lack of focus – Teel McClanahan

Time, sleep, kittens from above

Frustrated. Time, energy, ability, focus, all frustrated. Sleep 4 hours here, 10 hours there, never know how long I’ll be awake or how soon I’ll be able to wake, when I sleep. Weeks, now. Trouble getting ‘work’ done – podcasting on time, painting anything new, putting together videos, writing… Even thinking well, clearly, coming to anything.

Right now, as I write this, I’m having trouble sitting here watching a movie. That’s why I have the computer in front of me; sitting still for a movie wasn’t working. It isn’t a bad movie. My mind and body are simply … unable to focus.

Semi-nocturnal, lately, which has been causing problems, so Thursday night I went to bed at 10PM. Of course, I couldn’t sleep past 2:30AM, though I tried staying in bed another hour after. Got some stuff done in the late morning, but crashed for a long nap in the afternoon. Got up in time to finish the podcast before Mandy took me to the Sweet 16 party (formal dress) of the daughter of one of the teachers she works with. Couldn’t really get to sleep right when we got home.

Friday night around 2AM, as I was meaning to go to bed, I heard this noise coming from the ceiling. Like something moving around up there. I’d heard it before, but … this time is seemed to be accompanied by mewling. The sound of kittens. I resolved to peek my head into a nearby hole & see if I could see what it was, and after a bit of difficulty I managed to see that a cat had apparently had a litter of 5 kittens in my ceiling. For a couple of hours I thought about and tried to see if I could get them out through the existing hole, but that didn’t work out. Not getting into any details here, but if I could have done so without alerting Mandy/Rachel to it (they have a soft spot for cute things), I would have destroyed & disposed of the lot of them in the middle of the night. I went to bed with morning light coming through the windows. Slept until early afternoon.

Got up, checked with my dad (whose house I live in), broke a hole through the wall and extracted the kittens. Photos here. Found the opening where the adult cat had got in originally and sealed it up, so she couldn’t get back in and cause problems. Guessed the kittens were 2-3 weeks old. Bought some cat milk. Spent the next eighteen hours or so trying to get them to eat any of it. I guess kittens that age are supposed to be eating every couple of hours. In between hours-long fighting to get them to eat much at all (save the very eager one that gladly ate every time I offered) we tried to find them homes – asked our friends & family and everyone on twitter, Mandy blogged about it, called all the no-kill shelters she could find online (they’re all full up), and around 9AM Sunday morning I finally passed out, intending to get up again in a couple hours to try to feed them again. Thankfully, Mandy took care of feeding them the next couple of times so I could get some sleep. I got up in time to take them down to the Arizona Humane Society this afternoon, where I was told that since they don’t have a bottle feeding program, unless the kittens immediately started eating solid food, they’d be immediately euthanized, and would I like to keep them for a week and try to get them on solid food, myself? No. I just don’t want cats living in my ceiling. It was near closing time, and the entire staff of half a dozen women and young women -all quite susceptible to cute- immediately protested their euthanasia and got to work trying to convince them to eat solid food. A bit of quick paperwork, and we were out of there.

I’ll probably be up again all night tonight, at this rate. Maybe I’ll go down to Super WalMart and return the other container cat milk I didn’t end up opening. Should probably wait for tomorrow when I can stop by the Sam’s Club, too, to pick up the 5lb bag of shredded cheese that’s on our grocery list. Maybe I’ll try to sleep, or play a game of CIV:Rev. Maybe I’ll try to write a few thousand more words toward my book on being a MicroPublisher. Maybe I’ll just bumble around, frustrated & unfocused until I pass out.

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.

Not about Tools of Change

Last week I was in New York, NY for the first time in my life. I won a free conference pass to O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference from Booksquare, managed to afford the airfare and hotel (Would you believe I flew to NYC, stayed for 3 nights within 1.0mi of the conference at Times Square, was fed the entire time, and flew home for under $550?), and had a great time. I have tweeted a bit about it, from the conference, and I have many, many pages of hand-written notes I took over the two days of the conference I attended, but this post is not about Tools of Change. I may (or may not – but probably will) blog extensively about it later. There’s a good chance I’ll write a thousand words or more per page of notes, not to mention anecdotes about everything that happened between sessions and at night. This is not one of those posts.

This post is about everything else. This post is about how, in between the last two First Friday Art Walks (ie: basically in January), I painted 6 new paintings, recorded the audio for the podcast version of FWYCR (inlcuding 6 chapters ahead of where I needed to be), wrote 5 (mostly long) blog posts, did my taxes, et cetera, et cetera. This post is about how, since the February First Friday Art Walk I haven’t painted anything new, have only written this blog post, and have only finished the single chapter of MEPod that was due today. This post is about how I don’t know when my next book will be ready for publication, or what book it will be. This post is about how I occasionally notice that I don’t have a “marketing strategy.” This post is about feeling insignificant, helpless.

After this month’s First Friday Art Walk in downtown Phoenix (I show among the vendors known as “Roosevelt Row” – the booths in the blocked off streets of Garfield between 4th & 6th, on 5th between Garfield & McKinley, and starting next month on 6th as well – I’m there every month, I pre-paid for all of 2009, and you can see/buy my art and/or books in person there for cash), I sold two paintings. Did not sell them at the Art Walk, one because I don’t take credit cards on site, the other because there wasn’t a convenient ATM, but sold them after being seen there. Gladly drove across town on Saturday to deliver one (after processing the payment through Google Checkout) and to a different part of town on Sunday to deliver the other. I’m always glad to put my creations into the hands of people who appreciate them. People who love them. People who are excited to be able to see them again and again. These kind of sales are awesome.

Very early Monday morning I left for NY. Thursday evening I returned to Phoenix. Friday I did laundry and tried to recover from the conference & the trip.

Saturday I had another Art Walk / Art Fair, this time at Angel’s Serenity in North Phoenix/Scottsdale. The Angel’s Serenity Art Fair is a Saturday, daytime event. It had better turnout when the economy was in better shape (and when there was an open coffee shop involved – since gone out of business), but I still feel it’s worthwhile to show there. It certainly doesn’t cost anything but my time and effort. Sold a few books (You’ve seen the new books, right?), about half to returning customers. That’s my favorite and most reassuring sort of customer, the ones who have bought my books before, read them, and want to buy the new books, too. That’s the basis for my publishing model; to build an audience of people who will continue buying my books as I continue to write them. Didn’t move any art at the Art Fair, but a past customer and I spent a lot of time discussing the 5 or 6 pieces he wants to buy – if only I catch him at the right time of the month. I’ll follow up with him after the first of the month.

Writing it out, I know it hasn’t been a lot of time – especially since the conference was actually work. Yet I feel unaccomplished, so far. Dilligent, yes. I recorded three more chapters of FWYCR yesterday, and worked on trying to figure out what to do about the final main character’s voice – it needs to be distinct, striking, but not distracting or confusing. I edited, mixed, compressed & posted chapter 15 today, went to two banks and a book store, and am writing this blog post. I’ve been working on some other ideas (more below) as well. Still, I feel I haven’t done enough. On the other hand, a big part of why I chose not to buy the big TV was so that I would be able to work longer without stress and worry – so that I would be able to go at my own pace without having to freak out about whether my art & writing were bringing in enough money on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. So I’m trying not to freak out.

I’m also looking at some new projects. I’m considering designing a deck of cards – you can think of them like tarot cards or fortune telling cards, though I’m developing them largely from scratch. I’m working out some planning and manufacturing ideas already, starting work on basic artwork & meanings. Probably a set of 50 cards – thinking of maybe putting it out as a “deck” of moo business cards, actually, though I haven’t fully considered all the different custom card-deck printing options out there yet. Feel free to suggest someone in the comments. Then, in parallel with developing the deck, write a book explaining the cards, their meanings, and how to do a “reading” from them. Publish the book & make the cards available – because I can, and it interests me to do so. Not sure how to market such a thing, and certainly can’t bundle the cards with the book via Lightning Source, but it’s an idea. If I decide to paint the images for the cards, that could mean up to 50 new Mini-Paintings – I’d want to do them at a size I could scan with the equipment I have, so probably 8×10″ or smaller canvas or canvas boards. Or perhaps illustrations on paper, but then I’d have to mount/mat/frame them. bleh. But either way, that could be a gallery show I could shop around. Hang the originals on the walls, sell the cards & books (& originals), and have me (someone) do readings for guests all night/nights.

I’m also increasingly thinking of trying to put together a music “album.” Probably a “Christian music album,” at that. I keep having to compose my own music for the podcasts (because I’m quite stubborn and independent) and thus to think about music, to design music, and to practice with its creation. I’ve been vaguely thinking about creating music since middle or high school, but have rarely stuck with any physical instrument for more than a few weeks at a time & have never studied musical composition. Having Garageband in front of me several hours a week, listening to music I’ve composed play behind my audiobooks, it’s been pushing me more and more toward writing songs & putting together an album. That, I don’t have outlines or plans or marketing plans for (yet), unlike the cards/book thing above, but it’s rolling around in my head, closer and closer to the front all the time.

Which brings me around to what may be a lack of focus. If I’m writing/composing/recording/producing an album of Christian music, am I focused on art? On writing? On publishing? I’ve squeezed the designing of a deck of fortune cards (did you know the Old Testament condemns divination?) into the art/publishing worlds with the hand-painting of the art & the writing/publishing of a companion book, but has my focus slipped? What happened to the anthology of short stories I was working on last year? When is UTFBF-RoaAP: Book Four going to be written? Will I paint anything other than these cards any time soon? What about my next podcast novel (due in April)? What about marketing?

Marketing? Fuck. I knew I was forgetting something. I still haven’t figured out how to do marketing. Sigh.

In other news, since my books are increasingly apparent as some sort of idealized-communist propaganda, I’ve begun slogging my way through Atlas Shrugged. The Fountainhead is next. Then probably the Communist Manifesto, Wealth of Nations and Mein Kampf. I’ve never read any of these, but time for reading is part of what I bought myself when I didn’t buy a 73″ HDTV. Speaking of which, I’m going to go work on Atlas Shrugged right now.