books, please contact me before then to arrange the transfer. Prices are the same as on the web, though you will be saving on shipping, of course: Lost and Not Found = $20, Dragons’ Truth = $16.99, and The Vintage Collection = $15. Email me.

Marie, you’re on the list. Zoe, you’re due at least one book. Angela wants a couple. April, you up for a book or two? Anyone else? They’re good. Contact me. I’ll be contacting others directly as they occur to me, to gauge interest. And of course, they’re available in the store up here for purchase as well.

It goes without saying that any of these copies is available for signing by the author, since I’ll be the one hand-delivering it to you, if you please. These books are all First Edition as well, so may go up in value over time – if you care about that sort of thing. I just think they’re good books.

And if you don’t live near Phoenix or Pine, Arizona, you can still order any of the three books directly from my online store:

Click here to visit the Modern Evil Press online bookstore.

Truth is, I don’t know what I want anymore.

Or maybe I just can’t remember…

I have these drives… these compulsions… to act. I can’t read books anymore, because my brain is too “on” right now. I have three library books out, they were due today, I’ll take them in tomorrow and pay the 30cents… perhaps renew one of them… but every time I sit down to read one, I get into it, perhaps as little as half a paragraph, never more than a couple of pages, and something I’ve read has started connections and trains of thought within my mind and I find myself more entertained by my own mind and the pursuit of my new ideas than in what is on the page.

I have been inspired to create more illustrated childrens’ books in the past two weeks, trying to read these library books, than I have been in the last two years. I have had more new ideas for short stories, novels, and longer works and collections in the same period than in a long, long time, and most of them have come as I’ve been trying to read. I can’t get through the books – I can’t seem to concentrate on the authors’ ideas – I’m too inspired. Did I mention the other night I fought my way through less than half a page of The Hours before I had to get up and write down my own (not directly-related) ideas? Before I was done 100 minutes had passed and I’d filled an 18″x24″ sheet of paper with notes describing the relationships and timelines and story breakdowns of an anthology I expect my mind will force me to write before too long. Tonight, reading Dude, Where’s My Country, I’ve been inspired to create a series of illustrated childrens’ books and a new blog, where I write about things going on in the news and the world and in politics from a rational point of view that I sometimes have. Not “liberal” or “conservative” or about who said what or any of the garbage I keep running into – not just in the media (which includes Fox News and Michael Moore, both) – but among the people I know as well, but instead based on trying to look at what makes sense. Bah. I’ve blathered too much about that already. I’ll either do it or I won’t, and if I do it, it will speak for itself.

Sigh.

Where did I start? Oh yes. What I want.

Not sure.

Not sure it matters.

Reading stuff like this, facing the garbage that’s been going on in the government and the world in recent years, doesn’t just make me want to get the heck out of America (like many of my friends have said they plan to do if Bush is re-elected), it makes me want to fucking blow my head off. There is no place on Earth, no place I have ever heard of, or heard people dream of going to, that is free from this sort of garbage without also being free of basics like nutritious food and clean water and not-worrying-about-malaria. The only way I can think of escaping it would be to pass from this Earth, and seriously – even if I didn’t believe I was inescapably headed for Heaven, the atheist view that death would be just that appeals to me more than the reality of continued life on Earth, among humans as they seem to be choosing to be. Only each person can change themselves, so unless I can earn the trust and respect of 7 billion people and convince them all to make right decisions, what can I do?

It’s very frustrating.

And I don’t know what I really want.

I don’t really think God’s about to let me blow my own head off, though he’s been hinting pretty heavily that I need to get my ass down to the valley and pay a professional to teach me how to shoot and otherwise handle guns. Handguns and rifles, both. As soon as possible.

And I know some things I don’t want.

I don’t want to become an advertiser. Marketing … has never been my strong suit. I don’t feel I have the knack for it. There are elements to it that I just don’t seem to grasp. Perhaps someday this will change. Perhaps I will find the time and money to take a series of Marketing courses at a college, and perhaps after I do that successfully I shall begin to understand. But right now I not only don’t get it, I don’t like it, and I don’t seem to be good at it. I don’t want to be a “self-promoter”. I’ve been “self-promoting” Modern Evil and my art for years with little to no success outside of a small circle of my long-time friends and lovers. And now I’m writing novels, and that’s great. I like writing, I can stand editing, but … now I have to market them if I want to get any money out of them.

I’ve already invested hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours into each book. I’ve also invested a certain amount of actual money in them. Is my time worth something, or have I been masturbating all this time? I think it is worth something, and more than that I believe that people would enjoy reading my books once they got their hands on them. And I seriously don’t know how to get the books from where they are now – available for purchase – to where I’d like to see them – purchased, and in the hands of readers – without just buying them myself and giving them away. THAT I could do, know how to do. I know there’s some other way of doing it – something that involves people actually paying money for the books – I literally and seriously don’t have a clue about how to get that to occur.

And no, I don’t really want your advice about how to do it. I don’t want to be a self-promoter. So unless your advice amounts to who to get to do it (preferably for little or no money down – I believe a slice of each dollar earned as a result of their actions is due them, but I don’t have any money right now) or an offer to do it yourself, you’re not helping. Yes, I know I’m being stubborn.

But asking me to do my own marketing feels to me like you’re asking me to breathe used motor oil.

For reference: trying to figure out how to get my books to sell (ie: trying to do it on my own) has been more stressful and painful and has caused more anxiety for me in the last few days alone than working with my father has caused in the last … 60 days or so, combined.

It isn’t good for me.

And neither is staying up until 4:30 in the morning, or wondering how to get the server to stop using daylight savings time.

So I think I’ll go to bed.

No, I still don’t think I know what I want, and I don’t think I addressed much of what i meant to address (ie: long, painful discussions about the path of my life and my lack of companionship and work and the idea of ‘career’ and economics and the idea of the urges and drives I have now as compared to any sort of ‘plan’ or ‘path’), but perhaps I’ll post again. Later.

Later.

It (marriage) may be compared to a cage, the birds without try desperately to get in, and those within try desperately to get out.

-Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)