blog – Teel McClanahan

background noises

I’m sitting in my living room, listening to the early morning sounds. Birds chirping, neighbors revving their truck engines, planes flying overhead, the refrigerator running…. And now that I think about it, these sounds are present throughout the day, more or less. Sounds I am aware of because, time and again, I record audiobooks at home. Audiobooks that I don’t want full of birds tweeting and engines revving and dogs barking. Audiobooks in which the thumpa-thumpa of a car stereo’s too-loud bass competing with its ill-tuned engine (well-tuned to produce the most noise, that is) is simply not appropriate. My hearing is not perfect, not by far, and I often have trouble making out speech over background noise – a cocktail party is basically a place where I have no idea what most people are saying to me. (Not to mention, I’m not much good at small talk, which is all the talk most people in such situations seem to want to have.) Still, my hearing is good enough -attuned enough- that little noises like these become big annoyances.

There seems to be less traffic noise in the mornings, after everyone has gone to work and before they begin to be released from it, so I tend to try to record in the mornings. My sleep schedule has been bizarre, of late, and I’ve been sleeping starting at roughly 3AM-7AM and -despite my best efforts (hampered significantly by an ongoing and severe bout of depression) to get out of bed after only a few hours- running through the middle of the afternoon. Today it’s further off – I put myself to bed last night at 10PM, managed to fall asleep somewhat quickly, but then my mind woke me up at 2:30AM. I tried to sleep, I fought against waking, I felt quite … I don’t know whether I’m physically or mentally tired, but … tired, but at 3:30AM this morning, I gave up on it. Got up. Started laundry. Played the Free Realms Beta for a while…

Mandy’s up now, eating a breakfast I made for her, and as I finish writing this, she’ll be getting ready for school today. I don’t think I knew how noisy getting ready for the day is until I started recording audio books. So, in an hour or so, she’ll be done with that and I can try to begin recording. I’d like to get a couple of hours of recording done today, if my voice works that long. I need to get ahead of my podcasting; trying to record at the last minute doesn’t always work, especially when I’m depressed and/or my sleep schedule is severely kinked. Last minute is where I’m at right now, actually. I don’t have today’s podcast episode edited yet. Realistically, I give myself until midnight of the day I’ve said it will go up. Preferably, it always goes up on the morning of that day. Which, for episodes longer than a minute, means I have to have it recorded ahead of time.

((For the episodes going up on Podiobooks.com, I really need to be done ahead of time – in my experience, if I fail to have my episode uploaded & ready to go there by late Thursday night, chances are it won’t hit the site until Monday. Which feels like I’m three days late, even if I uploaded it at 7AM Friday. Even if it was on my own feed at 7AM Friday. Podiobooks.com feels like the “real” venue for my audiobooks. So I really need to be ahead. Consequently, I think I’m going to let the Podiobooks feed run a week or so behind my direct feed for the next few books.))

Recording a half-hour episode takes a lot longer than half an hour, by the way. (Assuming I’m not doing multiple voices, which takes even longer.) The actual recording part tends to take me about double, so about an hour. (Last night I tried to record in the evening, since I seemed not to have a choice, and it took me over 100 minutes to record what will be about 30 minutes of text.) Editing what I’ve recorded – selecting takes when I’ve recorded multiple takes, cutting out dead air, background noises, mouth noises and the like – takes about double that, so about two more hours. With my new computer, mixing together the intro, outro, multiple sections of an episode & transitions between them, leveling everything so volume matches within and across episodes… actually only takes a few minutes. I haven’t timed it, but I seem to be able to do both versions (MEPod & PB) in under half an hour, now, including compression. Then I have to listen to the entire episode, to be sure I didn’t miss anything during the edit. I usually do this while uploading it to both servers & writing the episode description. So, for a typical 30-minute episode (without character voices), it takes me 4 hours of work. All of it while listening carefully not just to my own voice, but also to tiny background noises.

This is not work I can do eight hours a day, five days a week. And not merely because wearing the over-the-ear headphones becomes annoying well before the 4-hour mark. I am certainly going to try to put in a few long days over the next few weeks, though. I am certainly going to try to get the other 8 episodes of this book recorded, edited, and ready to go just as fast as I am able, and on to the next book. Theoretically, it should only take me a total of 40 hours to complete this entire book (not to mention I’ve already got the first episode done), so why not? The next two books in the series are each almost exactly the same length book – so three 40-hour work weeks and I should be done with the entire series, right?

Except I’m also an artist. And I’m also writing a book on my Self Publishing experiences. And I’m also creating a deck of Christian cards (and a book to go along with them). And I’m also a househusband – cooking and cleaning and the like are part of my responsibilities. And I’m also a marketer. And a web developer. And a blogger. And a filmmaker. And involved in social media. And emotionally unstable, currently depressed & off-kilter.

It’s only 1 week until the next First Friday, when I have another Art Walk to show at. (If you’re in the Phoenix area, come down and see me! I’m among the ‘Roosevelt Row‘ vendors, and I’m usually near 5th & Garfield.) I’d like to produce some more new art before that happens (though I have plenty in stock, right now – more than I could possibly show), so that cancels out part of the next week. I’ve only just begun writing that book on MicroPublishing, and I’d like to build some momentum in the writing of it, instead of letting it perhaps wither with only a couple thousand words. I can’t record every day (I can’t recall now which day it was, exactly, but one day this week I managed to stay up late enough that I thought I could record in the morning, after Mandy left, at the end of my waking hours – but apparently that was when Bulk Trash Pickup decided it was time to slowly and noisily scour my neighborhood.) and I can’t usually stand to work on audio all day, when I do. Oh, and because I want to continue posting two episodes a week to my feed, I’m doing poetry episodes again – a one to two minute episode of which seems to take 30-45 minutes to create.

So maybe I’ll get ahead by a couple of episodes in the next week. And hopefully I’ll get ahead by the rest in another week or two. Mandy just walked out the door. I’d better get to it.

Productivity, Profitability

Still having trouble with staying focused. I feel like I’m not productive enough, almost daily. Things are getting done; the podcasts are all running on time, I’m doing two or more Art Walks/Fairs/Detours a month & I’ve painted a dozen new paintings since the first of the year. I’m even blogging semi-regularly, which you already know, reading this. But I could be doing more.

Yesterday I only did three or four hours of audio work, and even though I know I worked on other things, it feels like I didn’t get anything done, since it’s harder to tally the hours and to quantify what’s work and what isn’t. Does Twitter count? Reading publishing & other blogs? Blogging? It’s all part of connecting with people, with building an audience and building myself as a “brand” and educating myself about what’s going on, what’s working, and driving ideas forward. So in a way, yes. Then there’s the oft-repeated idea that everything an author does and experiences is a sort of reasearch for future books; this is somewhat true, but feels like a sort of excuse.

In addition to feeling that perhaps I’m not being productive enough, I also think a lot about my not being profitable enough. Even with the reduced up-front costs of doing business the way I am, not a single one of my books has even reached break-even, yet. The art, comparably, has been doing great – not bringing in enough to live on, but if not for the cost of going to Tools of Change in New York (ie: if not for a big, extra publishing expense), I’d already be profitable this year on art sales alone, with only bluer skies on the horizon. The margins on the art, even with prices basically cut in half & then frozen since 2004, are great – not just in money, but in time. It takes me hundreds of hours to produce a book, and somehow it’s harder to sell a copy of the book for $14 (or less) than it is to sell a painting (that took me less than 10 hours to create) for $150. Lately I’ve been creating a lot of “Mini Paintings”: 8×10″ for $20, 5×7″ for $15, and 4×4″ for $10, right now. Most of them are done in under 1 hour of work (though admittedly, some have taken up to 3), and they earn me as much as or more than a book does, usually without having to try to sell them at all.

Obviously, the art sales can only scale to the limits of my creativity & time to produce original works – I’m not sure what the upper limit is, but perhaps dozens a month. Certainly not hundreds. Whereas the book sales can scale without proportional extra work on my part – Lightning Source prints however many copies people order, whether it’s dozens a month or thousands. If/when I “hit it big” the books will quickly win in this regard. Not to mention I can sell a book more than once, and without doing prints (something I am currently opposed to), I can only sell an original work of art once. So it takes orders of magnitude more work to produce a book, but I can keep selling it over and over again forever, instead of just once.

If only my sales numbers were orders of magnitude better. Did I mention not a single one of my books has yet earned back the costs associated with its production, yet? That’s with $0 value associated with my time, no less. Which is to say: if I were more productive (of books), I’d perhaps only be digging myself deeper and deeper into a hole. Being more productive of art is good, but when I really need to figure out is how to be more productive of profitability. I need to produce more book sales. That’s a hard one. The podcasting thing is meant to be helping with that – it certainly puts my writing in front of a lot more minds than everything else I’ve been doing, even if it is for free, right now. Something approaching five hundred times as many people have downloaded Dragons’ Truth from Podiobooks.com than have purchased a copy of the paperback (not counting sales to family) – that’s a huge multiplier. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, it hasn’t translated directly into interest in my other podiobooks or in sales of my paperbacks or eBooks. Gotta keep it up, though. Gotta keep working on it. Gotta get back to work, right now – I’m supposed to be editing together next week’s episodes of Forget What You Can’t Remember, right now. Gotta go.

Silly new comments options

I’ve spent some time working on this, today, some of which means that future upgrades of the two plugins involved will be a little harder (I had to go in and manually change the code in order to get dates to display correctly) but the result is that now comments from both Twitter and FriendFeed are added to the comments on my blog posts. So, if you link to the blog post on Twitter or comment on the blog when it gets posted to friendfeed (or if you want your comment to go to friendfeed from the blog), it all shows up nicely in the comments area of the post.

You know, so that that conversation no one is having about my blog posts all gets combined and returned to the blog post it’s about. Well, except for livejournal comments. I cross-post most of my stuff to LJ, and sometimes people comment there, but as far as I know there’s no way to get those comments to come over here, too. I’ll look into it. But except for that, now conversations on this blog, on Twitter, and on friendfeed related to my posts are all integrated here. You can see what it might, theoretically look like, where I was testing it and getting it set up, on my last post.

At least it’s writing…

I think I’m writing here largely because I was having trouble at my typewriter. You see, I’m writing another novel, and I’m doing the first draft on one of my typewriters. This novel happens to take place in the same world as Lost and Not Found, chronologically after most of the events of that book, though not actually a sequel as such. It’s been a few days since I’ve written anything – I was working on getting started on the audiobook version of Lost and Not Found, then on composing a musical theme for same most of the week ((If you want to hear what I have so far, email me or leave a comment and I’ll send you a link)) – and I set down and tried to pick up where I left off. Apparently something had interrupted me in the middle of a chapter, in the middle of a paragraph. I’ve been trying to write chapters for this book for a variety of reasons -people seem to like and/or expect chapters, they help create a structure for moving between or tying together different elements of the story, it makes it easier to stop and pick up again at another time if there’s a chapter break, because I don’t have to match the flow of what came before quite as closely- but for whatever reason (now lost to me) I was half-way through this chapter. I set down a while ago and tried to just start going.

I read the preceding pages. I looked at the sentence. My hands sprang into motion, the keys of the typewriter clacking away noisily as the words formed on the page, and then … well, then the sentence started giving me trouble. It got longer and longer and, as it grew, it became less and less coherent. Where did this sentence think it was going? In the time I can usually pour out a couple of pages all I had managed was to mire myself in the first sentence I’d attempted. I XX’d out several words, cut the sentence short and -relatively- understandable, and stepped away from the typewriter. I finished my research on Klein bottles (one of the things that managed inexplicably to wedge its way into the sentence (which you will now be able to look for in the finished book, to find the troubled phrase)) and then came here.

To blog. Because I’ve been meaning to write something here for a while now, but keep either having something better to do (sleep, work on my novel, sleep, et cetera) or not enough to say.

Although that isn’t really the case, is it? I always have something to say. And I’m working on a lot of projects right now, have a lot of things coming up, going away, et cetera. So what is it? One long post, or a lot of little posts? I think a lot of little posts. I’m making a list right now of subjects to cover, so I don’t forget them.

First real day of MEP full time

So, today was my first real, full day of running Modern Evil Press full-time. Mandy had last week off for Spring Break (she teaches High School, remember), so I worked on and off and tried to use the week and half between leaving ICE and today to transition myself mentally and emotionally for this. I worked on putting together a semblance of plans and goals and … I don’t know, action-item lists… Is that what they call To Do Lists these days? Trying to have some idea of how to go from where I’m at to making money from my books and my art, so I’m not merely floundering. The general day-to-day plan, for time-management sake, is to get up with Mandy and work (at least) as long as she’s working. So, M-F, 6:30AM to 4:30PM.

So to get off to a good start, I started with a painting. I’ve been meaning to document my “process” better, so I also took a quick shot of the first coat of paint with my iPhone and threw it up on flickr (thumbnail at right). It’s a sort of a landscape right now. The image I’m planning for this background, which I will now describe as a “…monster with a robot head…” is not what it sounds like. Maybe I’ll post some more images tomorrow, when I’m working (digitally, of course) on adapting the sketch for the canvas. I sortof jumped the gun on the composition of the background without doing proper previsualization, but it’s no problem to work the elements together on the computer screen before I apply any more paint.

Ooh, thinking of it, I actually took a photo of another painting first, while the sun was still quite low. It’s one of four paintings I finished last year that I’ve only just put on wretched creature: ‘what… and why?’ was today’s photo, and I’ve been working on getting ‘it’s the internet…’, ‘without you’, and a (currently) untitled one with a face … Okay, admittedly, when I finished it I had a name for it, and I didn’t write it down or put it on the site right away, so … I can’t remember it right now. I’ll update it later, in the event I can recall the full name.

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