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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Note: this post is over 2600 words long.

As you may or may not be aware, in March of 2008 I left my “day job” (they would probably say I was fired for violent behaviour, but believe me when I tell you my outburst was literally in the vein of “if that’s the way you insist on doing business, I can’t work here any more”) and have been a full-time, self-employed creator of books (Modern Evil Press) and art (wretched creature) since then.  My wife, a high school english teacher, has been the primary income earner for our household since that time.  You probably know teachers don’t earn a lot, and she’s only been teaching for a few years, so far, if that tells you anything.  So: not a lot of money.  But there’s good news: God loves us.  Evidenced by the fact that it’s been almost 11 months and we’re still okay.

We didn’t start off in a great position.  No savings, two car loans, Mandy’s student loans, and my mess of cc debt put us somewhere over $90k in debt as of last March.  About half of that’s the student loan, but it’s still a lot of money.  A lot of debt.  At the time I worked out a budget, we cut back in a few places, and we found that every month Mandy’s income covered all the bills and none of the stuff that isn’t bills.  ie: food, gas, entertainment, medical, et cetera were not covered.  We had just got back a sizeable tax refund (for the poor, marriage seems to make your tax situation better) about a week before I left my day job, so we had that $2700 in the bank to live off.  I needed to spend a chunk of it getting set up to run my business (pro audio equipment to record my podcast audio books, a video camera to make promotional YouTube videos, packaging materials & equipment for doing the physical audiobooks including a new printer, oh, and a sizeable inventory of books to sell directly through modernevil.com) – something between 1/3 and 1/2 of the money we needed to live on, right off the top.

But we did okay.  I made art, I made audiobooks, I worked on writing new books, and most importantly, I worked on building an audience and getting sales.  In May I started showing at the Phoenix First Fridays Art Walk among the Roosevelt Row vendors.  A little later, I also started showing at the not-quite-monthly Art Fair at Intatto Coffee / Angel’s Serenity.  (Note: Intatto has since gone out of business, but if you’re in North Phoenix/Scottsdale on 2/14/09, there’s another Angel’s Serenity Art Fair coming up!)  I started using social media more actively (Twitter, Plurk when I found out about it, Facebook, et cetera) and I actually made several art sales through contacts I made in social media.  Sales haven’t yet been knock-your-socks-off great, but I’ve had sales every month since April, 2008 and most months a bit more in income than in expenses (according to my accounting software).

Right before the money left over from the tax refund ran out, our $1200 stimulus check arrived.  Not too long after, Mandy got a pay increase (at the start of the new school year) and was working extra hours.  Just before the stimulus check ran out (it went further after her raise & w/ Student Council overtime), she received a bonus of a similar amount.  Every step along the way, either with new sales / new customers, Mandy offered overtime, gov’t intervention, bonus checks, whatever, before we hit bottom, right when we need it, God has come through for us with more support.  Within the next two weeks, we’re going to get close to that bottom again.  Which brings us to taxes, and the original subject of this post:

It’s tax season again.  Yesterday I spent a few hours entering all our information into hrblock.com which we filed with last year, and both Mandy and I have filed with in various years in the past.  I knew they were capable of handling my business taxes (since I reported some business income last year, and got a look at what their site was capable of), and probably I’ll go ahead and file through them later this week.  I’m still waiting on a document or two in the mail, but I’m 99% sure I know what they say (and the $0.95 interest we earned on our savings account won’t change anything at all), so I don’t want to actually file quite yet, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got all the info entered in correctly.  And it looks like, for a variety of reasons (my income at my day job was so low I basically get all my withholding back, bonuses have a higher withholding than normal income, & our income was cut almost in half this year over last), we’ll be getting a sizeable refund this year.  Something in the neighborhood of $4500.

And now we have to embark on an examination of this post’s titular ‘opportunity cost’ – the cost of taking one opportunity is in being unable to take others.  Let’s begin with what we ought to do: use that money to keep things like food on the table and gas in the cars (esp. since Mandy drives ~21 miles each way to/from work) and some basic level of we’re-not-going-mad entertainment coming in.  At our current spending rates, with Mandy’s current income, and without counting on any significant sales from me (they’re already coming in – have you ordered my new books Forget What You Can’t Remember and More Lost Memories, yet? Have you seen my latest painting?), and barring any unexpected emergencies that money could last perhaps 9 months – until almost November.  Except that, since I left my day job last year, we haven’t been paying my father any rent to live here (he’d only started charging us a couple of months before that), and he’s been having trouble getting renters to pay on time, when he can find renters at all, for the property he manages / lives on in Pine, AZ – not to mention that just about every piece of equipment up there has broken this year and has needed (or still needs some) expensive repairs.  So, he has the property taxes coming due soon and I told him we’ll -at the very least- help him with that.  From the looks of the size of this refund, we may just pay the full amount, ~$1500, which would leave us with about 6 months’ worth of money for food/etc..

Then there’s the matter of my iMac died this Fall.  I’ve been doing everything on my 4-year-old iBook.  Everything meaning: writing books, editing/layout of books, cover design, audio recording, audio editing/mixing/compressing, video recording/editing, web site design, and more.  My whole business is wrapped up in that little, weary laptop computer.  If we bought the entry-level iMac currently available (& maxed out the ram for another $60), processor and memory intensive tasks (like mixing & compressing audio and video, and working with book-length documents and print-quality cover designs) would go four to eight times faster.  Not to mention I’m currently doing everything on a 15″ 1024×768 screen; I could really use more screen real estate – it would probably speed me up another several percent to be able to see everything I’m doing at once.  We looked into it late last year and decided that the iMac line appears due for an update, and we thought it would come at MacWorldSF, and we should probably wait to see if we’re getting a tax refund or somehow owed taxes before we bought a new computer.  That I could use the larger screen (and lower price point) of the iMac over the Macbook Pro -I absolutely need firewire; all that equipment I bought in 2008 for audio & video connects via firewire- and now … well, now we’re sortof waiting for the update.  If they leave FW out of the updated iMac line, I just need to get the current model (which will then be discounted), but either way it’s a better value to wait.  SO that’s somewhere in the $1500-$2000 range.  The opportunity cost being another 3-4 months of living comfortably.

Then there’s the TV.  This one, despite being largely irrational, has really been bugging me more and more the last few months=>weeks=>days.  The TV we currently use is not small, it’s a 37″ (I think 37″… I’m not going to go measure it) CRT TV I bought back in 1998 or 1999.  At the time, HDTVs were already on the market, but were very expensive.  I shopped around, decided I didn’t want an HDTV  with a diagonal measurement less than my height, and calculated how much I wanted to spend on a TV knowing that analog broadcasts were going to be shut off in 2006.  (They bumped it back a couple of times since then…)  At that time, stores had HDTVs up to about 83″, so saying I wanted one 76″ or larger was only mostly silly – since then, in trying to find a mass-marketable HDTV size and in compliance with plasma-TV constraints, HDTV sizes have settled pretty comfortably in the 40″-55″ range, and there is rarely a TV over 72″, so I compromised my ridiculous requirement a few years back to consider HDTVs 72″ and larger.  Long story short, I’ve been noticing that Fry’s Electronics keeps listing a 73″ Mitsubishi DLP HDTV for $1899.  (Note: DLP is my preferred technology for HDTV, until SED comes out.)  Yesterday I noticed that it’s even “3D Ready” – which I had to look up, since … umm…  3D ready?  I mean, I’d heard that there was a company working with developers to come out with some 3D games for the PS3 in 2009, but it didn’t make a lot of sense because -as far as I knew- there weren’t any 3D TV’s on the market, yet.  Apparently, there are.  Mitsubishi and Samsung both manufacture 3D-capable DLP HDTVs – they work with shutter glasses, available for ~$60-$75/pair.  Huh.  Anyway, so partially since I’ve been expecting/planning on replacing my TV with an HDTV in 2006 for the last decade, partially because the analog broadcasts are finally shutting down, partially because there’s actually a 72″+ DLP HDTV available under $2k, partially because we have a PS3/Blu-Ray player and actually just bought our first Blu-Ray (Repo! The Genetic Opera, FYI), I’ve sortof got a bug about getting an HDTV.  Like, I’m pretty sure it’s why I woke up at 2AM after less than 4 hours of sleep this morning – I can’t stop thinking about this money situation and about this TV.  So I’ve been sitting here for the last 3.5hrs writing this post, somewhat to try to talk/write myself out of the idea of it.

The opportunity cost of buying a $2k TV is… well, frankly, it would mean getting a new iMac is out of the question – because really we do need to eat.  Even if I didn’t feel paying my father’s property tax (or at least some large portion of it) was the right thing to do, HDTV+iMac = no money left for food.  Property tax + iMac = about 3-4 months of expenses left covered.  (And the iMac would actually be a business expense – so that’ll help with next year’s taxes.)  Property tax + HDTV = about 2 months of expenses left covered.  And then we can starve to death in front of a really, really beautiful home theater.  There’s always debt…  This is America, after all.  But since March, we haven’t missed or been late on a single payment on any of our accounts and our total debt is down by around $5k.  And while we could put one of these things on credit and pay it down over time (plus interest, of course – even when the Fed’s rate is at 0%, the rest of us have to pay interest), we’d really prefer to keep heading in the direction of less debt rather than more debt.  At this rate, I know, it’s about 12 years before we could dig ourselves down to debt-free, and the cost of an iMac only adds a couple of months to that, but it’s the principle, right?  Heck, the smartest thing to do would be to pay down as much of our highest-interest debt with the tax refund as possible, since we’re paying interest on it and our checking account earns no interest…

And, yes, there’s the idea of sales and income from my businesses to consider, too.  Before hrblock.com advised me of Sec. 179 Depreciation, whereby all the assets/equipment I bought this year were counted as expenses, I’d actually had a Net Income for 2008 of around $60.  (With the extra expenses it’s more like negative $300.)  Which is to say, after less than a year I’m nearly profitable.  I had some expenses this month that’ll take a while to earn back (travel to NYC for Tools of Change, books setup and inventory for my two new books, and I pre-paid for a full year for a space at Roosevelt Row / First Fridays), but I’ve also got at least one person considering commissioning some art already, too, and have had pretty good interest in the new books.  The closer the income from sales of my art & books is to our actual needs, the better, and if/when the one passes the other, concerns like this become less dire.  Hopefully we can get there within a year or two.  Hopefully the economy recovers enough that people can afford to pay more reasonable prices for my art.  Hopefully enough people hear about my books that sales go up from dozens to hundreds (or thousands) of copies.  Hopefully.  Hopefully.

Ugh, I’ve written almost 2500 words and I still don’t feel resolved on the matter.  The mature, appropriate, best thing to do is some combination of paying dad’s property tax, paying down debt, and using the money to buy food and gasoline.  The iBook works, even if it’s slow & has a cramped workspace.  The CRT TV works, especially since we get all our TV from the internet.  We can get by without either big purchase, and we can get by a lot longer without either one.  Maybe, maybe, I’d be more productive with a faster, better computer with a bigger screen.  And maybe I’d be more productive with a huge TV, too.  (No, really – I sketch, paint, and do most of my web development in front of the TV and -and this is important- do most of my relaxing there, too.  Being happy with my home theatre (as opposed to staying up nights fretting about HDTVs, like I’m doing now, or spending hours and days researching HDTVs, like I’ve done off and on these last few weeks/months) and able to actually relax in my off hours will certainly contribute to the quality of work I do.)  Sigh.  Alright, I’m going to see if maybe I can get a bit of a nap in.  Sleep on this a bit more.  I doubt it.  I feel almost as conflicted as I did last night.  Stupid money.

Note: the opportunity cost of fretting about this & writing this post is the last five hours. I could have been sleeping.

Did I mention I met another local author, today?  A published author of ‘Speculative Fiction’ whose comments -mostly not because that was what he was intending- made me feel like crap.  Made me feel like my choice to start my own publishing company was wrong, like the ignorant fool that I am for a variety of reasons ranging from my not ever having been part of a writing group, to my not writing in a particualr genre, to my not joining any of the major, national associations of writers, to my views of the future of publishing, and even to -apparently- my writing itself, after he took a brief flip through one of my books.  But he let me know about his writing group and gave me info about where and when they meet, so maybe after I’m done feeling sorry for myself I’ll go meet with them.  Or not.  Always easier to not do, right?

I need to find a way to relax, to let go, to stop worrying about working all the time, to stop freaking about about the value of my time.  To have faith that God will provide for my family – He always has, He’ll always love us, and did you see how well he took care of the birds of the air?  I’m sure we’ll be fine.  I was excited a couple of weeks ago because I’d reached a point of profit, according to my accounting software, and barring any unforseen expenses, all future sales this year would have been profitable.  If the profits actually reached $400 or more, I’d even have to pay social security taxes!  But then I realized that I’m planning on publishing two new books before Christmas, and that between the up-front costs of that and paying for the Art Walk for November and December, I’ll have to have some pretty sweet sales to get that far into profitable.  Which is to say that after working hard from March through the end of the year, the next financial contribution of my work -according to accounting & tax rules- will probably come out to nearly $0.  If I were counting all the money I spent on “assets” (which actually costs me money, right now, thank you very much bookkeeping principles) this year I’m way, way in the negative.  But the near-$0 is somewhat refreshing, perhaps, for my mental outlook because hopefully it can take some of the pressure off.  Because even without my contributing financially at all since I left ICE in March, we’re doing fine.  We’re taken care of.  The money we’ve needed has come at the right times to pay the bills.  We’re not getting ahead of our pre-existing debt any time soon, but we’re not delinquent on any of it, either, and there’s food on the table.  Every day.  Every night.  Instead of seeing this in the negative, instead of reading this as ten months’ work worth $0, I’m going to try to look at it as a sign that it’s safe not to be worrying about the cost/value of every minute, of every hour, of every choice about what to do.  I’m going to try to look at this as an indication that if I work hard and do what I’m led to do, and if I take advantage of the opportunities, inspirations, et cetera that just keep coming at the right times, and if I follow my talents naturally, I’ll continue to be taken care of, our needs will continue to be met, and things will just get better and better.  I’ll feel better about the work I’m doing and -if the waxing and waning of this year, and the thirty that came before them, are any indication- I’ll get more done, and better work done, not thinking about it and not beating myself up about working all the time.  I’ll create more art, better stories, and sell more of both by letting go, by letting myself just do what comes naturally, by letting go of worry.  I know what needs to be done, I understand deadlines, obligations, and my own over-amplified perfectionism / high standards / desire to create value, and I can and will create great things if I just stop trying, stop worrying, and start doing.

One more thing.  I’ve been thinking of trying to adapt one of my paintings to another format.  Maybe poster prints, maybe t-shirts.  What would you pay for a poster of it, and what would you be willing to pay for a shirt?

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!

The podiobooks.com feed will be strictly the book by itself, same as for Dragons’ Truth.  The Modern Evil Press podcast (Should that be just “Modern Evil Podcast”, or “Modern Evil Press Podcast”?  Hrm…)  will also include short stories and future audiobooks (including the followup novel to Lost and Not Found I am currently writing) as well as a small amount of “chatter” and promos for other podcasts / podiobooks I want to spread the word about.  It should be an ongoing / continuous podcast, going forward.  bleh.

I never really wanted to do a podcast of my own (though I did try my hand at audio blogging now and again, long before podcasts became popular, and it recently occurred to me that I was doing a sort-of podiobook back in 2001, when I “released” a serialized audiobook as I was recording it, week by week sending out installments… by snail mail, rather than the as-yet-uninvented RSS), so I’m not sure how much “chatter” I’ll actually be doing, but at least some more information and advertisement than in the 20-second intro/outro I did for the podiobooks.com version.  At least to remind people that there are paper versions of the books available, and perhaps updates on what else I’m working on that week, instead of just saying “see modernevil.com for more info…”

I’ve never been much good at maintaining regular content-update schedules, so we’ll just have to wait and see how things go with the podcasts.  I’ve got 5 episodes of Lost and Not Found recorded and -nearly- ready for upload.  I can record/edit/mix roughly an episode a day at this point (since I’ve done most of the music and planning work in advance… though my crazy plans require a certain amount more work on the music for a few future episodes… you’ll have to wait and listen to find out what I mean), and I expect there to be in the vicinity of 15 episodes total, so even without working on it every day, I should still be a couple of months ahead before my birthday rolls around, which will make things easier in that regard.

Anyway, along with the podcast, I plan to be adding a proper sort of “news feed” to modernevil.com (and to wretchedcreature.com as well) with updates on things like the next Art Walk at Intatto Coffee (September 27th!  Come and see my latest art, and get books signed!) or… well, I’ll probably go do the Phoenix Art Walk October 3rd, as well.  And I need to throw together a website specifically for Lost and Not Found, like I did for Dragons’ Truth … except I need to let people know this one exists, rather than putting it up late and not really linking to it.  I own lostandnotfound.com already.  In fact, I’ve put a couple of media files there, already:  Listen to a “five minute” preview of the Lost and Not Found audiobook, or grab the 60-second promo for Lost and Not Found to share with your friends/blog-readers/podcast-listeners/pets/self/et cetera.

That’s it for now… getting sleepy. Been up (and working) since before 7AM.  Mostly on the audiobook.  Forgot (slash was too busy for) to paint, today.  In the middle of at least 4 new paintings, and have another I need to photograph & get online… Exciting stuff.  And did I mention I’m over halfway through the new novel?  I’m sure that’ll take up some of the days I’m not recording & editing audio between now and forever…  So, lots of stuff in the works, I hope you tune in, and I’ll try to post again soon.

Over the course of the day I sold (and signed) several books (good thing I brought them along, instead of just the art, eh?), and talked to a lot of people about the paintings I brought, and ran into a couple of old friends.  Then, when I thought for sure I’d make more money from books than art at an Art Walk (which is about the opposite of my typical average sales numbers), in the last hour of the day, I sold one of my latest paintings, ‘fibonacci series #1′.  Yay!

Between these actual sales and the fact that I didn’t have to pay for the privilege of setting up (well, aside from all the $$ we spent eating and drinking at Intatto over the course of the day…), it was infinitely better than First Fridays.  No, seriously, I’ve never sold more than a single paperback (and usually less) at the First Fridays Art Walk.  Maybe in the fall, but until and unless and in a few weeks I’ll be at Intatto again.  I’ll let you know when I know more.

I’m told the event officially starts at 11AM, and according to the sign on the door they close at 6PM, so I guess we’ll be done by then, right?

If you live in the area, or if you haven’t had a chance to come see my art in person at the Art Walks downtown this summer, or if you just want to come out and show your support for indie business and indie artists, you should come have a look and a cuppa.

Intatto Coffee Art Walk
August 23rd, 2008, from 11AM to 6PM
4847 E. Greenway Rd., Scottsdale, AZ
(Greenway & Tatum)