It’s difficult.  Partially because I do need the money, so the commercial aspect, the idea that I’m making art I’m going to try to sell in order to buy groceries, is constantly in mind.  When I get in the neighborhood of thoughts like ‘what can I paint that will sell?’ and ‘what sort of art do people want?’ I tend to get stuck.  Like writer’s block, but for artists.  Well, like writer’s block for writers whose block stems from not wanting to “sell out,” anyway.

I have no interest in freelancing, or in getting a job as an illustrator, designer, journalist, pro-blogger, or any other such thing.  I don’t want to write the same book over and over again (ie: formulaic fiction, or process-wise, most non-fiction).  I don’t want to paint/create the same image over and over again.  I know, yes, verily I know, that these are core ways writers and artists are able to “establish” themselves and their “style” and to build a career.  To build a base of buyers who want to read another one like the last one you wrote, who are comfortable with your art because although each swirly tree is different, they can at least count on you to still be painting swirly trees the next time they need something for their walls.  And buyers would be nice.  Repeat buyers would be even better (and I have a few), but I nearly never want to be painting the same thing I’ve painted before.

((Technically, my not-very-publicly stated policy on the subject of re-creating an original work is that the base price multiplier for each successive recreation doubles.  I have a formula (an occasionally altered one, but fairly consistent for the last few years) which accounts for a work’s size and quality to determine price.  It is intentionally tweaked to give quirky prices.  I like them.  But imagine for recreations that formula is multiplied by 2ⁿ (where n is the number of times I’ve been asked to reproduce the image).  If created in quick succession, at the same size and quality, prices would quickly rise, say from $60 for the original to $120 for the second, $240 for the 3rd, $480 for the 4th, $960 for the 5th, $1920 for the 6th, $3840 for the 7th, and very quickly someone asking for the 8th copy is paying 128 times the cost of just buying something different instead.  Luckily, people don’t often ask me to paint something I’ve done before – and when they do, I simply tell them how much it would cost & see if they want it that much.))

But it is hard even to paint something new, if all I can think about is wanting to avoid painting something that won’t sell, because the bills just keep coming, even when I have a couple of dry sales months.  I’ve even been stalling a little, lately, in working on my next novel, which is intentionally an experiment in writing a formulaic (or at least recognizable) zombie novel – because although I’ve come up with a story I want to tell (and in my research of what makes a formulaic zombie novel fit, I’ve discovered that my novel won’t be as formulaic as I’d hoped… which is part of the problem), both writing a novel in reaction to people’s negative reaction to my last one (which is what motivated this experiment in the first place) and knowing before I start that my experiment will be a failure (ie: my novel will fail to be a cookie-cutter zombie novel, or to follow the ‘rules’ of commercial fiction) give me pause in pursuing it.  Even though it’s a story I want to tell, a book I want to write.

I am having trouble both because I don’t want to write commercial fiction and because I fear my attempt to do so will be ridiculously far from that blasted mark.  How can I be properly creative with this dark and complicated cloud of commerce always hovering over everything I do?

I’ll do another post soon, with photos I took along the way, but here’s the finished image.  See more of my art at http://wretchedcreature.com/

Finish painting ‘going in circles‘

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

Sign & put wire &c. on all finished paintings

Mark T-shirts somehow with size

Take book reviews less personally, somehow

Print price cards for new art & shirts

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

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

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

Also photograph & put online these new Mini-Paintings:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update 1:

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I’m unhappy with this, right now.

I put Chapter 1 of the Dragons’ Truth audiobook up at dragonstruth.com.

I added a link to dragonstruth.com over at teelmcclanahan.com, and re-arranged the page a little.

I’ve been waffling for the last week or so on exactly what colors to use for a piece I sketched out, but I spent a few hours working on it in Photoshop last night, pre-visualizing various color schemes, and came upon something which should be both in line with my original thoughts and interesting to look at.  I threw the first coat of paint on it tonight:

I also started and finished another painting this week.  I’m calling it “things i’ve lost“, and I’ll post later with more images and information on making it:

Yes, that’s my hair.

What else?  Hmm…  I’ve uploaded Dragons’ Truth to Podiobooks.com twice now; I’m told it should go online Monday.

Oh, and I’ve been Plurking a lot lately.

Conversation threads this morning on Twitter (which I can’t retrieve, on account of Twitter is “stressing out” – and I don’t feel like trying to track everything down with tweetscan/summize), included one creator saying they were thinking of planning on releasing a project they’re working on … in September or October.  To which my mind replied: “I don’t understand.  If you have a releasable product, why not put it out there as soon as it’s ready? For a finished product, why wait?”

Now, I can see how with certain products – say, a dancing Santa Claus doll or a new line of Valentine’s Day candies – releasing at a particular time of year might be appropriate.  And I can see how products which will only be relevant for a limited time should be released in a specific time period – though that’s now, not later – to avoid irrelevance.

I can even see where something like a blockbuster movie, trying to maximize attention and profits would want to schedule its release to not be the same weekend as a directly competing release, which would not only compete for viewers dollars but for the actual, finite number of screens, but — and this is a big but — I can’t see why a studio would hold off on releasing a movie for months or, as actually happens more often than you’d think, years after it was ready to be shown.  The finite number of screens is (I believe) now well over 30,000 in the US alone, and even the widest of releases hasn’t topped 1/3 of those – there’s a LOT of screens, if you have a movie ready to go, put it out there!   If you don’t think it’ll make “enough” money in theatres, throw it to DVD – as long as you keep it in print, it’ll be available to whoever wants it.  As long as it’s sitting “in the can”, unreleased, it’s not making anyone any money, it’s not entertaining anyone, it’s not communicating anything, it’s wasted.

Which, I think, is part of my problem with the whole thing:  Someone, possibly a lot of someones, put their hard work and creative energy and ideas into creating something, and that work, that creation, is being held back, hidden, kept from its audience.

The only response I got to my query on Twitter gave a few possibilities. Responding to a competitor, because it could hurt sales of a past product… but the number one response, and the one I see most often relating to this subject, generally is: To get good press.

And based on my research, the press wants your finished product and your press release months in advance of the product’s launch.  A three month lead time – for everything except daily newspapers – is the barest minimum.  Monthly magazines are effectively finalized three months before they hit newsstands, so they need even more lead time.  From what I’ve read, if you give them several months’ advance notice that you’re going to do so, daily newspapers only need weeks prior to a product’s launch to cover it.  And since that’s what the press asks for, that’s what the press gets, AND that’s what companies have become used to giving them.  So… the standard is that -if you want ‘good’ press- you have to have your product finished and ready for market a quarter or half a year before you want to release it.  The lead time in publishing, between an author turning in a complete manuscript and the book hitting store shelves seems to be one to two years, leaning toward two years, and the book is effectively done for most of a year of that. WTF?  Seriously?

I can upload a file to my printer today and -if I wanted to pay for expedited shipping- have finished, salable books in hand this time next week.  (Possibly within a week, depending.)  Amazon goes a little slower, so another week or two to have a complete page on Amazon (though if I wanted to be a Marketplace Seller, I could probably get the product up by the time the printer got it to me), but usually a couple fewer days than Amazon to hit other online booksellers like B&N, ABEBooks, Powell’s, et cetera.  I had set myself an arbitrary goal of having the book of short stories I’m working on finished in “May 2008″ and had been thinking of trying to churn away at it all week to have the finished book to the printer by the end of the month – if I did that, it would be 100% as available as every other book I’ve ever written by mid-June at the latest, and right now it’s just a virtual stack of rough drafts.  Except, apparently, if I did that, no reputable publication would ever, EVER, review the book, because I didn’t send them a “galley” to read 3-6 months in advance of publication.  WTF?  The book will be available, “in print”, indefinitely.  Forever.  It’s not a limited-time release.  It doesn’t stop being a book worth reading because it’s already out, or because it’s been out a year or two years or ten years.  It doesn’t actually stop being something worth reviewing the moment it becomes available to the public.

Yes, I know new books are coming out all the time – but that’s a separate issue.  The fact that something in the neighborhood of 100,000 new books were published last year in the English language is … wow.  Amazing, ridiculous, fantastic, encouraging, inspiring, et cetera.  Impossible for any one person, really even any team of people, to keep up with.  A publication dedicated entirely to reviewing books, a daily publication, an internet publication, a blog, even, with new reviews going up all the time … well, maybe a blog or wiki with thousands of reviewers working together to thoroughly cover every release could, but … it would be difficult, if not impossible, to review every book.  A normal publication, in the face of this, must decide how it will choose which books to review – that is a simple fact.  The idea that they’ve all decided that rule #1 is to ignore all books already in print is … arbitrary at best, but also ignorant and highly irrational.  What about the thousand-plus books that were released each week that they never even heard about?  If only a tiny portion of those were worth review, but came to the reviewers’ attention too late, too bad, eh?  What a terrible criteria.

I’ve gone on a tangent, have I?  Fine.  To sum up: The “good reason” to put off product releases is to get “good press” — because the press generally refuses to cover anything they don’t get access to before everyone else.  My response:  This is a practice based in the limitations of the past, on false scarcity and a lack of persistence -not just of products, but of vision-, which in the face of previously unheard-of levels of production (ie: 100k new books a year) and availability (ie: print on demand means nothing ever needs to go out of print), needs a massive overhaul.

The wrapping up of which brings me around to the second concept I wanted to address in this post, which I will try to do somewhat more succinctly:  I think that what people want is more content, more products; I don’t think that what people want is more marketing.

My basic, foundational, concept for what I plan to do with Modern Evil Press and wretched creature as I go forward, is based on this idea.  I’m going to paint as many paintings as I have ideas for, and make them available online for sale as soon as I can get a photograph of them taken – usually as soon as the paint is dry.  I’m going to write as much fiction as I have time for (I’ll likely never run out of ideas – I have hundreds of them, filling notebooks and file folders, usually a book’s worth of ideas per page), and put it out as quickly as possible – probably within a few weeks of getting first drafts I’m happy with.  I’m going to let people know what new things are available through whatever channels I have available (twitter, mailing list, shouting from street corners (did I mention I snagged a corner spot for the Phoenix First Friday Art Walk in June & July?), et cetera), and it is my belief that if enough people are interested enough in what I’m doing to want to pay attention, then I’ll be able to make a living on volume.  This is a version of the “1000 true fans” model – if I can find a critical mass of people who will gladly buy every book I put out, and enough people who will buy a piece or two of my art every year, and I just keep putting out new stuff all the time – two, three, or more books a year and dozens of paintings, I  can do what I love and still eat.

Because I believe people want what I create, not to see ads for what I’ve created and will be releasing later.  Marketing is to let people know the product is available – don’t confuse the issue and begin to believe that marketing is what the people want.

I started sketching in a cheap sketch-book I had on-hand, while waiting for the paint on ‘darkness looming‘ to dry, and started trying to see what might turn into another new painting. After several pages of messy nothing, I came up with a sketch for a something I liked. Sadly, for you, I didn’t take a picture if it, and I’m not going to, now. Maybe later. Anyway, it seemed interesting enough, and I annotated a few lines and spaces with ideas for colors, and after finishing the inking on ‘darkness looming‘, I started to work on the first layer of ‘1, 2, 3, 4, ‘. This layer was intended to be seen only in the vertical split between the left 2/3 and right 1/3 of the painting, and in the square in the lower right corner, but I wanted to do it right (and add a layer of texture) so I painted the entire canvas.

Purple.

Then I waited half a day for that to dry. And then, before I started working on the painting again, I set up a video camera to capture the rest of the process. I put a line of 1/2″ tape vertically on the canvas, and cut out a square of tape for the square – it’s like a sort of stencil; where I put the tape, the purple remains when I paint over the rest. Then I painted on the red circle, the blue background, the off-color right-side… You’ll watch the video and see it, right? I don’t need to describe it all in detail? Well, I painted on the colors, and as I’ve learned to do from countless past tape-involved projects before, I pulled up the tape while the paint was still wet. So, to explain the next part of the video: tape isn’t perfect. So some of the paint leaks under. What you can see me doing is cleaning up the worst of it, trying to maintain the purple background as intact as possible without hurting the (still wet) pink and blue foreground. The image you see at right is the painting when this process was complete; the main elements of color are present, but I hadn’t yet put on any borderlines, and certainly hadn’t painted the most-foreground element (the black, horizontal lines), so this image is sort-of an in-between-takes image. It was taken in between where the camera angle changes in the video. The camera angle changed, by the way, because I waited until the next day for it to dry, and I had to put away the camera before Mandy came home, or it would have blocked the walkway.

After the new color layer had dried, it was time to deal with the remaining (slight) leakage (mostly of white) at the edges of where the tape had been. I had taken a day to think about it, and had decided to use pearlescent purple and blue paint pens to both clarify the division by increasing the contrast from one color to another, and to cover up an otherwise unsightly evidence of my process which (in my opinion) did not improve the end result. The video of my tracing the outlines of the previously-taped sections is not particularly interesting, but I decided to just leave it all in. Then, semi-satisfied with the result of the colors, and after the paint from the paint pens had had a chance to dry, it was time for the three rough, black lines that overlap the piece. I put them vaguely on (for scale, placement, and some semblance of erraticism) first in Sharpie, then with a paintbrush and black paint. I knew exactly what I wanted, and it was no problem to execute this final step. There were only minor touch-ups of the black lines after the video camera was turned off, and ‘1, 2, 3, 4, ‘ was ready for hanging.

So that’s how I made this painting.  The title was selected while it was still a sketch, and ’1, 2, 3, 4, ‘ is now available for purchase at wretchedcreature.com

While I waited, I sketched and doodled, and otherwise tried to come up with another idea for a painting.  It turned out to be ‘1, 2, 3, 4, ‘ …  Anyway, after that excitement ((don’t tip the canvas, don’t move it, the blackness might move “wrong”)), when the black was dried, I used several sharpies to draw the figure.  I won’t bother pretending that it went exactly as I’d hoped.  Well, the proportions came out right.  The feet are good, the angles on the legs, through the knees, up to the shoulders, the angles were good.  The hands (well, ends of the arms) were just how I wanted them.  But then… well, the head’s shape wasn’t 100% right.  And trying to fix it … well, it didn’t … I’m not 100% happy with it.  I’m not 90% happy with it.  My original thought for the figure was that he was looking down, the line across the head being the eye-line, the dark note along the bottom edge being a hint of mouth.  Then, due to errors, the dark at the bottom became increasingly a shadow, a thick line, and… well, when Mandy saw the finished work hanging on the wall when she came home, she said the figure looked happy – the line is a smile in her eyes.  Which I’m now having trouble not seeing.

So, that was that.  This is a simple piece, based on a simple sketch.  Titled ‘darkness looming’, it is now available for purchase at wretchedcreature.com

Anyway, last week I started work on another of my paintings based on a sketch / doodle I did in the margin of a page of notes at work last year.  At the time that I doodled it, I outlined what was supposed to be part of the drawing in red – you can see that there were some overlapping notes leftover, in the picture below on the left.  If you look closely at the picture on the right, you can just make out the pencil-line I sketched freehand onto the canvas to get things started for this piece.  It didn’t match the original sketch, but considering I was freehand drawing from a blurry photo of a doodle, and that the whole thing is in a pretty loose style, I wasn’t too worried about it.  The pencil sketch captured the important details of the figure.

Instead of doing what I’d been doing on the last few pieces, and building up layers, from foreground to background, I decided to just paint everything at once on this piece, and stitch the colors together with a thick border, akin to what I’d done to outline the figure in audacity of hope.  So, I knew the character’s skin would be a pale blue-green color, and wanted his hat & coat to be a darker, but cool color, somewhere between deep blue-black and a dark violet, or perhaps a dark grey with a hint of color.  But I wasn’t sure what color the background should be, so … I just picked the color that contrasted with dark blues and purples the most, and voila – an orange background!  Before the orange even started to dry (which is how I usually operate – paint one color, wait for it to dry, paint the next color, and so on…) I went ahead and got out some purple and blue and white to mix in for the band and top of the hat, and got to work on the hat and coat.  It was much more purple than I’d intended.  I kept mixing more blue in, especially into the coat, but in the end, it was all much too purple to match my intentions.  Since the orange had actually ended up much more saturated than I’d wanted, the contrast between the rich orange and the rich purple ended up being well matched.

Then, while those colors were still drying, I moved forward again.  I mixed up a pale blue-green for the skin, more blue in the skin and more green in the beard, but a very subtle gradation between hues was what I was going for.  In contrast with the blue-purple coat surrounding it, the green in the beard almost disappears.  I actually spent about as much time just on getting the beard to look the way I wanted as I had on the entire hat.  I knew I’d been planning on adding a thick outline to the major features of the character before I was done, but I also didn’t want to have to outline the beard – I wanted it to look furry/hairy on its own.  So I made sure that I not only was creating variations in color, but that I was creating a fully-overlapping color, beard-over-coat, with hairs and mess along the full edge of the beard, from lip to eyeball.  The other colors all had a bit of space between them, and were fairly rough, but for the beard I made sure that the edge I was painting would be an edge I was happy with.  More green added to the blue-green for the eyes, then black added to that for the centers, and then for the mouth.  For the centers, I also didn’t want to have them outlined, so I made sure the black was touching the green.  Then, finally, I decided to let it dry before doing the outlines.

The next morning, I went out to run some errands, among which was to pick up a gold paint pen.  I actually ended up going to six different places to find three items.  Only one of which was the gold paint pen that I used to outline the figure’s hat and coat.  I’d already had a pearlescent blue pen on hand to use to outline the figure’s eyes and mouth, and that was the easy part.  I fought with myself for a long while, trying to get happy with the shape of the hat, the thicknesses of the lines, how much purple was left, how much gold I wanted to use in total…  And the pen I’d bought was terrible.  Just terrible.  It was a real pain just trying to use it without screwing anything up, but after the morning I’d had running all over I wasn’t about to go out and start looking for another one, so I struggled through.

Then I spent a couple of hours debating with myself (and with a few people on Twitter) over whether or not I ought to add in the feather-in-his-cap that had appeared in the original sketch (but which, I think, would have made the figure look much more pimp-like, and much less jazz-y), and what, exactly to call the thing.  In the end, I decided no feather, and a title both evocative and descriptive in turns.

Thus, I give you: ‘low moan, wide hat’, available for purchase from wretchedcreature.com

So to get off to a good start, I started with a painting. I’ve been meaning to document my “process” better, so I also took a quick shot of the first coat of paint with my iPhone and threw it up on flickr (thumbnail at right). It’s a sort of a landscape right now. The image I’m planning for this background, which I will now describe as a “…monster with a robot head…” is not what it sounds like. Maybe I’ll post some more images tomorrow, when I’m working (digitally, of course) on adapting the sketch for the canvas. I sortof jumped the gun on the composition of the background without doing proper previsualization, but it’s no problem to work the elements together on the computer screen before I apply any more paint.

Ooh, thinking of it, I actually took a photo of another painting first, while the sun was still quite low. It’s one of four paintings I finished last year that I’ve only just put on wretched creature: ‘what… and why?’ was today’s photo, and I’ve been working on getting ‘it’s the internet…’, ‘without you’, and a (currently) untitled one with a face … Okay, admittedly, when I finished it I had a name for it, and I didn’t write it down or put it on the site right away, so … I can’t remember it right now. I’ll update it later, in the event I can recall the full name.

Then I spent a couple of hours reading my feeds, focusing on publishing feeds, and following a couple dozen links to more publishing and lit blogs, going through them to find ones I think will be beneficial and subscribing to them and passing on the rest. Ah, blogs. I’ve got to start reading them, getting in tune with whatever it is “blogging” has turned into in the last few years, and becoming an active part of “the conversation” – because, as the people who appear to be in the know will tell you, that’s a key part of successful online sales. The blogosphere. Yup.

Then I worked on outlining the specifications and basic layout I want to try and either implement (by spending hundreds of hours learning modern web programming and building it) or find someone else to implement (see the paragraph above, re: becoming part of “the conversation” – I just have to get these ideas into the heads of the genius programmers already doing stuff, and they’ll do it, right?) in the coming months for … what I’m currently referring to as “Web 2.5″ in my notes and design documents. I want to put my novels online with it, and blog in it, and I’d like to see it spread a bit through the internet. More on that later.

After a couple of pages of that, I grabbed some drawing paper and sketched out a design for a flyer to advertise my books. And then spent the rest of the day in InDesign and Photoshop working on the flyer. Actually, it came out pretty good. I’ll get some copies made soon and get them posted up places. Your suggestions for places are welcome. I’m thinking, like, colleges, libraries, and then the book stores I’ll be schlepping my books around to to try to get them on shelves in, anyway. Ooh, I know. Here, (right-click, choose Save As…) a PDF of the flyer for you to print and post if you want to help. Its primary focus is on my free e-books, and the wonders of the Creative Commons license.

Anyway, then Mandy came home, and it only took another 30 or 45 minutes to get the flyer done after that, and then … we went for a walk, had dinner, and I settled in to write this post while we watched a movie (Black Irish)… and actually, Mandy’s just headed to the bedroom, so I guess it’s bed time again.

Hopefully we’ll have another good day tomorrow. Plenty to do. Gotta stay home for now – I’ve ordered a big order of physical books, and the first box arrived today (all poetry) and three more are coming tomorrow – but that alone gives me plenty to do. Finally going to set up my own online sales. Planning on using Google Checkout, so I’ve gotta sign up for that, read all the documentation, and re-work my website with a bunch of links so people can order books directly from me and can pay for the PDFs if they want to. (ie: If they want to support the artist for a little less than the cost of the book itself.) I gotta figure out shipping costs, I guess. Anyway, that’s it for now. Good night.