If you watch it a couple of times (once to absorb everything I’m saying, then again to absorb the production techniques) you’ll see that … at the beginning of working on this video, last Monday, I had never done any 3D animation and only a modicum of modeling (mostly in SL), and had never used Kinemac before.  (I bought the Macheist 3 bundle earlier this year, for access to that and BoinxTV, mostly.)  As I worked for about a week and a half on this video, I became more and more experienced with the software, more aware of what it was capable of, and more comfortable doing more advanced things with it.  So at the beginning, the big 3D text is pretty neat, but by the end I have an entire bookcase of individually hand-animated books leaping in and out of a box.

There’s things I’d like to change about it.  Not just improving the animation in the first half, either.

On Demand Books is now saying they’ll have two million titles available by years’ end, rather than one, for example.  Plus, I feel like I may have represented the kindle more strongly than the iPhone – while I believe the 41million iPhones/iPod Touches in circulation worldwide, each with hundreds of individual book apps and at least 4 different major eReader apps, each with robust eBook catalogs and (coming soon) in-app purchasing will do significantly better and reach wider and have more of an impact than the roughly half-million, all-US-based kindles.

I’m already working on the script for the next couple of videos.  More thoughts on what it means to have over 1400 new titles published every day.  More thoughts on print on demand.  Something about eBook pricing.

Now, I’m going to try to turn something disappointing into something a little bit better.  I’m going to change the nature of the contest, and the reward.  The idea now is to have an open-ended opportunity for anyone who reads my books and wants to try another.  Anyone, at any time, for any of my books, who can provide something to help me sell my books that’s better than what I’m currently using can win a free paperback of one of my books of their choice.

If that’s a better answer to the question “What is this book about?” – great!  If that’s better marketing copy, a better “elevator pitch,” a blurb from another author that I can put on the cover & the website, or even an entirely new cover image – wonderful!  If that’s an insightful blog post, or a detailed review (not necessarily positive), or a thoughtful analysis of character, theme, plot (or lack thereof) – I look forward to it!  Be creative!  Write a spin-off or sequel, a short story in the same universe, a song or a poem, shoot a video, or create any other derivative work (automatically allowed for non-commercial uses, since all my novels are available under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license) – and you’re a shoe-in!

As before, simply email your entries to me at teel@modernevil.com - perhaps containing your entry, or perhaps linking to your blog / a review / a video – and I’ll consider all entries using my personal judgement as to whether you’re doing a better job marketing my book than I am (which shouldn’t be hard – Marketing is not one of my strengths).  Every time I receive an entry that I believe will help sell books, I’ll send out a signed paperback copy of one of my books (their choice) to the entrant, and I’ll get my marketing efforts updated to incorporate the new materials.  So go, read or listen to one of my books, and think about how you might let someone else know about them.

Void where prohibited. No purchase necessary: You can read the eBook or listen to the podcast for free. Officially open to US Residents only – but only because I don’t want to deal with shipping books internationally. You can still enter from anywhere and, if you’re willing to help me with international shipping, get your free book. Winners will be selected by whatever method I want – probably I’ll just pick the entries I think are best, but I’m not ruling out asking people on Twitter or some such. Contest runs until I don’t feel like it anymore – which probably means it never ends, since when wouldn’t I want to sell more books?  By submitting an entry you are granting me an unlimited, nonexclusive right to use your entry and any derivations thereof for any purpose, including commercial - ie: the point of having better marketing material is to be able to get more people to read and/or buy my book, so I need the right to use the best entries to that end.  If you create a derivative work & would like to license it for commercial use (ex: you want to be able to make money by writing a sequel and selling it yourself), we can talk. I’m open to that, too.

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.

• One (1) First Prize: I’ll name a character after you in my next novel & let you decide whether that character lives or dies, plus send you a signed paperback copy of one of my books (your choice).
• Two (2) Second Prizes: I’ll send you a signed paperback copy of one of my books (your choice).

 
How to enter:
Email your answer to the question “What is Forget What You Can’t Remember about?” to teel@modernevil.com. The deadline for entry is May 1st, 2009, two weeks after the final chapter goes live at Podiobooks.com.
 
Void where prohibited. No purchase necessary: You can read the eBook or listen to the podcast for free. Officially open to US Residents only – but only because I don’t want to deal with shipping books internationally. You can still enter from anywhere & if you win I’ll still name a character after you… and… I don’t know, maybe look up international shipping rates & customs paperwork? Winners will be selected by whatever method I want – probably I’ll just pick the answers I think are best, but I’m not ruling out asking people on Twitter or some such. By submitting an entry you are granting me an unlimited, nonexclusive right to use your entry and any derivations thereof for any purpose, including commercial - ie: the point of having a better answer to this question is to be able to get more people to read and/or buy my book, so I need the right to use the best answers to that end. I will be running a very similar contest for both Lost and Not Found and Dragons’ Truth in May, in case you want to go read and/or listen to those books & prepare your answer in advance.

What’s the video about, you ask?  Umm… it’s about how I, Modern Evil Press, have decided to handle pricing of the for-pay text versions of my books, including the paperback & eBook versions through various sales channels.  There is another video needed, to cover the alternatives being explored by other publishers, especially re: eBook pricing, and I hope to have it up in a week or two.  (A lot going on right now – did I tell you I’ve started screen-printing T-Shirts?)  Here it is, I encourage you to watch in “High Quality” if your bandwidth allows:

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.

Forget What You Can’t Remember is a book that has zombies in it, but it is not a zombie book. It is not a horror book. It is not a science fiction or a fantasy book, either, despite the existence of a flying city, robots, and elves in the world where it takes place. It is not an action book — in fact, it may be the antithesis of an action book, when you step back and look at the whole experience. What is Forget What You Can’t Remember, if it is not these things?
 
It is a novel about people. Some of the people in the novel encounter zombies and, in fact, survive a full-scale zombie outbreak in a major US city. Some of the people in the novel, after becoming rescued rescuers, find there are gaps in their memories; whole swaths of their lives and their histories that are entirely lost. Suddenly given limitless possibilities for the future and robbed of their pasts, each charater reacts -and interacts- in different ways. Some follow their dreams, some try to continue living in the past they’ve had to leave behind, and at least one loses his grip on sanity.
 
The bulk of the story is told, not through description of actions, settings, and characters, but through the dialogue those characters have about the settings they find themselves in and the actions and events they’re experiencing and planning. This is simultaenously so intimate that a reader can lose track of the boundaries between characters and so distancing that it can give the impression that you are only experiencing the story second-hand. That feeling of being both present and distant at once mirrors the way more than one of the main characters’ minds reacts in the wake of tragic, traumatic events. In the scene in chapter 17 which inspired the cover image, two characters discuss this experience which could probably be diagnosed as depersonalization disorder:

“Huh.” Paul couldn’t identify personally or exactly with Brady’s experiences, but somehow understood him, in a way. “Are you experiencing this disassociation from reality right now?”

“No, I,” Brady paused to consider whether what he was saying was true. He stopped walking, and stood in the street for a moment looking down at his body and back up to the world around him. He held his right hand up in front of his face, staring intently at it. “I’m trying to decide if it feels like I’m staring at my own hand or if I’m watching me stare at my own hand.” Paul was now also staring intently at Brady’s hand, trying to more consciously notice his own awareness of perception. “Though just being present enough to be able to think about the difference is probably both a sign that I’m not experiencing it, and what truly surreal experiences even its memory allows me now to have.”

“Truly.” Paul was now staring at his own hand and contemplating the separation between perception and awareness as though for the first time. “Consciousness itself is clearly not mere eyes and ears and instincts, but the thought of being able to be conscious of one’s own consciousness is a sort of Klein bottle with no boundary, zero volume, and which despite seeming to be immersed in the visible world always keeps some critical part in a higher plane of being, beyond our grasp.”

Brady now took his turn to stare at Paul, though more like an examination of another’s sanity than one’s own perceptions. Brady stood there, staring at Paul staring at his own hand, apparently deep in thought, then spoke. “I have no idea what you just said.”

 
Then, when the narrative takes a dramatic turn toward long description and to action, the character experiencing and initiating the action is turned increasingly away from it by his own apparent memory loss and the philosophical line of thought it takes him down. A strange and difficult twist near the end of the book then seems to erase all evidence of his action -of everything described in detail rather than in dialogue- from the book, leaving nothing behind but the second-hand and the distant. The reader, if they realize this post-modern slight of hand at all, is left in the same situation as the characters; what you thought happened hasn’t, and what has happened is at least out of arm’s reach.
 
In trying to create this meta-experience paralleling that of the characters, the book loses the ability to easily serve the expectations of mainstream readers. It loses the ability to meet the expectations of readers looking for a traditional zombie book. It loses the ability to serve those looking for it to fit neatly into a genre slot, any genre at all. Instead, it serves the mind. It encourages thought. It attempts not just to describe a thing, but to deliver it into the reader’s consciousness. Forget What You Can’t Remember is not a book for everyone, and it may not be what you expect, but it may be the only book you read this year that is what it says.

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.

Zombies! Doomsday! And someone who actually finished writing a novel in a month!

Mary, Lance, Brady, Lorraine, and the Sergeant are a handful of the survivors from a zombie outbreak that decimates a city. Each of them responds a little differently in the aftermath of the tragedy and to the inexplicable and possibly unrelated memory loss some of them seem to be suffering. Paul is obsessed with a worldwide cataclysmic event he’s been predicting for years, and while everyone else seems able to go on with their lives in its wake, he just can’t let it go. Add a utopian city in the sky and a mathematician who can fly, then watch all these elements intersect and converge in a place where some see a moral void and others can’t escape deep questions of right and wrong.

Forget What You Can’t Remember explores everything from economics and ethics to politics, post-traumatic recovery and the lonliness of heroism. If it doesn’t leave you guessing, it’ll at least get you thinking.

And then, in another part of the cover, alongside a small version of More Lost Memories‘ cover (which I haven’t even started on yet… Ugh.), the following:

More Lost Memories is a companion book to Forget What You Can’t Remember, a collection of short stories each of which delves deeper into a character, event, or situation from this book. Find out how the zombie trainers died, about Lance’s restaurant, what was really going on in chapter 21, and more. Available now from Modern Evil Press.

That’s assuming, of course, I can fit all those words on the cover in a readably-sized typeface.

Please, please, please give me your feedback, either here in the comments or via email or via Twitter reply, or via Plurk ASAP. As soon as I can get these cover designs done, I can send the books to the printer. The sooner that happens, the sooner I’ll have them for sale. I’d really, really, like to have them for sale close to the time the podcast of the book starts (1/2/09, on Podiobooks.com). Thank you!

Getting everything together was psychologically taxing.  Which paintings to take along to display, how to display them without spending too much, testing the generator/lights setup, thinking endlessly about signage, how much change should we have in the money box, how to fit everything into the car…  And when I checked the official website for Roosevelt Row on Friday morning, they’d moved the setup time from 4PM to 5PM up to 5PM to 6PM, so I was aiming to leave the house by 4:30.  Everything took a little longer than expected (especially fitting everything into the car), and there was unexpected “baseball traffic” and it was a little after 5:30 when I showed up.  Bleh.

The original spot I’d been assigned … well, it looked like most people had been setting up for at least an hour, and expanding into any unfilled spaces.  My original space was on the edge of things (if they hadn’t expanded to 4x the original size to accommodate everyone who showed up at last minute, it would have been in the middle of things), and a friend of mine had already expanded her stuff into it (since no one had showed up to claim it).  They offered me another space which was apparently being filled by someone who hadn’t even paid (?), but it looked like they were almost done setting up in it, too… so when they offered me a space way down, around the corner … well, I knew that that corner always had thousands upon thousands of people going by it — Fifth and Garfield, most of the houses up and down Fifth between Roosevelt and Garfield are now used as galleries on First Friday, and last month Mandy and I just turned around upon seeing the entire block packed (standing room only) from the front door on one side of the street to the front door on the other.  So I picked that spot, two spaces down from the corner space on Fifth just South of Garfield, and I moved over there and was unloaded and setting up just before 6PM.

Heath and Sean were about 1/2hr behind us, and I still wasn’t entirely set up (the wind kept knocking things over, and I kept having to come up with new ways to counter it) before he was there AND set up.  He sold two bracelets before the sun even set.  I mostly just fought the wind.  My sisters showed up to show their support and hang out.  Few people were out while it was still light.  Before long, it was clear that I was “the end of the road” — the last person to show up, apparently, and the last vendor on a row with only 4 vendors total.  Not a lot of reason to bother turning off Garfield (the main drag of vendors) to see the few booths on Fifth, really.  But I was close enough to be in view, and I’d angled a bunch of my stuff so that it faced Garfield, and after the sun set and I turned the generator on (there was a bit of finagling to get it going, but we eventually figured out how to read the clearly labeled parts) I also re-arranged so that lighter-colored art was facing that way, to draw the most attention in the dark.

Fairly quickly, I sold a book to a man who seemed sold before I even spoke to him, which was nice.  And speaking to people is what I did most on Friday.  I’d set up the space in a way that I’d thought would draw people in, and I certainly created a space that was “mine” – everyone could see the edge of that space, and most seemed to feel like they oughtn’t cross into it – but in trying to create a welcoming space (as opposed to pushing the tables & merchandise all the way to the edge of my 10×10′ space, like most of the vendors), I’d effectively moved my merchandise (art, books) five feet further away from where most people were comfortable with approaching.  I’d effectively put my books out of reach of the bulk of the people who showed up.  Admittedly, most people seemed to be there strictly to “look at art,” so having books at all seemed almost foolish.  Still, a lot of people who are seriously interested in art are so because they’re intellectually curious, and are also readers.  So I spent a lot of time talking to people, giving out cards, being friendly, shaking hands, and trying to get people to take that step into the space I’d created to get a closer look.

My overall feeling about the evening, after I’d got home, was that I’d basically been working the crowd as though it were a gallery opening – except that the gallery had only one wall, eight feet wide and five feet tall, and it was a group show with three people (an artist, a writer, and a jeweler) all showing in that same tiny space.  I think Heath got the feeling that everyone who’d showed up to that tiny gallery had only been told about the art, because he didn’t get much attention (and didn’t make any more sales) after the sun went down and the lights came on.  Which may be a fair view, considering that what was drawing people in, across the street, down the crossroad, to the last vendor, out of the way, was seeing my paintings, glowing in the dark.  (One under its own power.)  A LOT of people, standing only a few feet away, looking at my art, able to discuss intelligently both the art above and below the books standing on the table, didn’t even see the books until I pointed them out. Wow. Heath (and Sean) merely sat behind their table of jewelry (like nearly every other vendor out there, every month), trying to speak to people they couldn’t see (beyond the wall of light I’d built), so what chance did they have? I don’t know. It was hard for me, too, and I was out in the crowd, sometimes literally pulling people in.

After 9PM or so, a problem that hadn’t seemed too serious caught my attention. At the North side of Garfield, just my side of the “Street Closed” barricades blocking off Fifth Street, was a huge (SUV/Suburban type) Police vehicle, several Police cars, and a dozen cops. All night. It was like, barricade, sure, but throw in a seven-foot-tall, intimidating wall between my booth and … I don’t know, a hundred thousand people… and yeah, they’re going to turn and go the other way instead of coming into the blocked-off vendor area to see what else there is to see. It was most apparent after 9PM, when 5th street North of the barricade was completely packed with people (as I’d seen it last month), illegally — that part of the road was supposedly open to traffic — and the block-party vendor area on the other side of the massive police barricade was relatively sparse. I mean, a lot of people came by -often more than I could hand cards to or even acknowledge- but, on our side it was like a semi-popular street faire (vendor booths, a reasonable turnout), and on the other side it was like … I don’t know, a street party slash packed outdoor concert… It was literally packed until about 11:30 when the police took the barricades down and traffic actually started to push people out of the road.

Mandy left around 9 to go to her HS’s Prom (she’s an English Teacher, she was chaperoning), my sisters left sometime after 10 and Heath and Sean left around 11 – I didn’t realize it until it was too late, but by not giving up “early” so that someone was there with me, I didn’t have anyone to help, I didn’t have anyone to watch the stuff while I went to get the car to put it in, and I certainly couldn’t then go pick Mandy up. ((That had been the arrangement – she would walk to the Prom, about a mile away, and I would be done between 10PM and 11PM (since the Art Walk “ends” at 10PM) and come to pick her up at or before the time Prom ended (between 11 and 11:30PM), so she wouldn’t have to walk around downtown Phoenix, alone, after all the art-walkers et cetera had gone home.)) When Heath and Sean left, it didn’t look like anyone was packing up, and like I said, 5th street was completely full of people until at least 11:30… plenty of people were still coming by, looking at things…. plenty seemed semi-interested… And then, between 11, when I suddenly found myself by myself, and 11:15, everyone was packing up, the organizer came over and personally told me I ought to be packing up (I was, but slowly, since I was alone), and a few cars, here and there, were being let onto the less-and-less blocked off street. Well before the barricades actually came down I had my everything out of the road and up on the curb, where I did most of the re-packing / stacking. And then I just had to wait, watch the crowds slowly diminish and the other vendors load their vehicles and leave, and hope Mandy made it safely across downtown Phoenix.

Now, that’s not the whole story, of course. I also was friendly with my “neighbor” whose lighting hadn’t come through (I had plenty of light, and he was glad to pay for some gas to be able to plug one of his in). I got a few business cards. I gave out probably over 300 of my own cards (perhaps too many to teens/college-students). Hopefully some of those people will actually look at my sites. Hopefully some of them will actually order something. I heard later that at least two separate sets of people who knew I was there, knew what I look like and what my art looks like, and came to the vendor/blocked-off area to look for me specifically, couldn’t find me and never saw me. So, that spot wasn’t so good, maybe, for being found. Oh, and there are pictures. I’ll have to get my wife’s pictures, my sister’s pictures, and my iPhone’s pictures together and up on flickr, and I’ll make a post here when I do. But that’s what I’ve got for now. Hope you like it.

Hope you can make it out to see me, next time.

Is it too late to make a blog post about something happening tonight?  Will anyone see it before-the-fact?  We’ll see.  Gotta get that mailing list thing figured out, so I can email everyone and let them know when things are happening.

Like tonight: I’m going to be displaying at First Friday in downtown Phoenix.  I’ve mentioned it before, but now that it’s mere hours away, I’m getting restless with excitement.  Trying to get everything together & figured out so it goes of “without a hitch,” as they say.  I’m not showing in a gallery (yet), and as I’ve been avoiding doing for years now, I’m not illegally showing on the sidewalk or in an empty lot, either.  Instead, I’ve rented a space from Roosevelt Row, an organization which is legally getting a section of Garfield (one block south of Roosevelt) blocked off under “Block Party” rules and dividing it up for licensed vendors on First Fridays.  A lot of the people who have been setting up illegally already had tents &c., which is something I lack, but I’ve got tables, lights, a generator, and more art than I could possibly show in a 10×10 space (without a tent/walls to hang it all on).  Plus my books and Heath’s jewelry (chainmail) and … maybe we’ll make some money, eh?

I’m trying to decide which art to show (show first, that is – I’ll take most of it anyway, in case anything sells, I can replace it), since there’s only so much that can be seen in a setup like this.  Thinking about price tags, signage, labels, all that. Only hours to go.  But the basics are covered. I’ve even got stands for my books and some of my art, which is better than having it just laying there.  I’ve spent enough, between renting the space and getting extras, that if I don’t sell at least one painting (or a lot of books) it’ll come out at a loss — And I didn’t spend much.

Anyway, that’s it, I guess.  If you see this in time, please come show your support (maybe buy a book – they’re cheap!)

wretched creature & Modern Evil Press
will be showing at:
Phoenix First Fridays / Roosevelt Row
Garfield St., between 3rd and 4th St.
Friday, May 2nd, 2008, 6PM to 10PM

Of course, that’s all dependent upon finding 250 places to post the flyers.  (I’ll ignore for a moment the hundreds or thousands of people who will walk by each posted flyer without even seeing it, the dozens who will see it but not be interested, and the few who will be interested but lose the tiny strip of goldenrod paper they shoved in their pocket.  First it has to be somewhere, and only then can it become ineffective!)

Yesterday, after stopping by the bank and Discount Tire (to pay for the tires I ordered – I get to go back Thursday afternoon and wait for them to actually get put on (ooh – I won’t really have internet access there to distract me, maybe if I take my laptop (or a pad of paper) I can get some work done!)), I started driving around a few places to see if they’d let me post the flyers.  And to stop in to any independent book stores I saw, to see if they’d carry my books.First stop: PVCC, barely a mile from my home, where I have taken 60+ credits worth of classes.  Walked in, the friendly person at information directed me to the friendlier people at Student Life.  They explained the rules, the stamp required, and went over a map of the 14 locations on campus where I could post the flyers.  One of the women even seemed interested in the “FREE E-BOOKS” declared across the top of the flyer.  I walked around campus and posted my 14 flyers.  Nice.  Next stop was the Maricopa County Library, right next door:  Not only do they not have a community bulletin board, but the librarians started by being affronted that someone would want to post a flyer at a library, then went on to disparage e-books (“we prefer the paper ones”), and when neither discouraged me, went on to say that they wouldn’t want to read (or worse, make available to their patrons) my “paper” books, either.  Okay.  No problem.  Tiny branch of a library that deals with charter HS students all day, every day – Like having my wife’s job, but not by choice.

Moved on, then, West on Bell Rd.  Stopped at the “BOOKS” sign at 16th St only to see that the book store there is not only closed Mondays, but has a posted “NO SOLICITORS” sign that has me wary.  Not sure if they carry any new books, or might support local authors at all, and the sign isn’t encouraging to my return, but maybe I’ll pop in.  Continued down Bell, stopped at an independently held coffee shop at 43rd and Bell (Mountain View Coffee, I think, though I can’t find a web site right now) and they were happy to have me post a copy of the flyer on their board.  Continued down to 59th Ave and headed South… no other book stores on Bell, nothing on 59th…  I stopped at the Glendale Public Library, near Dunlap, and the friendly librarians there thought it would be okay for me to post my flyer on their community bulletin board.  Several of them looked the flyer over and looked me over, and they all agreed it was a fine idea. 

My real destination, this far across town in that direction (though only a few miles out of my way – one of my errands was to stop by Kelly Paper (roughly I-17 & Sweetwater) to get something specific for Modern Evil Press letterhead), was GCC.  Just a stone’s throw from the Glendale library, or from Mandy’s old apartment.  I’d never been there, but PVCC had been so friendly, I thought it was another good opportunity.  Alas, GCC seems to have something long and hard stuck up its butt.  Last night when recounting the full story to Mandy, she said she’d heard that the staff there were “grumpy” – I think “rude”, “disapproving”, and “have a stick up their butt” are more accurate.  I won’t go into the details, but from the layout of the parking lot and the buildings on campus to every person I spoke to, no matter how positive, professional, and friendly I was being, my entire experience with GCC was negative.  For a small community college, they were awfully pretentious as well.

Anyway, across Dunlap to 43rd, up 43rd to Thunderbird, and in to the (totally expected) complexity of ASU West.  As long as I was in the neighborhood.  $2/hr to park in the visitors parking, the big sign indicating  the building next to said parking lot contains “Information” being a gross misstatement, and the fact that their boards are nearly all constructed out of a hard enough wood that nails and a hammer would have been a better choice than the thumbtacks I’d brought along; these notwithstanding, ASU West was a generally positive experience.  I have attended classes at the Main campus of ASU and am somewhat familiar with the bizarre complexities of navigating not only their environments but their bureaucracy, so the fact that it took me nearly the full hour (I didn’t want to spend more than the minimum $2 to park, you see) to post the 10 flyers seems like quite a good run.  The actual information desk is three or four buildings away from the clearly marked building that was NOT information and did NOT have available staff to ask for directions inside.  Student Life, which I knew to ask for because I’d seen approved flyers stamped by “Student Life” had been re-named Student Engagement.  10 flyers were allowed – they have 5 outdoor “kiosks,” with the hard wood mentioned earlier, and you’re on your own to find 5 other places to hang things – there are two pages of instructions in addition to the map about how and where and what and for how long ASU West allows flyers.  It took me about 15 minutes of walking up and down and back and forth and around and through one of the buildings (most of which is accessible from outdoor courtyards, even upstairs) to find the “hallways and lobby” where I might find a bulletin board or two to post something.  Actually, after the 15 minutes, I gave up on that building and tried the harder one across the way from it.  After finding the second building’s semi-secret hallways (though not the stairs to get to the upper floors), I had a clue about where to look in the first one for the missing boards.  It was clear from looking at the other flyers already up that some of the posters (“Foreclosure?” and “We pay Blue Book prices!”, I think) had given up on locating anything but the 5 kiosks marked on the map – they had posted two, or even three copies of their stamped flyer at the same kiosk location, sometimes one right beside the other.

Out of ASU West’s silly parking lot, and out across Thunderbird.  Noticed another book store, Book Master New and Used Books / Hero Comics, and stopped in, books in hand.  The store was laid out all segregated, books to one side, comics to the other, and the whole place felt unpolished, DIY, independent/uncorporate, which might have been great, but somehow the comics side was even moreso – like one of those hole-in-the-wall comics shops that no one wants to go in had been forced to mate with a friendly indie book store and the light from the books side just made the comics side uglier and the comics side made the books side less hospitable.  The only apparent employee was cordoned off behind a high counter/display case on the comics side, all long hair and yuppie-grunge, and he had the entire countertop covered in … product, I assume, but there was no clear space to conduct business in, whether I’d been a buyer or a seller.  I told him I was a local author, looking to build relationships with local independent booksellers, and showed him my books.  I mentioned that I did a lot of marketing online and would love to be able to direct readers to his store.  He gave the books a quick once over and handed them back to me.  I asked if maybe there was someone else I should talk to.  He pointed at business cards at the edge of the counter and said I should look them up online, I should contact the owner, Brenda, via email.  He was aware enough that when he picked up a card to try to shoo me out of the store with that there is no URL or email address on the card and just said I should google them.  I asked him to repeat the person’s name, because the card says pretty clearly across the top: “Erin Barragan Owner”  I should email Brenda.  Co-owner?  She’s a local author, he says, pointing at a poster on the wall advertising her book.  She’s in charge of local authors.  I should email her, he says again.  Then, as if suddenly he’s being straight with me, as if this is what I really want to hear, he tells me that “if it were up to him, he’d tell me ‘no’ right then and there.  They carry a lot of local authors’ books, and they don’t sell.”  Like he’s being a nice guy by letting me know that he doesn’t think the store should even carry local authors’ books.  Of course, you and I and anyone else who shops for books knows that what actually sells books is recommendations.  If you haven’t come into the store with a title in mind (recommended in some other time&place), the biggest influence on what you buy is what the store/staff recommends.  They can passively recommend, by featuring a book, by placing it on an endcap, by hanging a poster, and they can actively recommend books to live customers by saying positive things about the books.  But if they actively recommend against an entire class of books…  If they wish they weren’t in the store…  If this guy (who says he runs the “comics side”) is even just a part of the regular staff, it’s no wonder they don’t move many local authors’ books.  Even if my books were in the store, and even if I directed visitors to my website and my blog to seek out Book Master to buy my books, the staff would be actively working against making the sale.  WTF?!  Maybe I’ll email Brenda.

Anyway, then I went by Kelly Paper and got the paper I wanted – they didn’t have the matching envelopes in boxes of less than 500, and I don’t need $50 of envelopes right now, so I ordered the envelopes online – and didn’t see any other book stores or likely places to hang flyers on the way home.

All told, that part of the day went as such: 26 flyers hung in 4 locations around North Phoenix, one neutral experience with a book store, and one negative experience with a book store.

10% of the flyers I printed are hanging.  I definitely want to try Phoenix Library (and if there, then their other branches as well) and ASU Main, and maybe ScottsdaleCC on my way South, and other indie coffee shops around town.  Any other suggestions around GMPhoenix where I might post flyers advertising “FREE E-BOOKS” and extolling the possibilities of the CC NC-BY-SA license?