So today I’m listening to Babs and this line keeps jumping out at me: “Art isn’t easy, even when you’re hot. Advancing art is easy; financing it is not…Every time I start to feel defensive, I remember vinyl is expensive.”
In case no one missed me, I’ll tell you what I’m doing:
1. Damned Day Job. You know, I’m awfully glad to have one right now, so I’ll refrain from bitching. See aforementioned financing art to understand why I feel obliged to tell you that.
2. Had a very short deadline drop in my lap for a project I feel privileged to be part of, so there is much e-mailing and such going on around my office in order to get this yumminess out into the marketplace.
3. Stay is finished sorta. A secondary character (a throwaway, but how come all my redshirts end up demanding their own stories?) garnered some attention from alpha readers who said, “Hey, what happened to him?” The original story with Vanessa and Eric is finished and in the hands of beta readers. Yet again I’ve decided to do something bizarre, which is to say, put two mirror-image stories back-to-back in the same spine.
4. Magdalene is 3/4 finished. I believe Cassie St. James is the woman I’ve most enjoyed writing. Ever.
This balancing the art with the marketing is getting on my nerves, quite frankly. I’m a writer and I love my imaginary friends; I settle in with them and I’m mentally…gone…for days.
Plus, I’m still convinced that an author’s brand is the writing, the stories themselves. How can you have a brand that’s the writing if you only have 1 product?
I like blogging, don’t get me wrong—when I have something to say. I also didn’t like feeling like a slave to my stats, who’s visiting, where they’re coming from, what they’re reading…
Some days, I just don’t have anything to say and you know, I think more people should just not say anything when they have nothing to say. Not every second of every day must be filled with words just because we fear silence.
March 13th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
.
(Sorry about that.)
But blogging is writing too, isn’t it?
March 13th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Dude says blogging is writing but not “Writing”.
March 14th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Agreed.
While I’m on a 10 year plan here, and hope to turn the fiction into a decent income stream within that time, it’s definitely not where all my eggs are. I have two other baskets, one of which is fairly fiscally sound. So we’ll see.
My goal would be to be able to make a healthy living through my own efforts, where fiction is just ONE thing I’m doing, and definitely something I’m not relying on. The more free I am to write the fiction I want, the better.
And yeah I’ve stopped daily blogging and tracking stats, etc.
March 16th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
I hope you come back soon. To paraphrase that modern poet, Kelly Clarkson, the internet sucks without you.