less than this » wretchedcreature

Success vs. Business

Teel — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:08:40 +0000

Sometimes I look at the things I’m avoiding, like using any of the increasingly-large offers for free AdWords advertising I keep receiving, and wonder whether I’m afraid of success. Literally, I do not advertise my books or art through any traditional means. I don’t think it’s because I’m afraid of success. I think it may be because I’m afraid of business.

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.

thinking about galleries

Teel — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:46:29 +0000

It’s always come up, from time to time, but I’ve been noticing it more in the last few months, that people want to know what galleries I’m showing at. Years ago, it was uncommon – I would tell people I was an artist, and they would ask about the art: “What style of art do you do?” … “What medium do you work in?” … “What is your art about?” … that sort of thing (which I almost never had a good answer for, either) but now when I tell people I’m an artist, a larger and larger share have a first question of “What galleries do you show at?” I’ve even begun to get it at the Phoenix First Fridays Art Walk, where I am a street vendor. People see me standing in front of my art, hear me talking about my art, watch me trying to sell my art, and ask what galleries they can see it in. If my work was in a gallery, don’t you think I’d be there, rather than standing in the road, competing with myself?

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.

Numbers for 2009 (and 2008)

Teel — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:23:04 +0000

I’ve spent the last few days gathering numbers and putting them into a spreadsheet. Now I’m going to take a few of them and try to communicate them to you here. The numbers come from several places, representing podcast downloads, eBook downloads, and sales of books and of art. Since I didn’t make a post about it for 2008′s numbers, I’ll probably include some of them as well, for comparison. I’ll try not to turn this post into a spreadsheet, just numbers, but will try to make it more like my usual rambles.

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.

“new” book: Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut

Teel — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 02:37:45 +0000

I’m becoming more free, more liberated in how I think about and how I operate my publishing company. So Monday morning when I saw yet another review of Lost and Not Found which seemed to have misunderstood the entire point of the book and to have interpreted the heart of the book to be a mis-step and an incoherent disappointment… I realized that instead of just thinking about releasing an alternate edition of the book, it was fully within my power to actually release 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.

Problems of Perception

Teel — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 05:27:48 +0000

At the latest Art Walk, for the first time, I had some chapbooks/mini-books to sell at a lower price point than I normally have product at. I had two different, complete, individual short stories put together as 32pp & 44pp mini-books. I printed up 50 copies of each, signed & numbered them, and set the price at $2 apiece. The primary motivating factor here was to try to make sales to all the people who implied they wanted to buy one of my books but that they didn’t have the $13 or $14 required or a credit card (I totally take credit cards). I thought, perhaps incorrectly, that some of those people would have at least a couple dollars with them. I only moved 5 mini-books at the Art Walk.

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.

Art Fair in N. PHX, 9/12/2009

Teel — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:45:57 +0000

I’m showing my art & my books this Saturday (tomorrow!) at:

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!

T-Shirts, now online

Teel — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:53:09 +0000

I need to re-take those photos… well, probably get some photos of the shirts being worn/modeled by people, really… but I’ve finally got the T-Shirts I’ve been screen printing listed on wretchedcreature.com. I’ve decided that, for now, Etsy is not for me. They only integrate with Paypal for payments, right now. Paypal has stolen hundreds of dollars from me in the past, and attempted to steal more than that, again, and if I have the choice to avoid doing business with them, and with eBay -their parent company- I do. (I still refuse to sign up for Skype.) Instead, I use Google Checkout for sales of my books on modernevil.com. It’s now also integrated into wretchedcreature.com – at least for the shirts. After spending some time at the post office & on USPS.com, I’ve decided that I’m not going to overcomplicate my shipping fees – $3 per item is close enough to what most of my products cost to ship domestically, and too low, if anything, rather than too high.

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):

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.)

Swine Flu Sale – Pandemic Prices!

Teel — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:09:51 +0000

In light of the WHO raising the Pandemic Alert Level to Phase 5 (on a scale where Phase 6 is a “Global Pandemic” characterized by “widespread human infection”), I’m starting a Swine Flu Sale – Save 20% off any purchase. This is a special offer for 1) People who read my blog or follow me on Twitter 2) People willing to ignore WHO’s recommendations to stay away from large congregations of people in public places.

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!

list of things i ought to try to get done before tomorrow’s art walk

Teel — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 08:44:09 +0000

Updated, 2:52PM, completed items crossed out: (Think I can get the car loaded in half an hour?)

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.

Productivity, Profitability

Teel — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:23:48 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Working on art, 3/6/9

Teel — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:25:44 +0000

Okay, a few quick shots, because twitpic isn’t working. I may add to this after the initial posting. Depends on how busy I am between now and when I leave for tonight’s Art Walk.

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.

working out an idea

Teel — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:07:35 +0000

I’m working on an idea. I’ve mentioned it before, and I’ve worked through a couple of iterations, since. The idea has evolved significantly, as I’ve worked, and thought, considering the meaning and the purpose of such a project. And the meaning of my life, and of my work, in general. I like the direction it’s taking. Don’t know how capable I’ll be of either selling it, or of marketing it -each of which holds unique challenges- but I’m going to keep working on it anyway.

I’ve been vaguely considering designing a custom deck of cards, akin to tarot cards, for many years. I’ve never really wanted to simply design a tarot deck, as so many others have done before me, simply putting my own artwork on the traditional 72 cards. This has something to do with my understanding about about divination works, and what part cards tend to play in it (not to mention the other roles such cards tend to end up playing on the side). I’ve wanted to not just create artwork for an existing system of divination, but to create a new system from scratch. A wholly original deck.

Of course, I’m aware that Leviticus 19:26 makes it clear that God would prefer if I didn’t practice divination at all. The context that Isaiah 2:6 gives divination is as a “superstition from the East.” I’d effectively given up the practice a few years ago, after a brief, intense period of giving in to the temptation, but it’s been on my mind again, lately. Not in the context of wanting to do readings or divine knowledge/wisdom/future, but in wanting to design the cards, and to publish a book explaining them. So I started designing. I want through a couple of interesting ideas, did dozens of sketches, and decided to go a different direction.

I’ve been working on steering my creativity in a direction toward more Christian writing. Not entirely effectively, yet, but I’ve been trying to at the very least avoid going further in the direction of the sex, violence, and apparent lack of morality that the Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction was pointing me in (though that changes character in the final books). I have a partially completed book that literally explores the concept of the unforgivable sin mentioned by Jesus – with violence, sex, action, and all sorts of other apparent sins (and exploration of the meaning of ‘sin’) along the way. I would like to write several explorations of the complex, interesting, and challenging things I have found in scripture and in my own Christian walk. But first, I think I’ll start with something unconventional:

I’m designing a deck of Christian cards, and writing a book to explain them. As I conceive it now, I expect the book to have three pain parts: One part, the expected breakdown, card by card, of how to read the cards for divination – what this one means, what it means ‘reversed’, how to lay the cards out and to interpret them. One part, a theological and biblical exploration of divination, ‘Eastern superstition’, and related new age beliefs as a temptation for modern Christians, especially as for new Christians who prior to being born again practiced such things. One part, an alternative breakdown, card by card, that uses the deck of cards as a sort of flash cards for learning about Jesus, Christianity, and the early church.

Part of the idea (which will certainly be included in the book) is that most things of this world are neither inherently good or evil, but it is our individual choices, day by day and moment by moment, that we do right or wrong. That we imbue the things of this world with the good or the evil that we do with them. A deck of cards -the ones I am designing, or any deck of tarot cards- is not evil. It is not a tool of the devil, in and of itself. It can be used to do evil, but the cards themselves are not evil. If I do a good job designing them, if I write a clear and well-organized book, both of which I believe can only happen through him who gives me strength, then my cards will be able to do good by those who choose to use them for good, and to likewise allow those who choose to do so to use them for divination. A tool. A choice.

The production, distribution, and sale of the book is easy for me, right now. I’ve got 10 books in print already, and adding one only takes a couple of weeks, once it’s written. The production, distribution, and sale of the cards -especially as part of a bundled item with the book- looks challenging. There are several options for getting the cards printed. I could pay for a huge offset run, warehouse them somehow… There are a couple of companies that will do short-run decks of cards (hundreds instead of thousands or tens of thousands of decks). I found one place that will do “print on demand” of custom cards, but not like POD book printers do -they aren’t doing wholesaling, retailing, distribution, and won’t do one-offs- but they’ll print as few as 10 decks at a time, and they’ll print (but not assemble) deck boxes, too. And I found a place that sells microperforated playing card paper, so I can print a test deck or two on my own printer. So I’ll probably go with that last one at first, get the cards how I want them. Then go to the POD printer and get a small order (they have a price break at 50 decks) & have a matching print run at Lightning Source (who also has a price break at 50 copies of a book). Then try to get them carried by Christian and new age stores, I guess.

I’m considering some options like: Putting the book out with a high cover price & one page being a coupon you mail in for a free deck of cards. Doing all the distribution myself, so I can bundle them manually, and don’t have to worry about people who buy the book through other channels & don’t get the cards. Writing the book in such a way that it stands alone, without the cards, but tells you how you can order the cards, and using the same distribution setup I have for my other books. And… uhh… do you have any other ideas? I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

The current plan is to do the research (ie: read the bible, concordances, and other bible resources) so I can write 2-4 pages (minimum) for each of the cards (at least 1 page for each of the two parts that break down each card), and to paint an individual painting for each card’s art. I’m hoping to do each painting 8×10″ or less, so I can do a high resolution scan with equipment I already own, do additional work in Photoshop as necessary, but then to have an original painting for sale that corresponds to every card. To make packaging & distribution easier (and because it fell together in the designing of the deck), I’m doing a 52-card deck, currently as follows:

5 ‘Major’ cards: God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, Death, & Devil
14 Apostles cards: 1 per apostle, including both Judas & Matthias and Paul
11 Miracles cards, each featuring one of Jesus’ miracles
11 Ministry cards, each featuring one group of people to whom Jesus ministered
11 Message cards, each featuring one basic, foundational, repeated part of Jesus’ message

I think the hard cards will be the Apostle cards. I need to do the research, but I’m pretty sure there are a few of the apostles there isn’t two pages’ worth of information about in the bible. Hopefully I’m mistaken. Either way, I’ll have to figure out how to represent each of them visually – I plan to research how they’ve each been traditionally and historically depicted in the last two millennia. Still, they effectively represent 14 paintings of “a man,” which, if you’ve seen my art, you know hasn’t exactly been something I’ve been perfecting. So probably 14 abstracted expressions of what each man represented or something they did or … inspired by whatever was used to depict them historically. Your suggestions are, again, welcome.

I have a list, a flexible, mutable list, of what I expect the 52 cards to be. I’m thinking of creating 52 blog posts -perhaps in a separate instance of WP, or perhaps merely in their own category- one for each card, where I can write out my explorations of the concepts. I’ll have to think about that, too. What do you think would work best? Are you interested? What would hold your interest? What would annoy you about blogging it?

Up late again. Didn’t do any audio work today (now I’m not actually “ahead” of the podcast, anymore – a lot of recording done, but no finished episodes ready to go from here on out), but absolutely have to do some tomorrow. Who wants to try to get me up in the morning? Say, around 8? sigh.

Not about Tools of Change

Teel — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 10:04:01 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unhappy with my art, lately

Teel — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 10:26:29 +0000

Not that I’m especially unhappy with the art I’ve been creating lately, as compared with how much I’m unhappy with the art I used to make (with an exception I may not get into, but let’s just say Winter ’00 / ’01 was a unique period of creation for me), but that lately I’ve been feeling unhappy with all the art I make. Lately, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s been nagging me about it all.

I think I figured it out. I think Mandy helped me figure it out. ((ie: I blame her. I blame her for making me hate myself in a new way. For making me see just what’s wrong with me.)) How we got there:

Among other things, primarily I am an artist and I am an author. Every year in November, for the last seven Novembers, I have participated in National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo is pretty all-consuming, most years, so psychologically there’s an entire month where I’m not doing anything but writing and thinking about writing from day one to day thirty. Then in December, suddenly I’m not writing and all the pent-up everything else gets a chance to gush because (especially after such intense writing every day, all the time) I don’t even really want to be writing. In several years I’ve done more new paintings in the last two weeks of December and/or the first two weeks of January than the entire remainders of the years. I’d hoped to be able to continue that tradition this year, because I’d also been working on a novel from about July through October and hadn’t done much painting after September. I really wanted to get some new painting done. And then for the first 2-3 weeks of December I was editing and otherwise preparing for print two new books (the novel and the NaNoWriMo project, More Lost Memories), so I didn’t really have time for painting (or for the mental space to allow for it).

Over Christmas break (my wife is a high school English teacher, for those of you who don’t know her), I’d intended to try painting something with Mandy. This was part of my hope to be able to get some painting done. I’d be able to finally get back to painting (I have a couple of unfinished pieces from last Autumn staring at me all the time, right now), I’d be churning out new work on some of the dozens of new canvases I’d bought on Black Friday, and maybe Mandy and I could work together on one or two of them. Except that didn’t happen. I didn’t much paint over Christmas break. A couple of mini-paintings at the beginning of the month that didn’t sell at First Friday (well, not that month, which was what I’d made them for – they both sold at this month’s First Friday), and some godawful yellow thing. Then, in January, after she’d already started back at school again, I started painting something new. Mandy came home from school one day, saw me painting this, and reminded me I’d said we would paint together.

So that night I set aside my painting, set up the table and got out some materials and asked her to paint a background with the extra blue and green paint I had still-wet from the piece I was working on, while I cooked dinner. After dinner, when the background was dry, I asked her to pick a color and a shape (this is a method I’d used several times in the past to get paintings started when I didn’t have ideas, I’d call people up out of the blue and ask them for a color and a shape and just start from there. For this project to be collaborative, I’d fully intended, when I asked, to go back and forth with her, for me to paint whatever she suggested and then let her paint and then me and so on) and she picked orange and oval/egg-shaped. And I went and got orange paint and promptly remembered I was supposed to be heading out the door for a vendor meeting with the Roosevelt Row people, so I gave her a couple of brushes, the paint, and told her to paint her orange egg. I came home and immediately felt terrible.

My wife, who has no prior painting experience and no formal training, who insists she can’t draw and isn’t and artist and is terrible, had surpassed me on her first attempt. There were things about how she had painted it that I have been looking at in other people’s art for decades and wishing I knew how they did that. She’d actually gone through my paints and … well, her grasp of color and of how to use and mix paints to create the desired colors surpass most first-year art students I’ve met. Except she did it unconsciously. It wasn’t a master work, it probably wouldn’t have won any awards, but the moment I saw it, my heart dropped. Almost as much as it did when I saw his first 2 paintings. (Come to think of it, that’s around when I’d stopped painting much, last year…) I’ve been painting off and on my whole life, and increasingly over the last 12 years, and my wife’s first nothing of a painting crushed me.

I stared at it. I tried to talk her into telling me what else should be in the image. More insistently, I tried to talk her into painting whatever else should be there. I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t know what to do with it. (That’s not entirely true – that first night, the only thing that occurred to me is pretty much what I did with it, but I pretty much don’t like it or think it’s a good idea.) I stared at it for hours. I stared at it for days. Day after day it stood there, in the living room, taunting me, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. Finally, finally, a week later, I set to work on it. It took me several hours, and I really feel it’s pretty much just derivative of the other painting (which I’d finished after another few days), and I’m not sure if it’s done. You can take a look at it. I’ve been looking at it for most of a week, trying to figure out what to do with it, whether it’s done, whether it needs anything, et cetera.

Tonight, staring at it frustratedly, feeling awful and wanting to go to bed and wanting to be painting or otherwise getting something done, I think I figured out the problem. I think I figured out what, about my art, has been making me so unhappy lately:

All my art is flat. As I said earlier on Plurk at the moment I figured it out: “It’s all flat. There’s no light. No depth. No space, just the plane. Not just 2D in medium, but in conception as well.“ I thought about my art. I looked at the art in the room (about a dozen of my finished paintings are in my living room right now). I walked around the house looking at my art. I went to wretchedcreature.com and looked at the art I’ve since sold. All of it. Flat.

Sure, yes, most of it isn’t “figurative” as such. You could even go so far as to say that’s my “style” of artwork. But it doesn’t change the fact that the difference between what Mandy painted and what I painted is that it created the illusion of depth, of light interacting with something. Yes, something floating strangely in a color field without a shadow, fine, but have you seen what I paint? Even when I do something semi-figurative (EX: ‘audacity of hope’, ‘eat to fill the void’, ‘low moan, wide hat’, ‘darkness looming’), it’s completely two-dimensional. No light, no shadow, no depth, no weight. Just color. Just line. Just image; no thing. I paint nothing.

Lately a lot of my work has been consumed with words. With painting excessively stylized representations of words. Taking the lines of the letters, stretching them, distorting them, aligning and mis-aligning them, transforming the lines into borders and the borders into shapes and the shapes into maps of color. Geometric, sure, fine, and simple, yes. Not just the old ideas of ‘pussy___’ and ‘puppy___’ or the actually conceptually interesting ‘SEX&LOVE’, but something more pure (more purely simplistic) with pieces like ‘bleh’, ‘begin’, ‘cold’, ‘gaping’, ‘red joy’, and ‘big kiss’. I’m no Rothko. Yet somehow I’ve basically just been painting color fields.

I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know.

But I’m unhappy with this, right now.

Two Art Walks coming up!

Teel — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:03:20 +0000

I’ll be showing some of my art and have all my books available at two art walks in the next two weeks:

Saturday, September 27th, 2008, from about 10AM to 3PM
SE corner of Greenway & Tatum (in N. Phx / Scottsdale)
Sponsored by Angel’s Serenity & Intatto Coffee

Intatto Coffee will be closed -the owners have to leave town somewhat last-minute- but this is part of their semi-regular local Art Walk series. I also showed at their August Art Walk. It’s a very casual atmosphere, relatively little foot traffic compared to downtown (more on that in a moment), so it’s easier to take your time and really look at everything that’s being shown. I’ll be glad to talk with you about all my different books, and my art, and would even be glad to do readings if you like. I’m also told there will be live music by Amber Gaia, so it should be pleasant all around.

Friday, October 3rd, 2008, from about 6PM to 10PM
I’ll be in the “Roosevelt Row” street closure / booths area
(Either on Garfield between 4th & 6th, or on 5th S. of Garfield)

This is part of the Phoenix First Fridays Art Walk, and October is when “art season” really seems to start in Phoenix, so I expect a lot of foot traffic and big crowds, despite the downturning economy. I’ll still be glad to talk to you about any of my art, or my books, but I am definitely aware that a lot of people coming to the Art Walk downtown want to try to “see everything” and don’t want to stand still too long. It’s a lot of fun, especially if you like crowds and people-watching with your arts and crafts. I spoke to the Roosevelt Row organizers today and am told that there will be a stage set up at the end of 5th Street with live music.

I bought some interesting 4×4″ canvases today, and I’m going to try to have them ready for sale before the Art Walk on the 27th. I want to put as much effort into them as I would for any of my other pieces, but to have art that’s priced a little cheaper, probably $15 each. (Unless I do something weird/sculptural/with-lights to them…) I’ve tried to keep all my art at affordable prices, and while I’ve been creating larger and larger pieces (with larger and larger prices), I’d also like to do some smaller pieces with smaller prices, to suit a wide range of budgets. Come out and see what I come up with!