This piece, titled ‘screwed’, is approximately 32×47″, and is acrylic (spray paint) and screws on/in plywood. I worked on this piece over the course of multiple years, carefully mapping out and then drilling thousands of tiny, careful holes in the wood, selecting lies GWB had publicly told the American people (and which I felt we all knew, by then, were blatant lies) and spray-painting them on in as twisted version of the American flag as GWB must stand by, then screwing, by hand, about 1600 tiny screws into the thing (without scratching the paint job, of course). Why is there no image of it on wretchedcreature.com? Well, I’m disappointed in it. The flag didn’t come out as well as I’d hoped, GWB’s face isn’t as clear as I’d hoped, and I didn’t finish it until 2006. I’d meant to have it done prior to GWB’s re-election, and when that failed (and my life changed), I set it aside for a long time. If you’re interested though, please, make me an offer.

This piece was one of the oldest I still have, circa 1998. The technique, the quality, even the theme and tone of the piece contribute to why it isn’t currently listed at wretchedcreature.com. It doesn’t fit in with the other work I have there. I think what I was trying to do was paint a black rainbow in the sun’s rays. As though, no matter how bright the things of this world may seem, none shines as bright, none is as pure, as the light and sacrifice of Jesus. I just don’t feel it was adequately communicated. My records indicate that this piece is titled ‘gothic inversion’ and that it is 18×24″, acrylic on canvas. If you’re interested, you can make an offer, but right now it’s hiding in the closet. It was taken down in the last round of “I don’t really want to see my old work, anymore”, years ago.

The piece at the right, incongruously titled ‘Spiraling Shape 4′ despite being the first painting I worked on after moving away from home in 1997 and the first of the “Spiraling Shape” series, is not listed at wretchedcreature.com primarily because I didn’t feel it conveyed anything emotional. When I was first putting the site together, it was important to me to stick to the stated theme, ‘emotional artwork from a troubled mind’, which fit better with, well, most everything else I paint. This piece is 20×16″, acrylic and yarn on canvas, and if you want it, take it – every time I walk by this one, I half-wonder why I didn’t hide it in the closet with ‘gothic inversion’. On the other hand, as you can see in a semi-recent post I made about it, it does help me see how far I’ve come.

There’s this thing. It’s called ‘reign’, it’s 16×20″ and acrylic on canvas, and it was also painted in 1998. You can probably see what I was going for, though the bad photograph really brings out all its weaknesses. (In normal lighting, it’s somewhat less painful to look at. The brush strokes are less obvious, for a start.) There’s a fair amount of math at play in this piece. The color scheme is even based loosely on a derivation of the digits of pi. I remember when I liked it. I think I’d like it better if I did it now, with another 13 years’ experience at play. If you think you’d like it, make me an offer.

I have several more from the same period, all these rainbows. ‘Rainbow Connection 2′, ‘Rainbow Connection 3′, and ‘Spiraling Shape 6′:
The first one, ‘Rainbow Connection 2′ is actually glow-in-the-dark; an alternating pattern of rainbow stripes curved in the opposite direction from the visible stripes actually glows, either in black light or after being in a brightly lit room. This never worked as well as I would have liked, though it did work. It was a complex and fascinating attempt to achieve something I’m not sure I’d dare, now. Some of the things about it I could achieve with more skill, others would probably take a fair amount of experimentation and frustration with the materials before I was satisfied. As it was, I just made the one attempt, and left it at that. It was my practice run, and effectively discouraged further experimentation.

The second one, ‘Rainbow Connection 3′, which I thought of (before painting it) as an object passing through a rainbow and bending it along the way or leaving a wake, inspired a lot of lewd comparisons over the years. The frustrations I had with this one also informed a lot of my work in the time since, and I feel I have significantly improved my ability to mix and blend colors smoothly since painting ‘Rainbow Connection 3′. The third one, also numbered after-the-fact, is ‘Spiraling Shape 6′ and is probably the third or fourth thing I tried to paint after moving out on my own. It is roughly based on the golden mean, both in color and in shape, though I feel my later work interpreting the same thing came to a better result. All three are 16×20″, acrylic on canvas, except ‘Spiraling Shape 6′ which also has yarn. These three I had to dig around a bit for, to be sure I actually still had them. I keep them out of sight.

I also keep ‘Untitled Triptych 2′ out of sight. This was done while I was experimenting with reverse painting, and with painting onto glass, then carefully transferring just the paint from the glass to a painted canvas, and integrating the reverse-painted image with the canvas-painted image. I’d show you what this eventually led to, one of my greatest works (a portrait of Tyler Durden), but it was the first painting I ever sold, which was then gifted to someone, which was then stolen/lost by their evil ex-. I didn’t start seriously photographing my art until a year or two after that sale, and didn’t try to track it down for a photo before it was lost. Anyway, this thing is a 16×20″, acrylic on canvas image created as an experiment about translucency in the work that led to that project. (Alright, alright, there might be a painting or two that utilized the technique later, which I do have photos of. Tyler was better.)

The above image is ‘Untitled Triptyh’, three 16×20″ canvases, painted with acrylic, showing some of my earliest work with color blending, and using pure color to tell a story. The color reproduction in this image (as in all the images in this post) is not particularly good. I took the photo with the best camera I had in 2003 or 2004. I had a better camera for a time, but currently my best camera is in my iPhone. sigh. Anyway, I’ve had a lot of interest in this over the years, but only ever for one or two thirds of it; most people don’t seem to like the leftmost canvas. bleh.

And the last of my older artwork, I have one more small piece I created while I was working toward the one I started the post with. This piece is titled ‘screw Moo’, it’s approximately 17×14″, and is acrylic (spray paint) and screws on/in screws and wood. I adapted my painting ‘Moo’ to test out my ideas for creating a design from screws in a piece of plywood. This one was only hundreds of drilled holes and hundreds of screws, although it has the added bonus of the step of spray-painting half the screws before screwing them in, then trying not to scratch the paint on the screws while screwing them into a piece of wood. It was much more successful than the bigger piece, I think. The lighting in this photo is terrible; the background is just solid, spray-painted black. As with all the others, if you think this piece would look great in your home, make me an offer. I’d love to have it find its way to a new home.

Now on to the unseen of the newer work. The image at left, shot with my iPhone, is the best I have of this piece, which is … uhh… well, it’s sculptural, really. It’s about 8x11x6″, acrylic and yarn on canvas, and it’s titled ‘too far, not far enough’. I was learning to crochet, making little crocheted sculptures, and I began thinking about how to combine the sculptural work I was doing in yarn with the two-dimensional work I was doing on canvas. So I crocheted this right into the canvas (after painting the 2D part in colors I chose to match the yarn, ahead of time) and the blobby bits actually extend right off the image into the room. I really like this one. Unlike most of the stuff in this post, which I was tired of looking at a long time ago, this one I still like, and the reason it isn’t on wretchedcreature.com is that I have no idea how to present it there. A straight-on photo (like every other piece on the site) doesn’t show you what it is. What I’d like to do is take a bunch of photos and make an interactive image a viewer could mouse around and see it from multiple angles. Part of the reason I never followed through and made more pieces like this was the difficulty (near-impossiblitiy) of displaying them properly on my website.

Here’s another one I’ve never yet figured out a sufficient way to photograph. This is a 40×30″ monster of a painting, acrylic and ink on canvas, and it’s somewhat darker than it appears in the image at right. Dark enough that the words all down the left-hand edge, in sharpie, are almost unnoticeable. They disappear into the darkness. This piece is titled ‘this is how I…’, and the word repeated over and over down the side is “feel”. The darkness, the colors, the contrast, the shiny reflection of light which sharpie ink does and the paint does not, it’s all important to the piece, and I haven’t encountered a camera and lighting setup, since painting it, which captures the image accurately. And it was too big to take with me to the Art Walks, without causing trouble. So it’s almost never been seen. If you’re in the Phoenix area and would like to come by and see it some time, you’re welcome to. If you want to just buy it without getting a good look at it, that’s welcome, too. It’s a very emotional piece. Here was another attempt to get a good shot of it:

Not sure either shot does it any justice. I feel almost as bad about photos of the following painting, though I’m also pretty sure there were failures in the painting process as well:

You might not be able to tell by looking at that image, but it says “sleep” … in a way. The ‘s’ of sleep is just the shape of a wave in the darker block of the image, and it’s only there in glossy medium on a matte background – visible to the naked eye, but difficult to photograph. the l is the border between light and dark, and like the remaining letters, is further differentiated by a line of glitter/iridescent medium. The remaining waves, capped with looping lowercase e’s, are also painted on in a layer of glossy medium on a matte paint background, and the p marks the end of the glossy area. There were a lot of mixed-media ideas wrapped up in this 24×48″ piece titled ‘water, bed’, even though really it’s just acrylic on canvas. This piece is, right now, the most likely candidate among all the pieces I’ve shown you in this post to be painted over first. A lot of the details came out great; I especially appreciate the edge of the canvas, which is painted a darker blue where the face is lighter, and a lighter blue where the face is darker. Others were not as I’d hoped. Not being able to show it is, perhaps, the worst. If you have any interest in this piece at all, let me know soon – I already have an idea for painting over it. (I also have a couple other blank canvases in this size, but … ugh. I stare at this thing every day, knowing no one else has seen it. Knowing it’ll probably never find another home. I’m sure that’s why my mind goes right to painting over it.)

So, in addition to the pieces you can find at wretchedcreature.com, these are a few others I’ve still got around and wouldn’t mind being parted with. No reasonable offer refused, and on those old 16×20″ pieces, $20 seems pretty reasonable, right now.

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 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.

Here are my total sales (all paperback, except where noted), with last year’s comparable sales (in italics, in parentheses):

• Lost and Not Found: 1 / $14 / (0 / $0)
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 0 / $0 / (1 / $10)
• Dragons’ Truth: 2 / $26 / (4 / $49)
• Dragons’ Truth MP3 CD: 0 / $0 / (1 / $13)
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: 1 / $14 / (5 / $70)
• More Lost Memories: 0 / $0 / (0 / $0)
• MLM/Pay Attention chapbook: 0 / $0 / (1 / $2)
• Cheating, Death: 7 / $70 / (6 (plus 2 given away) / $55)
• Cheating, Death eBook (collectable card): 1 / $7 / (N/A)
• Time, emiT, and Time Again: 3 / $42 / (N/A)
• Untrue Tales… Book One (OoP): 1 / $6 / (1 / $12)
• Untrue Tales… Book Two (OoP): 0 / $0 / (0 / $0)
• Untrue Tales… Book Three (OoP): 0 / $0 / (0 / $0)
• Untrue Tales… Books 1-2 (combined, OoP): 1 / $6 / (0 / $0)
• Untrue Tales… Books 1-3 (combined, OoP): 1 / $12 / (8 / $200)
• The First Untrue Trilogy: 6 / $144 / (N/A)
• The Second Untrue Trilogy: 3 / $70 / (N/A)
• Total Comicon book sales: 27 / $411 / (27 / $411)

…that… didn’t total out the way I expected it to. I apparently sold the exact same number of books for the same amount of money, compared to last year. Weird. Anyway, based on my rough estimate of the same thing, I did pre-pay for a small press table at the 2012 Phoenix Comicon, so I’ll be there again next year.

((For reference, ‘OoP’ is ‘Out of Print’ and is the out-of-print first editions of the Untrue Tales books, which I’d had printed along the way as I’d finished each book – and which, with the new editions of the complete series out, I want to get rid of. Thursday and Friday I tried “Name your own price” but found people don’t like to do that, so Saturday and Sunday I said “50% off” and sold a couple of them.))

In addition, I brought a couple of paintings with me to show at the con: The original artwork I created for the cover of Cheating, Death, and my latest, ‘RainbowAwesomeUnicornWow’. I bought an easel specifically to show these paintings at this con, and I suppose it worked out alright, because the unicorn painting (which I had at/above eye level throughout the con) certainly brought more visibility to my booth than I would otherwise have had, and before the convention was through, both paintings had sold, for $400 apiece. I’ve still got to deliver them (this week), and both buyers will be working out payment plans with me over the next few months, but they’re also repeat customers who are also friends I trust. I’m sure that part of what made up their minds about buying the art this weekend was that I was showing pieces they were interested in, and that other people were expressing interest in buying them. So… not technically sales I made / money I took in at con, but certainly sales which mightn’t have happened any time soon otherwise. I feel a bit bad about it; it hadn’t been trying to pressure those particular people into buying those pieces, I simply wanted to sell the art. I haven’t done any Art Walks or other shows in over a year, so wanted to take advantage of the opportunity. :/

On the other hand, if I add the art sales to the book sales total (using accrual method accounting, of course), my sales at this year’s con are nearly triple last years… even though they were actually, eerily flat. (Come to think of it, the only non-book I sold at last year’s con was a crocheted artwork, sold for $55, and this year I brought a single piece of crocheted artwork to decorate my table which I traded, at the last moment, for roughly the same value.) Eerily flat.

Of course, there are also expenses. The cost of the table, of gas to and from downtown every day (or, as others do, of renting a room downtown for the duration), the cost of parking (last year I was trying to use free street parking ~1mile away & ended up getting a ticket – this year I paid to park in a garage adjacent to the convention center & ended up paying much less), the cost of food while captive downtown for ten and twelve hour days, the cost of the new easel, a few display materials, hundreds of business cards, and (I never account properly for this) the value of my time. I’ve been coming out a bit ahead each year, though realistically -if I want to do any better- I’ve got to spend significantly more money. Buy bookmarks or postcards or the like to try to sell or simply give away. Buy big, full-color signage; at least with my company name, possibly with my book covers, et cetera. Pay for a full-size booth instead of a small press table. Worse, perhaps worst of all to me, and most-recommended to me by other creators and by fans/attendees alike, is to show/sell at more conventions. Leprecon, San Diego Comicon and Emerald City, Tuscon Festival of Books and TusCon, Saboten-Con (really?), CopperCon, and on and on… Each one a big up-front cost for a space, tied to the hope/dream that I’ll sell enough to earn it back, and most with travel expenses far, far beyond both booth costs and my best sales experiences, ever. Hotels, gasoline and/or flights & shipping, and the cost of eating out multiplied severalfold (I could eat breakfasts at home, this weekend, and make/pack lunches, which is difficult or impossible from a hotel room in a strange city) and I doubt I could make enough sales to break even with such expenses. Yes, it’s a problem of confidence. It’s also a problem backed up with data, as in: $400 in book sales doesn’t cover $1000+ in expenses for a non-local show. Heck, a standard 10′x10′ space at SDCC is listed at $2200 for 2011. (The Leprecon & TFoB web sites are so terrible I can’t quote prices for you here; I can’t find them.) If I were motivated by money, I’d likely either have some terrible plan to make conventions profitable or have given up on the whole thing by now…

Realistically, I wouldn’t be doing Phoenix Comicon, either, if my wife weren’t in love with the whole thing. It’s a lot of effort, it results in a tiny amount of profit and a huge amount of stress and a small number of new readers. (For comparison, I sold books this weekend to only 20 new readers and gave away roughly 200 business cards (most of which have probably already been thrown away) – while each of the 13 of my titles which are available as free eBooks and podcast audiobooks finds nearly 200 new readers a month, every month.) There are roughly 3 people I met and talked with this weekend who I expect will, upon reading the books they bought from me, turn into “true fans” of my work (though 2 of those are teenagers who I’m not sure qualify in the sense of a small number of “true fans” being sufficient to financially support an independent creator, yet) – and that’s great… but I wonder about how much time and effort and money ought to be invested in acquiring one more fan… and I really need to get some sleep.

I’ve just looked up and it’s after 2AM… and I’ve been running long, hard days at the comicon since I woke up early Thursday morning. I probably won’t get much more good thoughts out of my now-almost-painfully-tired brain until I’ve slept. Feel free to insert your input in the comments, or by email, or by calling/txt’ing me… Or by buying my books… or art… *sigh* Enough trying to sell. Hopefully for a long time.

I don’t like the parts of running a small business that are the business side of things. Accounting/bookkeeping, paperwork, taxes, marketing, even some aspects of customer service. All of which are things which increase in time investment & complexity, the more business I do. With the books side of the business, the side most likely to be able to create working advertising for, the amount of extra work that needs to be done for each book sold seems disproportionate with the amount of income earned, especially in relation to the same ratio re: art sales. But how do you sell my original artwork via a 2-line text ad? What search keywords are going to be coming from people who will like my art and will click on an ad? Books are somewhat easier, though I doubt the word “zombie” comes cheaply…

If I were selling enough paper books directly (I earn 2x to 6x more per book when I sell directly, rather than wholesale, so hitting any $ target is less copies/marketing/et cetera that way) to say with any seriousness that I was making as much or more than I could earn via a traditional publishing company & contract, the time and effort it would take to physically process & ship the orders would nearly be a full time job in itself, leaving little energy left for creation of new works. That is a scary thought. That is what I’m somewhat afraid of: that I’ll be doing so much business that I won’t have time to create.

So, yes, perhaps I’m doing this writing thing “all wrong” and I ought to have gone the “normal” route where I let a publisher take most of the revenue in exchange for doing all the business-side stuff I don’t like, giving up the ability to do the editorial, design, layout, cover design, and web site design aspects of the job that I do like along with them. Except that doesn’t really end up paying much better than what I’m doing now, for most authors, since they’re putting their own money into the publicity efforts I’ve mostly been avoiding… Out of the advances they’ll be lucky to ever earn out. Maybe.

Success, though… For me, it’s more about being able to create. To create what I want to create, when I want to create it. I semi-recently had a conversation with my wife about it, where she (effectively the sole income-earner in our household) questioned the very idea that I ought to be trying to earn any sort of living from my creations. Like, “where did you get that idea?” And I think she was right, and well in tune to what I actually believe & want than my own behaviors and projected beliefs represented.

We’re closer now to a financial situation where we don’t have to worry every month about how we’re going to afford groceries than we were last year, and I’m decreasingly thinking about how to turn my creations into a regular income. I have faith in my work. I believe in the act of creation.

I don’t believe in the value of money, business, the market, or marketing.

And yes, this post is a messy ramble. I wrote it on my iPhone while my iMac was occupied with actual work.

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.

To begin, a snapshot of right now. As of 1/1/2010, I have 13 titles in some form of publication or other. 5 standalone novels, 2 poetry journals, 2 short story collections, 3 books in the Untrue Tales… series and a single edition containing those 3 books. One of the novels (the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut) is currently only available as an eBook. One of the short story collections (Time, emiT, and Time Again) isn’t yet finished, but I’ve released one of the short stories that will be contained in it as a standalone chapbook.  The 3 individual Untrue Tales… books aren’t technically “in print”, though I have a few copies, printed by Cafepress & sans ISBN. I am not counting The Vintage Collection, though it is another book I’ve put together, had printed, and sold at one time. (I plan to edit and re-release it at a later date.) Seven of my books are available as podcast audiobooks, and all but the poetry is available as eBooks.

Now. What would you like first, sales numbers, or free download numbers?  Sales numbers you say? Alright, free downloads it is! Early in 2008 I began putting my books online as free PDFs & txt files, and in April of 2008 (shortly after I returned to life as a full-time creative) I put all my novels (Lost and Not Found, Dragons’ Truth, and Untrue Tales… Book One, Book Two, and Book Three) as free eBooks in 7 different formats (PDF, galley-style PDF, txt, rtf, html, mobi, & epub) on modernevil.com, and made them available for sale on Amazon’s kindle. Here are 2008‘s download numbers:

• Lost and Not Found – 1079 downloads, including 1 paid copy
• Dragons’ Truth – 961 downloads, including 3 paid copies
• Untrue Tales… Book 1 – 948 downloads, including 2 paid copies
• Untrue Tales… Book 2 – 964 downloads, including 1 paid copy
• Untrue Tales… Book 3 – 897 downloads, including 1 paid copy
• Total eBook downloads in 2008: 4849
• Total paid eBook downloads in 2008: 8
• Total direct revenue from eBooks in 2008: $22.71

Also in 2008, I began podcasting audio versions of my books. In June 2008 I released Dragons’ Truth all at once, and starting in September 2008 I began podcasting Lost and Not Found (finishing in December 2008). Tracking the # of people who have downloaded the podcast audiobooks is more tricky than eBooks, since each book is broken into many files. I’ve gathered data about how many people have downloaded the first episode of each book, as well as the number who have downloaded the last episode of each book. I figure counting downloads of the final episode is a fairly conservative estimate of downloads. Here are the numbers for all of 2008:

• Dragons’ Truth – 2334 downloads of first, 1271 downloads of last, $9.99 donated
• Lost and Not Found – 434 downloads of first, 80 downloads of last
• Total “finished” downloads of audiobooks in 2008: 1351
• Total direct income from podcast audiobooks (after Podiobooks’ cut) for 2008: $7.49

On 1/1/2009, I published two new books, Forget What You Can’t Remember and More Lost Memories. I began podcasting Forget What You Can’t Remember on the same day. It was complete by April, and I started Untrue Tales… Book One the next week. Book One was complete in June, Book Two ran from July to September, and Book Three ran from September to November. In September/October I wrote a new novel, Cheating, Death, publishing it as an eBook for sale while I was still writing it. Cheating, Death was in print by 10/31 and began podcasting on Friday, 11/13/09 (finishing 12/25/09). For the eBooks, I decided to treat Forget What You Can’t Remember like my other novels, and made it available as a free eBook in 9 formats (I added .lrf & .pdb) and for sale on Amazon’s kindle. Starting in January I also began putting my eBooks up for sale on Smashwords.com, beginning with Forget What You Can’t Remember. Then I decided to make More Lost Memories free only by direct request, and for sale (as a whole & with 7 of its 9 stories available individually for $0.99 each) on kindle and at Smashwords. When Cheating, Death came out, I put it up for sale and again said I’d give a free copy of the eBook to anyone who asked. (So far, only book bloggers have asked, and I sent quite a few of them free paper copies as well.) At the end of November I threw together the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut and put it up for sale as an eBook on the kindle and at Smashwords. Here are the numbers for all of 2009‘s eBook downloads, with for-pay-only titles in italics:

• Lost and Not Found – 506 downloads, 5 of them paid
• Dragons’ Truth – 609 downloads, 7 of them paid
• Forget What You Can’t Remember – 735 downloads, 13 of them paid
• Untrue Tales… Book One – 587 downloads, 4 of them paid
• Untrue Tales… Book Two – 562 downloads, 3 of them paid
• Untrue Tales… Book Three – 553 downloads, 1 of them paid
• Cheating, Death – 8 downloads
• More Lost Memories – 13 downloads, 7 of them the individual stories
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut – 0 downloads
• Total eBook downloads in 2009: 3573
• Total paid eBook downloads in 2009: 54
• Total direct revenue from eBooks in 2009: $65.17

And here are 2009‘s podcast/audiobook download numbers:

• Dragons’ Truth – 3231 downloads of first, 1616 downloads of last
• Lost and Not Found – 1523 downloads of first, 926 downloads of last
• Forget What You Can’t Remember – 2711 downloads of first, 1150 downloads of last
• Untrue Tales… Book One – 5006 downloads of first, 2865 downloads of last, $10 donated
• Untrue Tales… Book Two – 5173 downloads of first, 1843 downloads of last, $10 donated
• Untrue Tales… Book Three – 1890 downloads of first, 1002 downloads of last
• Cheating, Death – 1786 downloads of first, 366 downloads of last
• Total “finished” downloads of audiobooks in 2009: 9768
• Total direct income from podcast audiobooks (after Podiobooks’ cut) for 2009: $15

Of note, the 366 downloads of the final episode of Cheating, Death actually occurred in a period of 4 days (I put it on my feed on Christmas, but it wasn’t on Podiobooks.com until the 28th). Speaking of my feed… I don’t have nearly as good of statistics for the Modern Evil Podcast as I do for the Podiobooks.com versions of my books. PodPress gives me total downloads of each file I put in the feed, and tracks how many are dl’d via the feed, direct from the site, and played through the flash-based player embedded in each post, but unless I’d been copying them out at the end of each month/year… I don’t know any way to get good breakdowns. Not to mention the number of downloads of each episode of MEPod vary wildly from one to the next. I’ve been putting all my novels into the feed, as well as quite a bit of poetry and some short fiction. Yet even when I put an entire novel up, one chapter after another uninterrupted, the numbers don’t make sense; most of my novels show more people downloaded the final chapter/episode than any other in the book. There are patterns like … the first few and last couple chapters of each book get downloaded several times more times than the others, even in the “feed” – which would mean someone (a lot of someones, actually – hundreds in some cases) had subscribed to the podcast & then selectively downloaded only a few parts of each book.

As far as numbers go, the Modern Evil Podcast seems to run at around …. 30 regular subscribers (ie: consistent & immediate feed downloads) but individual episodes tend to get downloaded… around one to two hundred times each… over time. With wild variations, as stated. Overall I might estimate that the Modern Evil Podcast has contributed an additional … perhaps 1000 finished podcast audiobook downloads to my total… including both 2008 & 2009 numbers together, since PodPress doesn’t break them out. But enough of the free download counts, let us move on to the money:

Beginning, again, with 2008, when I had 2 standalone novels, 2 poetry collections, and the 3 Untrue Tales… books plus the collected edition, for all of 2008 I sold:

• Lost and Not Found – 10 paperbacks by hand, 1 eBook: 11 copies for $143.11
• Dragons’ Truth – 3 paperbacks by hand, 3 eBooks, 1 giveaway: 7 copies for $47.74
• Untrue Tales Books 1-3 combined – 2 paperbacks by hand: 2 copies for $49.99
• Untrue Tales… Book One – 2 paperbacks by hand, 2 eBooks, 1 giveaway: 5 copies for $27.40
• Untrue Tales… Book Two – 1 paperback by hand, 1 eBook: 2 copies for $14.70
• Untrue Tales… Book Three – 1 eBook: 1 copy for $2.70
• Worth 1k — Volume 1 – 1 paperback by hand: 1 copy for $9.99
• Worth 1k — Volume 2 – 2 paperbacks by hand: 2 copies for $19.99
• Total copies sold of all titles: 31
• Total income from book sales in 2008: $315.62
• Paintings sold in 2008: 13 paintings & 5 mini-paintings: 18 original works of art for $1384
• Total from sales of books + art combined in 2008: $1699.62

In 2009 I added 2 novels, a short story collection, and some chapbooks; for all of 2009 I sold:

• Lost and Not Found – 4 paperbacks by hand, 3 paperbacks wholesale, 2 eBooks, 3 giveaways: 12 copies for $72.43
• Dragons’ Truth – 1 paperback by hand, 1 audiobook on CD by hand, 4 eBooks, 4 giveaways: 10 copies for $42.60
• Forget What You Can’t Remember – 9 paperbacks by hand, 8 paperbacks wholesale, 9 eBooks, 18 giveaways: 44 copies for $153.98
• Untrue Tales Books 1-3 combines – 0 copies for $0
• Untrue Tales… Book One – 4 eBooks: 4 copies for $5.86
• Untrue Tales… Book Two – 3 eBooks: 3 copies for 3.23
• Untrue Tales… Book Three – 1 eBook: 1 copy for $0.53
• Cheating, Death – 6 paperbacks by hand, 6 paperbacks wholesale, 4 eBooks, 15 giveaways: 31 copies for $83.40
• More Lost Memories (full) – 8 paperbacks by hand, 5 paperbacks wholesale, 3 eBooks, 8 giveaways: 24 copies for $110.82
• More Lost Memories (individual stories) – 5 chapbooks by hand, 6 eBooks: 11 copies for $12.54
• Time, emiT, and Time Again (individual stories) – 4 chapbooks by hand: 4 copies for $8.00
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut – 0 copies for $0
• Worth 1k — Volume 1 – 1 paperback by hand: 1 copy for $10.00
• Worth 1k — Volume 2 – 0 copies for $0
• Total copies sold of all titles in 2009: 145
• Total income from book sales in 2009: $503.39
• Paintings sold in 2009: 10 paintings & 19 mini-paintings: 29 original works of art for $1074
• Total from sales of books + art combined in 2009: $1577.39

Not very much, is it?  I also sold a few hand-screen-printed T-Shirts in 2009… but… yeah. So, a few notes: This summer for almost 3 months I reduced the prices of all my eBooks below $2 retail, to see whether volume would increase. Volume of sales did NOT increase. But that’s why, for example, I only earned $0.53 from Untrue Tales… Book Three in 2009; I earned 35% of $1.50. Also, I’ve included giveaway copies here because they’re copies that should have earned money.  I actually have another set of figures that examines the profitability of each individual title (mostly not, so far), but I’ve already put too many numbers into this post. Suffice it to say that for my in-print titles it costs me $200-$375 to get a book set up & to make an initial order of paperback copies (not counting the value of my time at all) and my highest-grossing book to date (Lost and Not Found) has only earned $218.36.  That examination is for another post, at another time.

In fact, I think I’ll save any thoughts/conclusions/analyses of these numbers for a possible future post, as well.  For right now, this is it.

So I took some time on Monday and put together a quick “Director’s Cut” that had all the love story and fantasy adventure that had ended up being the last third of Lost and Not Found, cut out the few scenes that had connected it further to the confusing-and-irrelevant characters-who-get-found-and-forgotten, and re-attached the part of the story that goes to Skythia (released earlier this year as a short story in More Lost Memories). I wrote a few words about why I was creating the Director’s Cut, put them up on modernevil.com. I wrote a quick marketing summary so I could put the book up for sale as an eBook on Smashwords. Whoosh, from frustration at people misunderstanding my book to publishing a version of the book that those frustrated people would hate outright, in the space of an afternoon.

Yesterday I sketched for a while & then painted an image for the cover.  I’ve been thinking about doing this with other books (have you seen the covers of More Lost Memories and Cheating, Death?) and I’ve finally decided to do it with the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: I’ve put the painting I did for the cover art up for sale at a price that will allow me to fund a paperback release of the book. If you buy the art, I’ll make the book available on paper. ((Alternatively, if I can get, say, 25 people to pre-order a paper copy, I’ll make the book available on paper.)) Otherwise, it’s going to remain available only in formats that cost me nothing to make available: eBook (and probably audiobook, later this year, especially since I’ve already recorded most of it).

I’m thinking of trying this with some of my future books:  Release them as an eBook and if 1) enough eBook copies sell or 2) the original painting for the cover sells or 3) enough people are willing to pre-order then I’ll put out a print edition.  Because realistically, right now, I’m not even breaking even on the publishing costs.  I sell too-few copies.  I’m not saying this is permanent/final, especially since I sell a lot more paper copies by hand (and make more money per copy) than I sell eBooks, but I figure it’s worth a try.  It’s my publishing company, I can do what I want, right?  The only rules to follow are my own.

So, here’s the brief marketing summary I wrote for Smashwords:

A non-traditional story; no real conflict, no struggle, no antagonist, and -some would say- no plot. A love story of fantastic proportions, of two people who realize that the less-than-comfortable normalcy they’d felt responsible to is the only thing keeping them from achieving true bliss. With a faerie, titans, a two-headed monster, a flying city, amazing museums, unusual time mechanics, & more.

And here’s the page-or-so I wrote “About the Director’s Cut”:

Lost and Not Found was the first look at the storybook universe expanded upon in Forget What You Can’t Remember, More Lost Memories, and Cheating, Death. This “Director’s Cut” of Lost and Not Found comes closer to my original intent, and to the original first draft of my 2002 NaNoWriMo novel, originally released in limited edition under the title Forlorn. Forlorn was written in the final 8 days of November, after a similar ordeal to the fictional one presented in Lost and Not Found.

In response to the criticism and feedback from a very vocal and adamant subset of the people who read Forlorn, and based on advise about what “all” fiction “needs” I spent the following year trying to find ways to give the story I’d written in Forlorn things like conflict, character arcs, and a three-act structure. I ended up cutting Skythia out completely, and writing a significant amount about the writer’s life and the journey toward the heart of the story, which I’ve always believed starts with the word ‘Forlorn.’

I released the First Edition of that expanded, “fixed” book as Lost and Not Found in 2004, and I’ve been receiving two kinds of feedback from readers in the five years since then: One group of people liked the book right up until the word ‘Forlorn.’ This group thinks the rest of the book is a “wrong turn”, and they were disappointed by it. The other group of people typically don’t even remember what happened in the book before the word ‘Forlorn.’ They understood the heart of the story to be the same thing I did, and they loved it.

This “Director’s Cut” of Lost and Not Found is bound to divide readers in the same way, though I expect to a more significant extreme. The people who would have been disappointed by the end of Lost and Not Found will be disappointed by this entire book. The people who would have loved the end of Lost and Not Found will probably love this entire book. And I, increasingly emboldened to do what I want to do with my books and with my publishing company, love the idea of releasing a Director’s Cut of the book, one that I prefer and that I think my true audience will prefer.

The fact that people didn’t have (or lied about not having) $2 to buy a short story isn’t what struck me the most about the experience that night. Instead it was this: People assumed they were free.

Now, I could have used a color and/or cardstock cover to clarify that they weren’t simply photocopied brochures or flyers, though I suspect there may still have been some people who assumed they were free. A lot of people picked the mini-books up, looked them over, and managed to ignore the price marked on it in 70pt type. Over and over again. They grabbed, they looked, we discussed what it was, and they moved to walk off without even considering that a product at a vendor booth might have a price.

I thought this was bad enough, then when the crowd had thickened a bit later in the evening, it got worse. People started grabbing the mini-books and moving to walk off with them without so much as slowing down or asking what it was they were grabbing. Upon final inventory Saturday morning I confirmed that I’d caught everyone who’d tried to walk off with an unpaid copy, but the experience further illuminated some problems with perception I’ve been having pretty consistently with my business.

Another aspect of the problem that also manifested itself last Friday at the Art Walk comes across in the oft-voiced assumption that the art I’m showing is prints (as opposed to the handmade originals they all actually are). I’d thought this might be related to my relatively-affordable prices, so this month I didn’t post any prices. More people than ever asked whether my art was prints before (or without) asking about pricing.  I know that some of the other artists at the art walk offer both prints and originals, and that some even offer prints exclusively.  I just wonder what is driving this assumption about my work.

In thinking about this problem, it occurred to me that it might have something to do with the precise nature of my recent work, and of how carefully I’ve worked to produce clean, crisp, bold intersections and interactions of color fields.  That some of my recent work is so well-crafted that it appears to have been created in (or cleaned up in) a computer and then printed out.  That the sharp edges I create with my hand-carved tape-stencils are clearly not created with manual brush strokes.  I really don’t know what it is, I can only guess, and these are what I’ve come up with in the last few days.

The other possibility is that people are projecting on to the work what they want from it.  That they don’t believe they can afford original artwork, so project the idea that the art they want is available as an affordable print.  That they can’t afford a couple of bucks for a chapbook, so they project the idea that they’re free.

Other perception problems I’ve had potential customers express: People who have been to my websites (modernevil.com, wretchedcreature.com) and who honestly are not aware that they can buy my books and/or art online (or in some cases, that they’re available for sale at all).  People who have my business card (and/or are looking at one of my websites) and don’t know my address, phone number, or email address to contact me.  (Literally: My name, address, phone number, and email address are on every single page of both of my business sites.)  People who have purchased an handmade original piece of art from me, given it away to someone else, and come back to buy another copy of the same thing for themselves – sincerely believing that what they bought was a mass-produced (or at least multiply produced) item.

I don’t know what to do about these perception problems. Putting “all artwork original” on a sign at my Art Walk booth and on wretchedcreature.com doesn’t seem to have helped to communicate that I’m not merely selling prints.  Offering prints isn’t the answer, either.  Not only do I not like the idea of it, preferring each piece to be handmade and unique, but I’ve also looked into it and found the costs to be prohibitive.  I’d have to at least double the prices on all my art, probably up to double the normal prices (ie: quadruple or more the current prices), or some of the prints would actually be more expensive -just to print- than the prices I’m asking for the originals.  I’ve been thinking of changing my prices, but downward, not upward.  I want my art to be selling briskly more than I want individual pieces to be gaining value.

Feel free to chime in with your own thoughts on these quirks of perception; I mostly just don’t understand them.  Book pricing, perception of value of the printed word, perception of value of chapbooks, these  are a separate discussion I’d meant to get to earlier today, but haven’t yet made time to.  Perhaps tomorrow.  I thought I needed a nap 5 hours ago; by now I need a full night’s sleep.  Good night.

Angel’s Serenity Art Fair
Saturday September 12, 2009, 10:00am – 4:00pm
4839 East Greenway Road (look for Safeway)
Scottsdale AZ, 85254

Please join us!

In addition to myself and other artists, there will be activities for the kids, a free workshop in the back room and a free raffle. The setting is much more relaxed and family friendly than my normal First Friday Art Walk, so you really have a chance to take your time to see everyone’s art, speak to myself (and the other artists) about the art, the books, and more. A few more details:

Free Workshop
Lisa will be providing a free workshop on interpreting your Angel Cards. You’ll find her in Angel’s Serenity’s Backroom from 3:00-3:30pm

Raffles
Stop into Angel’s Serenity and enter to win a Tie Die T-shirt.

Artists
Our artists will include Authors, Painters, Jewelry, Crafts and more!

Activities
There will also have free activity table for the kids including Creating Peace Flags.

Join us!
So, come one out with the whole family and enjoy a day of art, activity and just plain fun!
We hope to see you there!

Thanks!

But you want to see the shirts, yes?  Just follow these links (really, you could just follow one of them, and then use the navigation on that site from there – no need to come back here):

• ‘THIS SIDE UP’ – T-Shirt
• ‘PLEASE USE OTHER DOOR’ – T-Shirt
• ‘SEX&LOVE’ – T-Shirt

I’ll also have all these shirts available with me in a variety of sizes at the Phoenix First Friday Art Walk, every month, and I also accept credit cards in person.  (Though I prefer cash.)

Details for those afraid of Swine Flu (or not in the Phoenix area):
Browse my books at modernevil.com and my art at wretchedcreature.com.  Email me at teel@modernevil.com and mention the “Swine Flu Sale” along with whatever books and/or art you want to order, and I’ll take 20% off the full price of your order (before any sales tax & shipping costs, if applicable).  Offer not available via the shopping cart on modernevil.com – I’ll have to manually invoice you to give you this discount.

Details for brave Phoenix residents:
Come out to the Phoenix First Friday Art Walk May 1st – you can find me among the vendors in the street closure one block South of Roosevelt between 4th & 6th Streets, usually just south of the corner of 5th & Garfield.  Mention the “Swine Flu Sale” and receive 20% off your entire purchase.  Plus, by showing up in person there’s no possibility of shipping cost, and I won’t charge you sales tax if you pay cash.

The sale lasts as long as the WHO Pandemic Alert Level for Swine Flu is Phase 5 or Phase 6.  I’m still happy to deliver purchases to people in the Phoenix area free of charge, myself.  If I think of anything else, I’ll edit this post later.  Stay healthy, everyone!

Finish painting ‘going in circles‘

Maybe try finishing the two or three mini-paintings I have half-done

Sign & put wire &c. on all finished paintings

Mark T-shirts somehow with size

Take book reviews less personally, somehow

Print price cards for new art & shirts

Load the car; try to be ready to go by 3:30PM

Paintings I need to photograph &/or put online, painted since the last time I posted anything new to wretchedcreature.com:

• ‘lost memories’, Dec08, 12×24″, acrylic on canvas, NFS
• ‘Untitled’ (collaborative/2009), Jan09, 16×20″, acrylic on canvas, $60
• ‘interrupted flow’ (triptych), Apr09, ~58×20″, acrylic on canvas, $220
• ‘going in circles’, Apr09, 30×24″, acrylic on canvas, $166

Also photograph & put online these new Mini-Paintings:

• ‘scowl’, Jan09, 4×4″, $10
• ‘G is for Grass’, Jan09, 4×4″, $10
• ‘Never Enough’-or- ‘good’, Feb09, 8×10″, SOLD
• ‘purple tree’, Mar09, 10×8″, $20
• ‘fluidity’, Mar09, 10×8″, $20
• ‘spiral compass’, Mar09, 4×4″, $10
• ‘darkness, growth’, Mar09, 4×4″, $10
• ‘love rainbow’, Mar09, 5×7″, $15
• blue w/filagree (untitled), Mar09, 5×7″, $15
• purple spirals, blue edge w/red grass (untitled), Mar09, 4×4″, $10

Wonder why I don’t seem to have painted any full size paintings in Feb/Mar

Oh, and sleep. Between now and then, I should sleep.

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.

I’ve been staring at this deep, deep, dark violet (8×10″) canvas I painted for a couple of months.  Then, last night, I knew what to paint and here it is:

Then I started on a few others – a red 5×7″, a brown 4×4″, and another 4×4″ which I started by painting the face of solid black (I’ve since painted the edges forest green), and then there’s the 8×10″ off-green thing I’ve been looking at as long as that purple one.

And then I went to bed.  Today I put another coat of red on the red one and then painted this on the green 8×10″:

I like painting the foreground as background, and painting the background over it.  It’s like a study in negative space, and I like the effect.

Update 1:

This is what I did with the brown 4×4″ painting:

I tried to show part of the edge, here – these 4×4″ canvases have a 1.25″ depth, so I enjoy doing interesting things that play beyond the front face.  here I just did simple extended purple corners, showing how the implied diamond just keeps on keepin’ on.