The new poetry collection, Unspecified by Yoshira Marbel, which I’ve been posting about for the last couple of weeks, is currently trying to raise funds to cover the costs of creating a print edition of the book. I posted a little bit about the costs involved in that (setup, proofs, initial printing, shipping to me, shipping to South Africa, ISBNs, et cetera) and in running the Kickstarter project itself (shipping rewards to backers, Kickstarter takes 5%, Amazon takes a few % to process payments), but I guessed I’d need $330. I decided to run a shorter Kickstarter fundraiser than average, since statistically most pledges come in the first few days and on the last day, only about two weeks long, ending at 9PM MST, Friday September 16th, 2011.

As of last night, we reached our funding goal. (This is presuming no one removes their pledge in the next two days.) There are still two days for you and your friends and family and pets to pledge to the project, knowing confidently that the book will have a print edition which should be delivered to me by the first week of October and then forwarded on to you post-haste. Knowing that Yoshira’s dream is coming true and her poetry and message will be reaching people who never would have had a chance to have contact with it otherwise, and that as a backer, you are contributing to that dream fulfillment (and you’ll have your name in the book’s Special Thanks section in acknowledgement of that).

Here’s how we reached our funding goal:
On the first day we had one person pledge $30 (Thanks, John!). I was posting about the fundraiser on Facebook, on Google+, on Twitter, I’ve been running a 30-second ad on every episode of all 13 of my Podiobooks which gets downloaded during the course of the fundraiser, and I posted an episode of the Modern Evil Podcast with info on the book, the fundraiser, and containing a few of the poems. Over that first week we got one more pledge of $2. Which is part of why by the end of that first week I was having an emotional breakdown. (More on that, below.) My semi-public emotional breakdown led to another $51 in pledges on Friday/Saturday.

Around the same time I added a couple of new reward levels offering any piece of original artwork (see wretchedcreature.com); $50 for the book, eBook, and any piece of art 8″x10″ or smaller, and $300 for the book, eBook, and any piece of art (including an original commissioned piece). Those offers are still available, by the way. If you’ve been looking at some of my art (some of which is priced significantly higher than $300, which includes shipping) or want to commission something, this is a great opportunity, which will help support the publishing side of my business, too. You have two days to take advantage of this offer via the Kickstarter fundraiser.

One person has already taken advantage of it. Bill Jonas Jr., someone who has bought a couple of pieces of my artwork in the past, was moved by Yoshira’s notes (see the Kickstarter page) and was thinking about pledging most of last week. He was thinking of pledging at the $250 level, to support the project (that would have put us over our goal) and because he really likes the piece of art I used to create the book cover… and then he saw the offer re: getting commissioning a new piece and he contacted me about that. (For reasons I won’t go into, rather than pledging directly, he preferred to give me cash – I had my sister use her Kickstarter account to put the pledge up on the site on his behalf.) We met last night so he could give me the cash and his thoughts and ideas for the painting he wants (and to hang out and chat, which was nice (and about the limit of the social I think I can take right now; it was just my wife and Bill and myself chatting at a coffee shop); we were friends before Bill became a fan of my art). That $300 put us at the $383 pledged we’re at as I write this post. Enough to publish the book in print, and depending on how Yoshira and I feel about it in a year, the rest either to keep it in print for a while after that, or which can be used toward the publication of my future books. (ie: Probably the next time you see me post a Kickstarter fundraiser for a book, the goal will be ~$50 lower than it otherwise would have been. (Or not happen at all, if someone else pledges at the $250 or $300 reward levels in the next two days.))

Which brings us around to a long, long ramble about what’s been going on with me, emotionally:
I’ve been quite depressed for some long time, actually. About a month ago my stress, anxiety and depression reached a point where I could no longer handle even relatively low-key social gatherings exceeding about 8 people. (For about half the summer, Mandy and I had been attending a weekly (well, mostly weekly) game night at a friend’s house, where we played board games (mostly of the strategy variety, though they’d been admirably enduring my unusual collection of Scrabble variations, one a week) with a handful of friends.) I’ve managed to avoid acting on my suicidal thoughts, to avoid attempting to numb/poison myself with alcohol, and mostly to avoid emotional overeating. I have stopped strength training in the last two or three weeks, and I’m not sure whether that’s mostly because of the depression, mostly because I’ve run out of Podiobooks I want to listen to (and keep starting Podiobooks I don’t enjoy, which puts me off my exercise a bit), somewhat because the worst of my depression induces a sort of constant, all-over bodily pain/soreness which makes strength training even more painful, some combination of factors, or just because I don’t enjoy exercise for its own sake. Of course, at its worst my insanity drives me out of doors on long, long walks (usually in the middle of the night), so I haven’t been entirely without exercise, or been entirely cooped up in the house; I suppose that can be counted as good. Anyway, to sum up: I’ve been feeling quite poorly of late.

Getting a submission, a good and appropriate one, was a bright point. Working with the author to create a publishable book from that submission was something which could take advantage of my occasional manias or give me something to focus on and distract me from the darkest of my depression. Getting an eye exam and being prescribed eye glasses for the first time (right around the time I launched the Kickstarter, a week and a half ago) feels pretty dark, and I’m sure I’ll begin feeling even worse when the glasses arrive and I actually have them as a constant reminder of my own slowly decaying body; I don’t cope well with disorder, disease, aging or the reality of what our physical bodies go through as they approach death and I expect I’ll take my life in a decade or two (at the latest) rather than suffer the indignities of that end of the experience of life; getting glasses is like a precursor, and I have repeatedly thought, in the last 10 days (and in recent years as my eyesight has degraded) that I ought to kill myself now, rather than even begin down that slippery slope of decay toward death.

Then there’s the Kickstarter itself. What it feels like it represents. As I said on Facebook, most of the time it’s easy to believe/pretend I’m successful, because I’m doing what I love. I’m writing the books I want to write, I’m creating the art I want to create, I’m telling stories, reading books, living my life, loving my wife, worshiping my God, and most of the time I can believe I’m successful. Once in a while I have to do bookkeeping (at least quarterly, when taxes are due), and once in a while I become involved in something like this fundraiser, and once in a while I look at the number of people reading/buying/responding-to my books in the context of other creators’ work, and when I do it becomes easy to try to measure my success with numbers and contexts and comparisons. It becomes almost impossible to avoid feeling that I’m unsuccessful. Other indie authors, who consider their books to be less successful than they’d like, usually posting from a context of “this isn’t close to where I want it to be, but I can see how, if I were just doing ten or twenty times better, I could consider myself successful”, make off-handed remarks about how many eBooks they’re selling (this week it was “only averaging 18 copies a day” when they raised their price from $0.99 to $2.99) and the perspective it throws my own eBook sales into feels like they’ve physically thrown me down the stairs. Down an infinite spiral staircase, and I’m tumbling all the way down in increasing pain. (I don’t think I’ve ever, in over three and a half years of selling eBooks, sold 18 eBooks in a month. Right now I have 27 or 28 eBooks available; novels and short stories, collections of short stories and even collected novels, ranging in price from $0.99 to $9.99. Eleven novels priced $5.99 or less. I don’t have my spreadsheets in front of me right now (and don’t care to look at them, which I’m sure would make me feel even worse, a countering of “Yay! The Kickstarter is funded!” I don’t really need), but I don’t believe I’ve ever gotten within an order of magnitude of the sales other authors bemoan as “not making it”.) At some point after I launched my Kickstarter fundraiser trying to raise $330 -this was while I still only had $32 in pledges after most of a week- another Podiobooks/indie author launched a Kickstarter to raise funds for a print edition of one of his books, looking to raise $4000, and he surpassed his goal within about 25 hours. This was around the time I began to have a major emotional breakdown. I spent a few hours curled up in bed crying, I tried to find things to do to occupy myself, and I ended up posting something about how I felt on Facebook… which is when a handful of people pledged a bit more, but I continued to be less than 25% of the way to the goal.

I hate marketing. I loathe promotion. I’m not fond of sales. Working on any of those things, especially to try to market/promote/sell my own creations, tends to induce physical symptoms such as nausea, headaches, and worse… and emotional responses including grief, intense self-loathing, and anger. I believe in this book, in Yoshira’s poetry, and I believe that it deserves to be published, or I wouldn’t be putting my name and the name of my company behind it. Yet writing copy for it was just about as uncomfortable as writing copy for my own work. Promoting the fundraiser has been … very bad. Worse, in light of how the last Kickstarter I attempted turned out. Bad, in knowing that most pledges for most Kickstarter fundraisers come in the first 24-48 hours, and I hadn’t even reached 10% of our admittedly modest goal. Imagine I’d set a $4000 goal, or -like another indie author I know who was raising funds for a strictly eBook release- an $8000 goal; my “success” would have been obviously “none” (while both of those other projects were fully funded within a matter of hours or days). Those successful authors certainly did more to promote their fundraisers than I did, but even just the little promotion I was doing felt like too much to me, like SPAMming my social network and my readers, like I was going to make myself sick with all that goddamned promotion. I just couldn’t take it, couldn’t face it. Thousands of people download my books, possibly tens of thousands (it’s hard to know how to count), and hundreds of people follow me and my work or call me a friend, and dozens of people have called/written/txt’d or otherwise reached out specifically to tell me they’re fans of me and my work, and yet …

…and yet, only a small handful of people buy my books, only 1 of my friends (friends and fans combined, really) had pledged anything to show their support, and it felt like their not pledging (or sharing the link, even, or commenting), not even $1, was a refutation of my success. It felt like every one of the hundreds of people who would self-identify as my “friend” on Facebook but hadn’t bought a book, eBook, or painting, hadn’t donated to a Podiobook, hadn’t pledged toward any of my 3 Kickstarters, that every one of them was outing themselves as someone who doesn’t believe in me, doesn’t like or support my work, doesn’t care about what I’m doing or who I am or what I believe in. I know I have real friends, and I know I have genuine fans, and I know there are people who care about me, even if they aren’t saying so with their money; those people actually say so, and then usually spend money even after I tell them it isn’t necessary. I also know that when hundreds or thousands of people purport to be your friend or fan and neither say they support your work nor spend to support your work, the one or few who do are easily overshadowed. Especially when I’m already really, really depressed. And once it begins, measuring self-worth with dollar-signs is a difficult paradigm to break free of. When I’m trying to raise funds, or when I’m trying to sell books (say, at comicon), or when I’m launching a new/finished project, it’s too easy to fall into that trap and too difficult to find my way back out again. In between, while I’m working on creating things and not thinking about whether my past projects have made money and whether the things I’m creating are going to be able to make money, when all I’m thinking about is the work of creation itself, I feel fine. As I said, I feel successful to be able to be doing that work, and to be able to not be thinking about money. I suppose I ought to add to my earlier list: I really, really hate money. I wish I never had to deal with it or think about it at all. In a way, I think that’s a large part of how I measure my success; the less I have to think about money, the more successful I am. I can imagine that, if I were to suddenly start making millions of eBook sales and I had to start dealing with all the financial bullshit that comes along with financial “success” I might see myself as less successful than I am now… though… there must be a balance point somewhere, where the increased income means less time spent thinking about my family’s money (food budgets, clothes budgets, how we’re going to afford glasses, medical procedures, new tires, et cetera), in excess of the increased time spent thinking about bookkeeping/accounting/taxes/etc. I can almost guarantee you that point is still lower than would put me in the top two quintiles of American income. (Stupid rich people.)

To wrap things up a bit, I’m glad we’ve reached our funding goal and that I don’t really need to do any more promotion (in a traditional sense) or fundraising for Unspecified. The process of getting there has been painful and difficult, and has made me question the value of my life and the measure of my success. I’m depressed enough right now that I don’t know whether my misgivings and self-doubt are real or are symptoms. I suppose I haven’t quite reached a point where I’ve been able to sufficiently decouple my business from its reliance on money… Ugh. I suppose that’s something else I need to work on, another money thing I need to think about before trying to launch my next project. Sigh.

I’ll post again when I’ve got books in hand; possibly even when I get a good-looking proof copy. Ooh, or if/when my mood changes; better or significantly worse.

Click to see it a little bigger. That, of course, is the full wraparound cover. This is the front cover by itself:

If I don’t hear from anyone who is interested in buying one of my paintings (heck, any of my paintings, even a new commission) to help fund the print publication of this book in the next day or so (you don’t have to pay in the next few days, just let me know you’re interested & can pay, say, by 10/1), I’ll go ahead and launch the Kickstarter project. I’ve been mapping it out and it looks like I’ll probably have the following reward levels:

• $1+ – Your name in the book’s ‘Special Thanks’
• $10+ – The above, plus a copy of the eBook
• $25+ – The above, plus a copy of the print edition
• $50+ – The above, plus a 2nd copy of Unspecified, plus both of my poetry collections in print
• $250+ – One backer gets everything at the $50 level plus ‘without you’
• $250+ – One backer gets everything at the $50 level plus ‘embers of you in a sea of me’

The goal will probably be $300 or $330/$350 (I just remembered to add the Kickstarter/Amazon fees, each around 5%, to the $300 I actually need), and I don’t think I’ll bother running it more than 2 weeks – I like the end of the day on 9/16 as the end date; it’s a Friday and right after a payday, whether you get paid weekly, bi-weekly, or bi-monthly. Then, whether you email me right now to say you want to buy a piece of art or whether the Kickstarter fundraising is successful, the book should be in print by 10/1… and if neither works out, I can publish the eBook 9/16 and the print edition as soon as one/both of those paintings sell (or profit from eBook sales covers the print cost).

Oh, and the final prices on the eBook and print editions won’t be anywhere near $10/$25 – these pledge points are based on the idea of “you’re pledging because you want to support this project,” not based on trying to reach the thriftiest of book shoppers… I fully expect to price the eBook at $2.99 and the print edition somewhere in the $9.99 to $14.99 range – I’m worried that a print edition price lower than $12.99, even for a 66-page book, will devalue the collection… based on prevailing prices for similar books. In my research I even found that several of the most popular single-author poetry collections under 90 pages had list prices at $24.99. (Also that, while some publishers are sticking eBook prices to ~80% of the print edition’s list price, an equal number seemed to just stick the eBook at $2.99-$3.50, regardless of the print prices.) So… if you’re concerned with the price & don’t think you can afford to pledge, please at least pledge $1, then try to remember to order the book when it’s published.

I’m getting sleepy and may be rambling a bit, now. Sorry about that. Anyway, if this art doesn’t jump up and find a buyer soon, I’ll be rambling at you again, soon! More promotion! More fundraising! Plus, there’ll be a deadline! A countdown! A community! Kickstarter, ho!

To give you some idea of what sort of poetry you’ll find in the collection (what you’ll be helping share with the world through your purchase of the art or, later, the book itself), I’m going to share a poem or three from it, along with the (current version of the) description I’ve written for the book.

Released Pain

Tiny slit
Sweet release
Blood droplets
Hypnotize me
A fountain of blood
Dancing on the crystal water
Floating away
Darkness has destroyed the pain
End is near
Now free
Blood has released me

I picked that poem to start because it speaks to one of the recurring motifs of the collection, something also addressed by one of the paintings we’re hoping you’ll buy, ‘without you’.

We’re asking just $239 (plus tax & shipping) for this original work of art, and the buyer will also receive a copy of the finished paperback book. It’s mostly acrylic on canvas, though technically, because of the real razor blades which are cutting into (and affixed securely to) the canvas, it’s really “mixed media” artwork. The purchase price of this piece would nearly cover all the costs of publishing a print edition of Unspecified; close enough that I’d be able to send it to my printer immediately.

Here is the current version of the official Description we’ve put together for the book, a version of which will appear in the book’s listing on sites such as Amazon, or in eBook stores:

Young South African poet Yoshira Marbel experiences such a complex and profound state of emotional turmoil in her everyday life that it leaves even the most experienced doctors at a loss for words; their official diagnosis for her was ‘Unspecified’. Yoshira has invested years of her life in the painful struggle to do what her doctors could not; both in finding a path through the troubles of her life and in expressing her depression, heartbreak, emptiness, anger, and suffering through poetry. ‘Unspecified’ is her first published collection, exploring themes which are familiar to most of us, to one degree or another, but amplified through the lens of Yoshira’s honesty, intensity, and natural lyricism.

Here’s another example of Yoshira’s poetry, the first poem from the collection:

My Friend

At least I have my faithful friend
He never leaves my side
Lays next to me at night
Wraps his arms around me
Holding me tight
Can’t break away
He is here to stay
My dear friend
Pain

The other painting we’re offering as part of the fundraising for Unspecified is a smaller piece which, in insufficient lighting, appears solid black. It’s titled ‘embers of you in a sea of me’, and it’s also acrylic on canvas. This is the piece I’ve adapted for the cover of Unspecified, which you’ll see soon, and if you can’t make it out in the small image below, it’s a swirling black field full of tiny bursts of color (red, blue, and some green).

The asking price for this piece is an affordable $199 (plus tax & shipping), and the buyer will of course receive a copy of the finished paperback book. Again, while that alone will not fully cover the printing/setup costs, it’s still enough to get things started, and if you buy this piece, I can send Unspecified to my printer immediately. (And avoid having to do a Kickstarter fundraiser!)

Finally, I’d like to share one more poem from the collection with you. I hope you appreciate these poems and will consider contributing to this project.

Doll

Emptiness consumes me
An infectious disease
No escape
Silent tears
Depression in control
Drowning
Pretending
You say you love me
But you’re never really here
My dear depression
Never disappears
Like a rag doll
Thrown in the trash
Come back
See through my façade
I may not say this a lot
But I love you

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.

I spent a few days thinking about creating a new painting for the cover, reading and re-reading the poetry, immersing myself in it, trying to appropriately capture visually what the words expressed. Several of the ideas I had seemed to be gravitating back toward something I’d already painted, ‘embers of you in a sea of me’. I spent a few hours throwing together a basic design so I could get Yoshira’s impression of what I was thinking for her book cover, and she thought it was great, too, so we’re going forward with part of this painting as the basis for the cover design. I’ll post again when we’ve got something close-to-final, but here’s the full painting:

It’s nearly all black, but the black isn’t a perfect darkness, and there are tiny bursts of color swirling throughout. I think it’s dark but hopeful, in a way.

If you’ve seen these paintings before and have considered purchasing them but hadn’t made up your mind about them, now would be an excellent time to do so. Even if you’ve never seen them before but one (or both) of them speaks to you, please consider adding it to your growing art collection. Perhaps you’d like to do your part to support independent creators such as Yoshira and myself, or to support small-press poetry publishing, or you meant to chip in to one of my earlier books and didn’t get the chance or didn’t have the cash; here’s your opportunity to become a patron of the arts. If you do decide to buy one, in addition to the painting itself, an original one-of-a-kind work of art, you’ll receive a print copy of the finished poetry collection as soon as I have it in hand, and a copy of the eBook as soon as it’s published.

If neither painting sells in the next couple of weeks, we’ll start a Kickstarter fundraiser with the paintings as rewards alongside copies of the paperback and eBook editions. If the Kickstarter fundraiser doesn’t get funded, we’ll probably just publish the eBook version at first, at least until one or both of these paintings sells (or until revenue from eBook sales covers the cost of the print edition, whichever comes first). I’ll be able to share a couple/few of the poems with you here, soon, too, to give you an idea of the sort of work you’ll be supporting when you purchase this art. For now, hopefully the art itself and what I’ve told you about the poetry (and my enthusiasm for it) will be enough.

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…

You can probably also see that it isn’t a particularly precise execution of its own ideas. Here’s a closer look:

It’s easy to just appreciate it, but for a perfectionist like me there are a lot of things about it which have bothered me for years and years. If you look closely, you can see the squares aren’t square, the circles aren’t perfectly round and none of them are aligned/centered with each other, which is part of why the straight lines don’t have correct symmetry. I don’t recall all the details of my initial plans, but you can see that there are three variations of each basic color, one in each ‘level’ (big box, big circle, small box), but can you guess what the pattern is? Or count the number of basic colors? Here’s a tough one: What is the relationship between the colors of paint and the colors of string? There is one. There are so many colors, and the variations between the 3 levels of each color are so non-uniform, that it appears unpatterned. A jumble.

Which doesn’t get into the fact that, in addition to not measuring the lines out accurately or symmetrically, I didn’t paint them very well, either. Even today I’m not very good at drawing or painting a straight line (or a curved one) freehanded, but in 1997 I clearly sucked. I had no clue. The thickness of the paint varies wildly, the edges overlap and aren’t crisp/clear, and to me, the result is a mess. Of course, I’ve been nit-picking it for over 13 years, now… And I still like it more than a lot of the other art I made between 1997 and 2002, and I know a lot of other people have told me they like it, too. (Never enough to buy it, yet, but enough to say something, which is more than most people do.)

In the following image, you can see one of my first attempts to use masking tape to create an actually-straight line. You can also see that the tape leaked – there are little “blooms” of paint where its edge wasn’t perfectly adhered to the canvas, and where I didn’t manage to lay the tape down straight at all:

Oh, and there were two other things; first, I always live a bit hard-pressed for cash, so the canvases I was practicing/starting with back in 1997 were the cheapest I could find. They were 16×20″ and came in two-packs from Michael’s. As you can see in the image at right, they also happened to be side-stapled. If I were the sort to frame my artwork, this might have been less troubling. As it is, it just looks sloppy and unprofessional to me, now. For every other piece I painted during this period (well, those I still had in my possession in 2003), where I hadn’t been extending the paint around the edges of the canvas (which is my current style – to literally continue the image around all the edges, increasingly with the deeper “gallery wrap” thickness of canvas), I went around the four ugly, stapled edges and painted them solid black, giving those works a sort of frame, covering up the staples, but not incurring the ridiculous expense of buying actual frames for them. With the bare canvas in the white stripes extending all the way to the edge of this one, the black border didn’t make sense…

The second thing is that, at some point between painting that first painting in 1997 and when I sold my first painting in 2000, I went back and signed all my paintings… but I didn’t know anything about signing paintings. I’d spent some months/years developing a new, artistic interpretation of my name/signature, so I had that ready, but … I ended up signing … disproportionately large signatures on my first dozen canvases. After that they grew smaller and smaller and, eventually, I began signing my art on the back of the canvas. In 2003 or 2004 I also decided to date and serialize all my art/creations, and I went back and signed the backs of all the paintings I still had possession of, adding serial numbers and dates. This is what I continue to do: sign, date, and serialize all my artwork, doing so on the backside of the canvas, for paintings on stretched canvas.

Over the years I continued to work on my techniques, continued to strive for straight lines, crisp edges, meaningful and interesting combinations of and patterns between colors, and around the end of 2009 or the beginning of 2010, I reached a sort of culminating point of development. In February 2010 I painted ‘they come in threes’ and immediately, before the paint was dry, knew it was my best work to date. Look at how crisp and clean the edges are. Straight lines are straight, curved lines are smooth and crisp, there are no overlaps, no visible brushstrokes along the edges where I had to go back in and cover this or that error up, all the paint is the same thickness, not clumped-up here and too-thin there…

It’s beautiful work. The brushstrokes which are visible are broad, sweeping strokes, blending colors and suggesting motion in line with the shapes the colors create. The whole thing was done in two passes, two “coats” of paint, one green and one the blues.

The corners are sharp. The colors carefully selected and carefully blended, their relationships, their contrasts, are clear. Darker blue against lighter green, lighter blue against darker green, some areas where the saturation and shade are so close as to play tricks on the eye… and all the measurements are precise and accurate. Each of the three shapes of the full composition are exactly the same size and shape and distance from one another, perfectly proportioned with each other and the canvas, and full of invisible symmetries beyond the obvious repetitions of shape. I accomplished all of this with carefully practiced brushstrokes and painstakingly perfected use of masking tape – the same things I didn’t know how to use well back in 1997, now mastered.

I painted this and felt, “Well, that’s that. There’s no more I can do, no place else to go, with that technique.” It was the last painting I created for a long time. In 2010, after I painted ‘they come in threes’ I only created two more works of art, both for book covers (here and here). This year, in April, I finally began painting again (a bit), when I received a commission for a new piece. Despite a few technical errors (including a strong gust of wind which resulted in a hole being broken through one canvas of the piece!), the same expertise I’d been building toward for over a decade, which had culminated in ‘they come in threes’, created another beautiful work of art with stunningly crisp lines, bold contrasts, and a delightful composition. Then, from a suggestion from the same woman who commissioned that piece, I created my most complex and difficult work to date, ‘RainbowAwesomeUnicornWow’, which is also really just two coats of paint carefully applied with the same techniques.

‘RainbowAwesomeUnicornWow’ is sold, but if you’re interested, both ‘they come in threes’ and my first stretched-canvas painting (currently titled ‘Spiraling Shape 4′ for some reason) are each still available for purchase. Prices are negotiable, delivery in the Phoenix area is included (shipping anywhere else is also available); email me at teel@modernevil.com if you’re interested.

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.

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.

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.

Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers (including above eBooks estimates), as usual giving the total of eBook downloads, the total of Podiobook downloads, and the more-accurate (re: # of people who dl’d a full book) total downloads of the final episodes of each Podiobook, as: eBook/total-PB/final-PB

• Lost and Not Found: 65 / 1342 / 61
• Dragons’ Truth: 133 / 934 / 102
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: 102 / 3032 / 90
• Untrue Tales… Book One: 91 / 3771 / 332
• Untrue Tales… Book Two: 89 / 3493 / 247
• Untrue Tales… Book Three: 93 / 1841 / 159
• Cheating, Death: 2 / 3176 / 229
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 0 / 909 / 89
• Total for all titles: 575 / 17,589 / 1,220
• Total YTD: 2,595 / 109,990 / 7,800
• Total all-time: 11,017 / 290,091 / 18,919

What this looks like, in case you didn’t just look at April’s numbers, is a slight drop in dl rates of most of the Podiobooks and a slight increase in most of the dl rates of the eBooks. The Untrue Tales… Book One & Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut Podiobooks held steady, and the Lost and Not Found eBook dropped off. I can guess the latter is because the Director’s Cut is quite visible on modernevil.com, and is new on Podiobooks.com. It also looks like I’ve probably (in the last couple days) passed the 30,000 downloads point (across eBooks & “finished” Podiobooks, for 8+ distinct books), which is a nice-looking round number. I’ll probably also pass 300,000 Podiobooks episodes downloaded some time this month. Not anywhere near Scott Sigler’s numbers, or Nathan Lowell’s, but numbers I’m pretty happy with.

I have a new Podiobook launching in a couple of days; the short story collection More Lost Memories, which has been out a year and a half in paperback and all but one story of which has already run on the Modern Evil Podcast. It’ll run for the next couple of months and then I’ll start running the audio version of Time, emiT, and Time Again there. (TeaTA begins on MEPod in 3 weeks.) Each new Podiobook means the “Total all-time” numbers just go up faster and faster, both simply because there are more episodes to be downloaded, but also because (generally) people who try one are likely to try all the others, and the more they like them the more likely they are to share them.

Moving on to actual sales: First, you already know about the great success I had with my first attempt at a Kickstarter fundraiser. The fundraiser ended (and the pledges were transfered to me) on May 15th. The big pledge is $500 and I’m counting it as art sales (since the $500 reward level included ‘everything below’ and a single piece of original art, and the ‘everything below’ reward level was much lower at only $150). I’ve never made $500+ in art sales in a single month. (Even if you want to only count $350 toward art, since the other rewards are all related to the book, I haven’t made $350+ in art sales in a single month since moving back to Phoenix in ’04. (My records for sales in Pine are … effectively non-existent.)) Best art sales month, ever.

My other two backers pledged $15 each for copies of the TeaTA paperback & a chapbook & eBook. That’s $30 for 2 (or six, if you want to count them that way) books.

Also in May (last weekend) was the Phoenix Comicon 2010, at which I was a ‘Small Press’ exhibitor. I had all my books with me, prominently breaking them up into genres (heh) of ‘Science Fiction’, ‘Fantasy’, ‘Horror’, and ‘Poetry’ (in the back corner). I also had the little zombie I’d crocheted, priced at $55, as a sort of mascot to sit next to the stacks of Cheating, Death. The zombie sold Saturday, along with a copy of the book, which was awesome. (The zombie sale counts as art, bring the total art sales for May to $555, by the way.) Here are my total sales (all paperback, except where noted):

• Lost and Not Found: 0 / $0
• Dragons’ Truth: 4 / $49
• Dragons’ Truth MP3 CD: 1 / $13
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: 5 / $70
• More Lost Memories: 0 / $0
• MLM/Pay Attention chapbook: 1 / $2
• Untrue Tales… Book One: 1 / $12
• Untrue Tales… Book Two: 0 / $0
• Untrue Tales… Book Three: 0 / $0
• Untrue Tales… Books 1-3 (combined): 8 / $200
• Cheating, Death: 6 (plus 2 given away, 1 to Wil Wheaton) / $55
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 1 / $10
• Total Comicon book sales: 27 / $411

I have never had $411 in book sales in a single month before. Actually, with the sale of another copy of LaNF-DC prior to Comicon, the TeaTA sales, wholesale sales of 3 books (2 Untrue Tales… Books 1-3 (combined) & 1 Cheating, Death; $14.82 total net) and eBook sales, my total book sales for the month were $468.10. Best book sales month, ever, and it compares pretty favorably with the total book sales I reported on this blog for the whole of 2009 ($503.39). I suppose I’d better sign up for a table at the 2011 Phoenix Comicon.

Two very successful projects came to fruition in May, and they pretty fairly secure profitability for Modern Evil Press for the remainder of the year, barring unforeseen expenses (or, if/when I return to the Art Walk this Fall, even worse sales than before). More importantly, they give me hope for the ongoing financial viability of Modern Evil Press. Thirty-four books doesn’t come close to the sales volume most other authors and publishers would consider “successful” for a month’s work. It does exceed the goal I set last time I bothered trying to set a sales goal; that if I could sell at least one thing per day, on average, Modern Evil Press would be financially viable, and more than successful. Since I’m not planning on doing any in-person sales for the next 3-4 months, I expect much lower sales numbers for a while. Still, I believe I’m on the right track, and things are looking good.

As I mentioned before, the front cover is based on the painting ‘love takes flight’ which I designed and painted specifically for it. Not thinking clearly (apparently) I didn’t paint something suitable for a wraparound cover (like I did for More Lost Memories & Cheating, Death – and photographically for my other books), so night before last I painted a new 8×10″ blue sky painting for the back cover. Last night (I’m still up, I keep wanting to say “tonight” even though it’s after 7AM) I scanned that painting, adjusted its colors to match the other painting better, and then worked for hours to get everything just so.

If you’d like to leave a comment, I’m asking two things: 1) What do you think of this cover design & especially of the words on the back? 2) What should I paint on the 8×10″ blue sky canvas? (ie: it served its purpose of being blank for the book, now what?)

I’ve participated (as a vendor) during the First Fridays Art Walk Roosevelt Row Street Closure (now known as Phoestival in Roosevelt Row) 21 times. Six in 2008, all 12 months in 2009, and all three so far this year. In 2008 I paid $35/month for a space. In 2009 I paid $385 for the full year (~$32/mo). For 2010 the price of a single space increased to $50 per month, with no ability to (or price break from) paying for multiple months in advance. I have had other expenses, including things like building my two portable gallery walls, putting gas in my (borrowed from dad) generator until I bought a battery-based power solution, buying & replacing lights… buying replacement parts for the couple of times my walls were broken in strong winds… paying for an account & equipment to be able to take credit cards at the event… et cetera. Since I started participating in May 2008, my total expenses (including the $745 for 1 space per month) have been about $1759. That’s about $84/month, overall.

Then there’s income. For convenience, on three occasions I had made sales online (usually via Twitter) and the art actually changed hands at the art walk, but I am not including those three transactions in the figures below, as they would certainly have occurred without my participation in the art walk. I have included sales which were a direct result of the art walk (ie: a followup email/call about something seen at the art walk, which resulted in a sale), even if they were completed elsewhere.

In the first three months I participated, May ’08 through July ’08, I earned $19. Total. So I took a couple months off. Sales were better when I returned in Oct ’08, and were generally good through about May ’09. For that 8-month period I averaged about $131 in sales per month. My highest sales month was March ’09, in which I made $297 between art walk sales and art walk followups. Then sales went into a slump.

In the last ten months, from June ’09 through March ’10, I averaged about $35 in sales per month. I only made $50 or more in 3 of those 10 months. In an equal number of them I earned $15 or less ($0 in January). Compared to the new minimum cost of $50/month, this is not sustainable.

Buoyed by the 4 or 5 good months between Oct ’08 & May ’09, my net income from the art walks is generally positive. Net, I lost less than $19 for 2008, then earned roughly $147 in 2009 & $11 so far in 2010. That’s $140 total, less than $7/month. But it’s also positive… generally. So it’s not (yet) an actual money-losing proposition to participate, which is better than I’d expected before sitting down to look up the numbers. Plus, big expenses like building the portable walls are already paid for, so (theoretically) the ongoing expenses will be closer to the $50/month now charged for the space.

So what I have to decide is why I’m doing the art walk. If it’s to make money, that’s clearly a failure. I barely break even. If it’s merely to show off my art, I suppose that’s working out okay – tens of thousands of people walk by my art every month, and will do so for as long as I participate. If the purpose is primarily to show my art, I need to decide how much I’m willing to pay for that privilege – if it’s as much or more as it would cost (in money and in time) for me to participate in a “proper” gallery, either one where wall space is rented to artists, or a co-op like eye lounge, then I need to consider those alternatives as well. If my participation has something to do with community… a community I don’t live in, don’t work in, and only physically visit twice a month (once for the art walk, once for the vendor committee meeting)… then I’m possibly more nuts and ineffective than I thought. If there’s some other reason… I don’t know.

But doing the math & writing this out helps me consider it.  I think that at one time I thought it was about trying to earn money, but have since given that up – having seen both that I don’t seem to earn money there and that my family isn’t desperate for add’l income from what I create. I do hope that the economy recovers enough that the sort of people who were opening their wallets (and their homes to my art) in the hopeful period right after Obama (Mr. Hope) was elected will do so again someday soon, but I don’t think money or sales are really the point.

I think I’m going to stop doing the art walk for a while. I’ve been thinking of running through the remainder of a correspondence art course I never finished, and I’ve been thinking of spending some time deciding whether I’d like my art and/or writing to be “about” anything, and perhaps in a few months or so I’ll have something new and interesting to show, instead of just bringing random selections from what remains of my last 13 years of work & hoping they catch someone’s eye. Maybe I’ll have a reason, an answer, a new thought… Or at the very least, have a few new books to sell.

I’m a little disillusioned with First Fridays & the art walk, the “Phoestival,” et cetera myself, right now. Let me state that here, and perhaps expound on it later. I have been considering halting my participation in the event.

I received a very inflammatory email yesterday from someone I’ve never met or heard of before, but whom I now half want to murder (and half want to attempt a rational discussion with him, first). My first thought upon receipt of the email was that -damnit- I’d missed yet another Downtown Artist Task Force meeting! Yet again, because no one told me when it was until after it had happened! Then I read the long, rambling email from Kim Moody, co-founder of Alwun House, and I found more and better reasons to get angry.

Now, of note, I’d never heard of Kim Moody prior to receipt of this bizarre email. I don’t know how I got on his (long) list of “downtown participants” (most of whom have @phoenix.gov addresses). In fact, for a couple of hours today I thought Kim was a woman. No idea. Kim is, apparently, a co-founder of the Alwun House. According to several Alwun House PR pieces I found today, Alwun House says it was Phoenix’s first art gallery. It’s apparently been there for 38 years (something like 23 of them unlawfully, by their own account), and was a founding member of Artlink (the organization that started the First Fridays art walk in Phoenix, 22 years ago). I’ve been a Phoenix-area resident for 24 of my 31 years, I’ve attended ASU’s College of Fine Arts (briefly, I admit, in 2002), I’ve been creating art and visiting galleries and museums, and I’ve been attending the First Friday art walk pretty regularly since I returned to the valley (from N. Arizona) in mid-2004, and I never heard of the Alwun house until after I’d stopped attending the art walk as a visitor. I didn’t hear about them until after I was already a “street vendor” with the Roosevelt Row street closure. So I’ve never even seen the place. I never noticed it on the Artlink maps, the ~4 years I was attending First Fridays. They weren’t even a blip, to me, then.

But now they’re all over my radar.

Because they’re being ridiculous. The most obvious part of their ridiculousness was evidenced in an attachment to the unsolicited email from Kim Moody, a copy of an op-ed piece he wrote 5 years ago about how horrible it was that the government actually expected people to obey the law. The attitude of the piece was that the presence of police, fire marshals, health inspectors, zoning and tax enforcement officials at the art walk -actually doing their jobs and educating participants about what they needed to do to come into compliance with the law- was an assault, comparing it to the then-recent bombing of Baghdad and to the less-recent massacre of Irish civil-rights protestors. I cannot accept such attitudes any more than I can accept the ridiculous statements of those who protest traffic law enforcement.

I try to do things honestly and lawfully, myself. Not just by obeying traffic laws as well as I am able, but others as well. So, for example, despite the fact that I was creating arts and crafts and wanted to display and sell them during the art walks, from 2004 to early 2008 I refrained. I was (and still am) nowhere near being able to afford to rent a gallery myself, or to rent/buy a home in the area for that matter. But setting up in empty lots and on sidewalks is unlawful, and I’m still not convinced even attempting to get my work into galleries is a good idea, so there was no option for me at that time. Then, as soon as there was a lawful option (the Roosevelt Row street closure), I was there. I already had my Transaction Privilege Tax Licenses from both the city of Phoenix and the state of Arizona, and before I showed up in April ’08 to show my art at the Phoenix First Fridays Art Walk for the first time I seemed to have read more state statutes and local ordinances about what was going on (and what was prohibited/allowed) than anyone else there (including city employees, that night).

The event has changed a great deal since that night, but the reason for the street closure is related to my own participation in it – what had been going on before, for years, was unlawful and increasingly unsafe. People were setting up on sidewalks, empty lots, and alleyways to show and to sell, and the crowds on Roosevelt spilled out into the road every month – mostly around these unofficial “vendors” and mostly at the intersections at 3rd Street. The police “cracked down,” as it were, on these unlawful participants -after multiple warnings- and Roosevelt Row stepped in to try to keep a vital and vibrant part of what First Fridays had become from being destroyed (and from potentially taking the rest of the event with it). They did what was required to allow the unofficial “vendors” who had been participating in Phoenix’s First Fridays event for years to do so lawfully. The local artists and craftspeople and the t-shirt vendors and the sunglass resellers and the sno-cone guys who had all been participating illegally were now given the opportunity to keep doing what they’d been doing for years, except now in compliance with the law. I thought it was (and is) a wonderful compromise between community, culture, and law enforcement.

I am a creator. I create art; I paint, I sculpt, I write… And I make most of what I create available for sale to people who like it. The only storefront I can afford is my websites and, once a month for a few hours, a 10′x10′ space at the art walk. I’m not motivated by money, by sales, by fame, any of that. I am a creator – I will always be a creator – I will always create new works. I would like to share them with the people who like them, and with the people who love them. If doing so can help cover the cost of their creation, all the better. But money isn’t the thing. Creativity is. If money was the thing, or fame, I’m sure I’d be in several galleries by now and struggling to keep up with demand. I care about art. About creation. About freedom. I love that I, a totally independent creator, am able to participate in an event like the Phoenix First Fridays Art Walk without having to deal with commercialism (ie: renting “gallery” space from someplace like Red Dog) or politics/snobbery/art-scene (ie: getting my art accepted by a “reputable” or “collective” / “community” gallery).

On the other hand, the current incarnation of First Fridays in Phoenix has very little to do with fine art. Or so it seems. I suspect that the number of people who currently attend the event to see and/or purchase art and/or visit the galleries is higher than it has been in years. It only seems different because of the 20,000 to 25,000 other people who are also attending the event… proportionally, it seems like almost no one attending the “art walk” is there for the art. A lot of them are coming just because it’s fun. People come out to people-watch, and people come out to be seen. People come out to eat and drink and be merry. People come out to see what the local creators are creating. People come out for lots of different reasons; there are more reasons to come out on a First Friday than ever before, and it’s changed the atmosphere of the event.

Another factor is something that is affecting people regardless of their field; the economy is in a severe recession (or worse, we’ll see) and consumer spending is down across the board. Because of the problems in the larger economy, even though it shows signs of improvement, people still aren’t spending money like they used to. This includes art consumption. So, more people are attending the art walk who aren’t looking for art at all, and everyone in attendance is less likely to spend money, and it’s no wonder galleries aren’t doing so well these days. Aren’t doing as well as they used to, during First Fridays.

I’m not doing very well there, myself. Even at the start of the street closures, when I began selling my art at the art walk, I’d already reduced the prices on all my art. Last year I cut prices by another 40%, to try to increase sales… to try to make sales, at all. Sales didn’t go up. Aside from a couple of impulse purchases (and mini-paintings), most my sales are to people who have bought my art before, to people who aren’t swayed by price as much as by their love for a particular piece. I raised my prices back to my old “normal” range (circa 2003) at the end of last year and … sales are flat. Price inflexibility? The whole thing is bizarre. I began doing mini-paintings (8×10″ & smaller) specifically for the art walk, so I would have pieces I could price $10-$20 (pocket money) without resorting to the vulgarity of selling prints. Their sales are brisk compared to my larger pieces, and I still don’t cover the cost of showing there, most months… which means that no matter the cause (a shift in audience, the bad economy, I’m a crappy artist, whatever), it doesn’t make much sense to continue participating… financially.

But I’m not motivated by money, so why am I showing? Why am I participating? This is something I’ve begun asking myself lately, and I’m not sure I know the answer. I like the event. I liked what it was, years ago. I liked what it grew to be. I liked it enough to participate -as much as I was able to, within the law and within my budget- for the last two years. I like that Phoenix has a monthly cultural event that consistently draws tens of thousands of citizens of all walks to gather together downtown – apart from sports. I like that close to a hundred local creators who wouldn’t otherwise be able to show or sell their creations locally are given this opportunity to share their work with Phoenix, and I appreciate that  another forty or fifty local businesses, non-profits, and food vendors also find value in participating in the event every month – helping make it all financially possible. If I weren’t showing, I’d still be attending. But I’m showing. Why am I showing? Is it worth $50/month to me to just have my work visible to local crowds? Am I just paying a fee to be seen? Am I doing it because of some twisted belief in commercial participation, that one needs to have one’s life’s work translated into currency for validity? If so, I’ll almost certainly stop. Am I doing it because it’s important for me to do my part to support this event, this community, and to help maintain its grounding in the arts?

I think part of that is why I’ve been attending the Roosevelt Row Vendor Committee meetings every month I could since they began, and have tried to do my part to help in other ways, showing up when help was needed. I think that the idea of wanting to see this continue to succeed is why I agreed to take on a job I loathe to do, when others were unable to do it after literally a year. Not because I want to do it, not because I’m seeking reward or recognition, but because it seems as though if I don’t do it, it won’t be done.

I think this is part of why I’m writing this post at all; I support the existence of the event, and want to see it succeed -not just for street vendors, or for the public who comes out every month, but also for the galleries and the artists- and there are people attacking it. Every time I see their inflammatory statements, I feel called to defend it with reality. To explain what they aren’t seeing. To try to bring light to what they seem only to wish to destroy. Is it worth it? Is it worth my time and effort to go through point by point and refute Kim Moody’s email? To provide facts and logic to replace his speculations, accusations, and outright lies? I doubt it. It would be like Jon Stewart’s daily attempts to refute Glenn Beck (et al) with facts, logic, and common sense; Beck won’t change his tune, and the people who listen to him will only continue to believe & repeat the propaganda. It reminds me of an episode of South Park.

Personally, I may just need a break. I may just need to form a plan. Take some time off from showing and take a look as an interested viewer, instead. Go see what’s going on over on Grand for the first time in years. Maybe make it over to the Alwun House (and try to stay my hand from burning the place down to shut up its owners). Maybe see if I can’t come up with a reason to be participating in the art walk. Right now it’s merely … what I do.

• Lost and Not Found – eBook: 85 dl’s in Jan. (2 paid), 82 dl’s in Feb.
• Lost and Not Found – Podiobook: 2885 total/138 done in Jan., 1991 total/88 done in Feb.
• Dragons’ Truth – eBook: 103 dl’s in Jan., 92 dl’s in Feb.
• Dragons’ Truth – Podiobook: 1929 total/228 done in Jan., 1243 total/124 done in Feb.
• Forget What You Can’t Remember – eBook: 98 dl’s in Jan. (1 paid), 79 dl’s in Feb.
• Forget What You Can’t Remember – Podiobook: 5890 total/186 done in Jan., 4649 total/144 done in Feb.
• Untrue Tales… Book One – eBook: 94 dl’s in Jan., 93 dl’s in Feb. (1 paid)
• Untrue Tales… Book One – Podiobook: 4078 total/337 done in Jan., 3907 total/354 done in Feb.
• Untrue Tales… Book Two – eBook: 66 dl’s in Jan., 84 dl’s in Feb.
• Untrue Tales… Book Two – Podiobook: 4220 total/344 done in Jan., 4232 total/357 done in Feb.
• Untrue Tales… Book Three – eBook: 121 dl’s in Jan, 67 dl’s in Feb.
• Untrue Tales… Book Three – Podiobook: 3050 total/274 done in Jan., 1607 total/155 done in Feb.
• Cheating, Death – eBook*: 0 dl’s in Jan., 1 dl in Feb.
• Cheating, Death – Podiobook: 8853 total/687 done in Jan., 4758 total/358 done in Feb.
• More Lost Memories – full eBook*: 0 dl’s in Jan., 1 dl in Feb.
• More Lost Memories – individual story eBooks*: 1 dl in Jan., 4 dl’s in Feb.
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut – eBook*: 0 dl’s in Jan., 1 dl in Feb.

• Total eBook downloads: 568 in Jan., 504 in Feb.
• Total paid eBook downloads: 4 in Jan., 8 in Feb.
• Total Podiobooks downloads: 30,905 in Jan., 22,387 in Feb.
• Total Podiobooks “finished”: 2194 in Jan., 1991 in Feb.

Getting month-to-month stats for the Modern Evil Podcast is basically impossible at this point, but I from looking at the stats I do have, I can estimate that between 40 and 60 people are actively subscribed to the feed. Older episodes of the Modern Evil Podcast keep getting downloaded though, currently at a rate of roughly four times a week, each… which is a totally inaccurate way to state that, since it seems that what happens is that every once in a while someone finds the feed & downloads 50+ back-episodes, all at once. Anyway, there’s the download numbers for electronic versions. Now, here’s the numbers for paper versions, plus revenue figures for paper books, for art, and for eBooks: (Podiobooks donations are paid out quarterly, so YTD PB income is $0 AFAIK.)

• I had ZERO direct sales of books and art in January, and ZERO wholesale sales of paper books.
• eBooks sold in January: 4
• My cut from eBooks sales in Jan.: $7.70
• Total gross income for January: $7.70

• Mini-paintings sold in Feb.: 4
• Income from art in Feb.: $45
• Chapbooks sold in Feb.: 7
• Paperbacks sold in Feb.: 1 direct (W1kV2), 2 wholesale (C,D & UTFBF1-3), 1 sent to reviewer (FWYCR)
• Income from paper book sales in Feb: $32.63
• eBooks sold in Feb.: 8
• My cut from eBooks sales in Feb.: $9.73
• Total from book sales in Feb.: $42.36
• Total gross income for February: $87.36

Not great, but by not going to Tools of Change this year, I’m way, way ahead in terms of net income versus last year, even without sales in January. I’ll be at the Phoestival (read: Phoenix First Fridays Art Walk Block Party, on Roosevelt between Central and 7th Street from 6PM to 11PM) this week, and I’ll be showing/selling my art during Art Detour on Saturday outside Eye Lounge (5th St. & Roosevelt from 9AM to ~5PM), so hopefully I’ll be able to make some sales there.

eBook downloads are up again, after an off year in 2009. February wasn’t as good as January, but it was also 3 days shorter… though that doesn’t account for the actual level of dropoff in total downloads, or the opposite experience in sales. These numbers bring the total number of my podcast episodes downloaded (PB+MEPod, all time) to 264,615 (YTD: 53,292) with the total number of “final” episodes downloaded from Podiobooks.com (a more accurate number, I think) to 14,893 (YTD: 3,774), and the total number of eBook downloads from modernevil.com to 9,494 (YTD: 1,072). Total number of books sold (eBooks+paperbacks+chapbooks+giveaways) YTD is 23. One way to read that is to say that for each person who has downloaded a free copy of one of my books this year, less than one in two hundred of them decided to pay. And I think that’s more than enough numbers for now.

My website, wretchedcreature.com, is my gallery, I say. I do most of my sales online, I say, and a fair amount through the First Fridays Art Walk.

Then, about half the time, they want to talk about what other local artists I know, show with, and/or work with.

Sigh.

I don’t know this stuff. I don’t know how one gets one’s art into a gallery. I don’t know how an artist would select galleries they wished to show in; what are the criteria to judge it on? I don’t know how galleries decide what artists to show; what criteria are they judging artists on? On this latter count, I can make some guesses:

Past shows, prizes/grants/fellowships won, fine arts degrees held, notability/name-recognition, market value of work, and what other galleries are showing the work. To which, right now, I can answer: None, none, none, none, none, none*, and none. (*well, very low, compared to every price I’ve seen in an established gallery)

I’m aware that galleries expect to, like most retailers, pay the creator 50% of the list price for works sold. Same as books. Same reason I’m in no hurry to get my books sold through book stores. Same reason I don’t really try to drive sales even to Amazon.com. Please, buy from me in person or through modernevil.com or wretchedcreature.com. I’ll hand it directly to you, personally. If it’s a book, I’ll sign it to you. (The art’s already signed.) Theoretically, the benefit of having the art in the gallery is that then they’ll market it for you, I guess, since it’s in their self-interest to sell it so they can get their 50%. The more they sell, the more money they make. Theoretically they have a client list of people who they know buy art, who they can contact to try to sell my art. Theoretically they have open hours when someone can just walk in off the street and see my art, who wouldn’t have otherwise seen it. I’m just not sold on the concept.

Then again, I’m not sold on the concept of money, either. Which I can see, intellectually, is the point. Right now, with no galleries showing my work, few people see it, fewer buy it, and I don’t make a lot of sales – but when I do sell, I get the full sales price to cover my expenses (and maybe even make a profit). If I had my work in galleries, more people would see it, theoretically more people would buy it, and while the gallery would take 50% right off the top of every sale, the higher volume would (theoretically) end up giving me more money. Except if I were selling a higher volume of work, the overhead expenses would be equally higher, and profit would be more difficult to achieve. In fact, I’d be doing the same creative work for less money, and I would be less likely to have personal contact/relationships with the people buying my art.

That’s not taking into account that a gallery would almost certainly want me to raise my prices. On one hand, this would increase how much I was earning from each piece (perhaps even reaching into the realm of a reasonable hourly wage, even after expenses and the gallery’s 50% and the government’s chunk). On the other hand, it would price my work out of the realm of possibility of the people who have, historically, always been the fondest of my work – young people. I don’t know.

…

…my thoughts went off track there, and I wasn’t writing it, and I’m not going to write it all out, but it ended with “I wish I could just kill myself,” so you know this isn’t good…

…earlier tonight I was thinking of maybe looking into finding out what I’d have to do to get my art into galleries, but … This, I don’t need. In the last two weeks I’ve figured out how to get my family into a stable financial position; I’ll have to wait a couple of weeks to see exactly what the numbers come out to, but everything looks to be 150% better than the last year, which was certainly survivable. (And that’s without any pressure on me to make more than $1 this year.) I feel I’m in a good place with my writing, with 4+ books queued up to be written (books I like the idea of writing, which is important to me) this year and months before I run out of already-written stuff for the podcast. I’ve just started something that could lead to a whole series of interesting and thematically linked paintings – something I’ve never really done much of, in the past, but have wanted to try. You probably saw my new year / old decade post; I’m in a generally good place, doing what I want to be doing.

Things that lead to suicidal thoughts, I do not need. F_ck that. I don’t need it.

I may make a post about what happened in my mind in the “…” up there.  It’s not an unoriginal line of thought, and may be more the source of the problem than this galleries garbage, so it’s worth investigating.  But not right now.  Not tonight. And I know I didn’t touch on the issue of validation or prestige associated with being shown, partially because I was side-tracked by my own brain, and partially because I don’t much care about either. Another time, another train of thought, but not now. I don’t need this right now.

One of the thoughts was related to the apparent ‘new decade’ (no need to get into technical definitions and ‘counting starts at 1′ – my beliefs about time are far and away less specific, & more meaningful and orderly) and the question of what one was doing 10 years prior. On Twitter this was often read as 10 years ago to the minute; I suppose it was fun for people to think about a 10-year-old party on New Year’s Eve. But a lot can happen in ten years. A lot happened in mine. Ten years ago…  Ten years ago I’d already begun painting again, a bit, though I still hadn’t re-started my writing.  Ten years ago I’d just begun creating online comics for the first time. Ten years ago I was living in Tempe. Ten years ago I cut my hair off: New Year’s Eve 1999 I had hair so long I could sit on it, New Year’s Day 2000 I had “normal” short hair.  Ten years ago this month I was getting fired (technically I quit) from MicroAge for insubordination for calling out my boss’s incompetence in front of the other employees (he & I & his boss & HR all agreed he was incompetent and that I was right about everything except saying so where the other employees could hear), and later that day I was getting hired at Realink. It was nearly ten years ago that Sara said yes. (Did you know she said yes, once?)

Since then, I’ve painted quite a bit more and by early 2002 I’d got back to writing again, though by September 2004 I’d stopped creating new comics. (I suppose that lasted exactly 5 years, from September 1999 to September 2004.) I did fun things with my short hair, bleaching it, dying it fun colors (blue, green, pink, and purple – sometimes all at once & in my own designs), et cetera. In 2002 I worked my way back into college, to try to pursue a BFA in painting, then got laid off from Realink (My insubordination there was turning down promotions I didn’t want. Repeatedly.) and, the economy actually having been sh!t (for normal people) this entire decade, I couldn’t find another job. I wrote Forlorn, my first novel, that year, “before I turned 25.”

Then, I moved to Pine, AZ at the start of 2003 and lived with my grandparents – my grandmother needed near-full-time care after her stroke (and a lifetime of increasingly bad heart problems), my grandfather had been doing alright taking care of her, but then his cancer came out of remission and on chemo he couldn’t do that and maintain the property up there, so I went up to help out as much as I could. And to escape from the world. To go live in the mountains. To retire from corporate life and to become a full-time creative. I edited Forlorn into Lost and Not Found, I began selling my art and my hand-made natural-form furniture from the family shop I ran there, I began getting commissions for new paintings, I wrote Dragons’ Truth, and I developed a deeper appreciation for my family, building a relationship with my grandparents before I lost the chance. I grew out my hair and my beard; I did not trim them at all for several years (though I did eventually start shaving my upper lip).

In 2004 the economy was truly in a slump; I had to drastically lower the prices on my art to keep sales up, and by the summer of 2004 I had to move back to Phoenix and find work. I ended up working in a travel agency’s mail room for half the pay I’d been getting at Realink. At first I tried literally to kill myself, then stayed there nearly 4 years. I wrote the first three books of the Untrue Tales… series during those years. I painted more. I fell in love again. I had actual sex for the first time. Then had it turned around on me, not just ripped away but twisted into a horror, and I was thrown into a painful emotional tailspin that devastated me for years. I cut off my beard and began keeping my head shaved. I wrote two collections of poetry. I started my own, official, publishing company, Modern Evil Press. In October of 2006 I met Mandy and then courted her over the course of the next year -no need to get into the emotional, sexual, and spiritual difficulties that year entailed in a post like this- and on December 1st, 2007 Mandy and I were married.

In March of 2008 I left my corporate job (I was fired for insubordination when my boss insisted that it didn’t matter what was right, only that I do it as she’d decided, and I insisted -rather loudly and violently- that if that were the case I couldn’t work with her any more) to retire once again to the life of a full-time creative. My wife, who I love and who loves me very much, has been willing to accept the relatively meager lifestyle of a single-income family (see yesterday’s post on Numbers) in order to allow me to do what I love and am passionate about. And to keep me from having to deal with the life-threatening difficulties of attempting to hold down a corporate job.  (Which is to say, we are both well aware that I would probably make additional attempts on my own life if faced with doing a job I loathe, especially if for an incompetent, unreasonable boss.)

Since which time I’ve written another two novels, a collection of short stories, recorded and serialized seven audiobooks from my novels, painted quite a lot more, and learned a bit of bookkeeping, business, and tax rules. I’ve shown my art and my books at most of the Roosevelt Row block parties on the Phoenix First Friday Art Walks each month, and have been an active member of the event’s Vendor Committee. I’ve only occasionally been insubordinate to my boss (myself), usually by doing things like suggesting that I write what people want to read instead of simply writing what I want to write. Oh, and I’ve begun regularly attending a church, an activity I haven’t done since … well, since 1996 or 1997, I suppose. I’ve even begun to read more books, again, which had fallen off quite a bit since moving back to the city.

Which brings us back to the present, and to the ‘new year’ ahead. 2010. This is supposed to be the year the aliens collapse Jupiter into a star and jump-start the intelligence of life on Europa, right? If it happens, I won’t be surprised. No, this year I’m looking forward to more of the same. What same, you ask? Well, let’s look back: Fifteen through twenty years ago I was creative; writing and painting and storytelling. Ten years ago I was beginning to get back into being creative; painting, drawing & writing comics, and writing online (my online journal posts go back to March 2000 – those 1995 posts are transcribed from a paper journal I was forced to keep for a class). During the last ten years there’s been a recurring theme of getting “back into” art and writing, of retiring from workaday life to be a full-time creative, and of my incompatibility with keeping a job and putting up with corporate bullshit. So more of the same is: working on my art, writing new books, telling new stories, trying to figure out how to get more money out of my creations (or at the least to lose less money on the books), and trying not to have to go get a literally soul-crushing corporate job.

In 2010 I want to read at least a dozen books on [Hitler, Einstein, and the 1918 Spanish Flu], then to write that zombie novel I’ve got lodged in my brain. Then see if I want to research for and write the [70's|80's] zombie thriller/mystery that follows it. Then totally write the teen/zombie/religion book I’d meant to write last year, but couldn’t on account of I need to write those other two books (the 2 I just said I want to write) as research first. I’d like to see if I know how to finish the second book I began for NaNoWriMo 2009, another book with an author for the main character. I’d like to finish Time, emiT, and Time Again – which calls for at least a couple more skewed-time-based speculative fiction stories. I know that’s five books already, but I’d also like to write some new poetry, this year. Oh, and I worked out that I only have to write a quarter-million-words a year to maintain about a half hour of original podcast literature per week, every week…

In 2010 I want to read many, many other books. I have a huge backlist from the library already, and hundreds of books on my shelves that I bought, intending to read, and haven’t read yet. I’d like to review most of them, too. Reading is good for you, you know.

In 2010 I want to paint more, and better, than I have before. I’ve even penciled in the finishing of the correspondence art course I bought and began but never completed (especially since I can’t possibly afford to go back to school right now). In addition to potentially improving my technique, I’d like to begin to consider the idea of “intent” and of “purpose.” Right now I paint because I’m an artist, but I understand that other artists create art with other reasons in mind. Most of them seem to have something specific they intend to communicate with their art. This is, generally, not the case with my work. In 2010, I’d like at least to consider the idea of whether or not I’d like to try to mean something.

I keep thinking about wanting to try my hand at making comics again. I don’t know whether 2010 is the year for it. Wait and see, I suppose. At the least, I’d like to build a working site for my existing comics, and put all the archives of my old comics up online.

In 2010 I want to work on being a better Christian. To pray more. To read the Bible more. To seek God’s will more. To soften my hard heart and my stiff neck, if it is His will. I’d like to be a better husband to my wife, and a better role-model as a life-long-Christian to her as a pretty-new-Christian. I’d like to learn to be a better member of my church, of the community. This paragraph represents the hardest of what I’ve listed.

I’m sure there’s more, but this post has gone over 2k words, all told. Quite a ramble. But if the point wasn’t clear: I’m in a good place. I’m happy. Even though I’ve been pretty bad lately, even in this deep depression, I’m happy. (If that doesn’t make sense, ask me about it. It makes sense to me.) I’m doing what I want to be doing, what I’ve been working on doing for a long time, and even though it isn’t exactly financially successful, it’s been successful for me and my family in the ways that matter to us. I’m happily married, and my wife loves me more than I’ll probably ever be able to catch up to. My God loves me, and is faithful and just. My family gets along with one another, loves one another, and that is a real blessing.

The last ten years have had a lot of ups and downs, but they’ve been good and they’ve brought me to a good place. The next year will certainly have more ups and downs, but as I said, I’m glad to hope for more of the same.