1. Be interested.
2. Be generous.
3. Be interesting.
4. Connect.

I’ve been thinking about these imperatives a lot for the last few days.  I sometimes seek a guiding principle for my life.  Maybe that’s something us nonreligious people do–I don’t have a spiritual belief to guide me in my decisions and path in life– just a deep-seated personal morality that isn’t much more complex than the Golden Rule.  Do no harm.  Do things to lessen misery for everyone.

It’s not the ethical things that trip me up.  I’m more uncertain about things like purpose and role in life.  And in that regard(-ish), the TED imperatives seem like a good guiding principle for a while, at least. I feel like I’ve managed to do enough to secure myself this year that I can start being more generous and interested.  And perhaps the other things will flow from that. They just feel… right at the moment.  Especially in regards to Godin’s suggestion that they are “valid guidelines for any time you choose to stop hiding and step out into the world.”  I keep stepping further and further out into the world lately.  I felt like the last couple of years have been about rebuilding my life at the foundations. Now it’s time to start adding new elements, connecting what I do and have done to others.  I’m less fearful of what others think of me and my interests now.  And I’m deeply curious about the things others are making, doing, and how they see the world.

What do you think of the TED imperatives?  I’ve re-enabled comments on the site.  They may not be pretty, but they should be functional.  As always, this site is a work in progress.  If you’re following by RSS, you’re definitely aware of that.  I really need to rework the RSS feed to properly include the photos and link URLs.  Sorry for the dust, folks.

As we waited for the show to start, my attention wandered to the crowd.  It felt good to see a bunch of strangers around me and to talk to some of them.  I’m a classic introvert, and I tend to avoid unnecessary social interactions.  I hadn’t realized that my life as a freelancer has me so socially isolated that for a brief period of time, I actually greatly enjoy being around a group of interesting-looking strangers.

And it tickled part of my writing brain that’s been dormant for a while.   I started concocting stories for all these strange faces.  I don’t know why it surprised me, because I love people-watching.  It’s just that you don’t get much opportunity to do that when you spend 10 hours a day staring at the same two monitors and the basement wall behind them.   I spent a lot of time wondering if I was stunting my growth as a writer by being a freelancer who rarely leaves the house.   Again, I was faced with the idea that extroverted writers have an advantage when it comes to the characterization of people.

Paul, who is a fellow work-from-home guy, chatted with me about how we both spent time watching the crowd, and how it was possibly related to our work environments.  He gets out a hell of a lot more often than I do, though.   I feel very poorly socialized compared to him.

Ultimately, I had to remind myself as I sometimes do, that I am an ape.  I’m a smarter than average ape (probably solidly average among the hominids), but I’m still an ape, and my genes carry the evolution-shaped needs and desires of my ape ancestors.   I think we’d all be better off to be reminded of that fact from time to time.  I need to commission an artist friend to make me a memento simia,  an ape replacing the skull of the traditional memento mori.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go pick and eat some nits off my mate.

Lose 30 pounds. Eat more healthy foods, eat out less. Exercise more.

Fail. I didn’t lose weight. I gained a few pounds. If anything, we’re eating out more. However, I have upped my walking to around 3–5 miles a day. It’s a struggle that I continue into 2012. I have been learning to eat more healthy foods, though. My vegetable diet is still minimal, but it’s growing.

Read 36 books, 30% nonfiction and technical.

Success. My percentage of nonfic/technical was around 40%, and I’ve read 39 books for the year. My short fiction reading has dropped off to nearly zero, but I did get a lot more reading done overall. Thank you, iPad.

Complete a 60,000 word YA novel.

Success. I completed a first draft of Takedown Notice in April. However, I’ve failed to revise it or write much since. I’m not happy with it. I have a lot of ideas for fixing it. Some time I hope to get to it. Probably a goal for next year.

Write at least 6 short stories and put them on the market

More success than fail. I wrote 5 stories, and marketed them a bit to little success. I have a long way to go as a writer, but it probably always feels that way.

Make three new friends, regardless of the political/religious beliefs or interests. Take a deeper interest in the humanity of those around me, especially those that are different.

Semi-fail. I’ve made a couple of new friends. I have several Mormon friends now, which is a big improvement for me in being open-minded about others. I would say I solidly failed the second half of this. I’ve been too wrapped up in my business and work to look around me more. I need to change this.

Save enough money to pay off the credit card in 2012.

Success. We could pay off the card. I don’t think we will right now, because we’d rather have the liquidity to deal with upcoming changes.

Create 3 things a week. Little designs, little photo manipulations, flash fiction. Just keep creating, and remind myself why I do what I do. Little acts of creative joy, no matter how heavy my workload gets.

Fail. I barely even attempted this. I was quite busy this year, but you’d think I could do better at creative play. Something to continue to work on.

Keep my clip book/sketch book active, adding at least one interesting thing a week.

Fail. My sketchbook is full of ideas, but I ended up focusing my efforts on becoming a better programmer, and not a better designer.

Stop and marvel at the wonderful life I live more often. Be more thankful to those who make it possible. Continue to improve my positivity, reducing my pessimism.

Success? This is hard to evaluate. I feel more positive about myself and others lately. I still maintain a fundamentally pessimistic view on humanity and the world, but it bothers me less. I feel less concerned and more willing to roll with the punches.

A quick notes on business goals

The business goals had a 40% success rate. I did not create and sell a commercial WordPress theme, but I took steps towards this goal. I was just too busy to work on it, for the most part. I exceeded my income goals, but did not make 3 new prospect contacts a week. I’m a poor salesperson, and I know this. My energy will be focused on better uses in 2012. I failed to grow my service contract income– in fact, it shrank 30% by the end of the year. My clients generally don’t need that kind of  regular support work. I’m putting together a new kind of maintenance agreement, however, that may target my particular type of client better, in 2012. As planned, I learned a tremendous amount about HTML 5 and CSS 3 and have switched my sites over to them almost entirely (for new development). Finally, I succeeded in redesigning the Clockpunk Studios site.

All in all, not a bad year.  Not bad at all.  I hope you had a similarly productive year and that you will be rocking 2012.

This is not me complaining.  Quite the contrary. I’m as excited to work on client projects as much now as I was when I started the business.  But it’s causing me to delay some things, like getting back to this blog regularly.

I intend to spend some time in the next couple of weeks redesigning this blog a bit, to make it more mobile friendly and cleaner, easier to read.   I also want to go over my personal goals for 2011 and check my success and talk about the things I failed to do and why.  It helps keep me honest about them.  And I’ll also be working on my goals for 2012.

I can’t say that I feel like I’ve changed a lot in 2011, except in the sense that I’ve realized I can’t do all the things I want to do in the time I have.  I’ve started to realize that my dreams of being a professional writer/web designer/photographer are pretty much conflicting with one another, and at best I might manage two of them, but not three.  But more on that later.

Mostly, 2011 has been like 2010, only better.  Business has been better, growing slightly!  My life feels more in balance.  But I do feel a bit tired, coming up on the end of it.  I’ve been working hard for the last few months, and I never took a real vacation this year, in the sense of not just traveling for business or family.   I believe I need to make time to travel to recharge my batteries, and more importantly, disconnect.   I had this week scheduled for that, but I’m frankly inundated with client email and calls on a daily basis regardless.  It’s getting harder to see how I can sustain things the way they are and go on a vacation in the future, especially one where I wouldn’t have web access.

About the closest thing I have to a competitive advantage is  that I try my damnedest to offer the best support possible, responding to emails any time, anywhere so long as I’m awake.  But I think this policy may be starting to burn me out, to be constantly worried about clients needing something.  The constant iPhone dinging and checking.  It’s a bit much.  I’m not sure what to do about it yet.  It’ll be something I have to address in the coming year.  If anyone has any advice on the subject, I’d love to hear it.

But as far as problems go, it’s a minor one.  My biggest problem is deciding what risks to take next.  What ways to stretch myself and grow.  There’s food in the fridge, money in the bank, and the rent is paid.  And as far as I know, I’m not suffering from anything uniquely terminal.  I’m very grateful for what I have this year.

I hope your year is wrapping up nicely as well, and I hope you’re thinking ahead to all the great things to come.  Let’s all kick butt in 2012.

The Shuttle of Khazad Dum

The distance between the two hotels, the Atlantis and the Peppermill, is approximately 1.5 miles, or, when adjusted for the desert heat index, 627 miles. The Atlantis has the advantage of being attached to the Sparks Convention Center, wherein the bulk of convention activities take place.  The Peppermill has the advantage of being where I kept my stuff. And about 80% of the rest of the attendees too, it turns out.

The convention helpfully offers a shuttle service between the two locations, spanning the fiery chasm of asphalt and strip malls between.  On day one, returning to my hotel in the late evening, the air conditioning is broken, and the heat is stuck on “Furnace.”  The driver barks over and over, as if to no one in particular, “it’s not my fault.  I’m not allowed to open the windows.”

Day two, I wait 45 minutes for a shuttle to arrive. It is only day two, and the wait is supposed to be only 15 minutes, but oh well.  I am late for a panel, but no big deal.

Day three, I stand in line for the shuttle for 25 minutes before someone comes out to address the line.  “Uh, the shuttle isn’t coming.  A girl threw up all over it and they’re still arguing over who is supposed to clean it up.  The driver is refusing to drive until it’s cleaned.” I take a taxi.

Day four, I step out of the convention center to go back to my room before dinner.  The line is 4 shuttles worth of people, winding far down the baking sidewalk. I take a taxi again.

Meeting New People

Many awesome peoples cross my path for the first, but not the last, time. I meet Doug Cohen, Alliette De Bodard, Erika Holt, Chris Kastensmidt’s roommate Dru (whose name I never remembered because it was missing from his badge), Lee Harris, Alex Lencicki, and many others whose names have left me but whose faces have not.

Despite my snark, there is one message I receive loud and clear at every Worldcon:  You Are Not Alone.  I wish everyone could have the experience of being told this over the course of a four day celebration.  You are not alone in your passions or interests, or your oddness.  You have a place of belonging.  It’s only a matter of finding it.

Eating Pastrami

A few of us gather at the New York Deli for lunch.

“I’ve never had pastrami,” I say. “What’s it like?”

“It’s like pastrami,” says one of the New Yorkers at the table.

The waitress comes to take our order.  “I’ll have the pastrami,” I say.  I turn to my companions when the waitress asks what kind of bread.

“RYE,” they demand in unison.

“Do you want swiss cheese on that?” she asks.

Once again, I turn to my dining companions.  Nick actually shrieks in horror.

“So, uh, no cheese then,” I say.

Later, as I eat the most delicious sandwich ever, I ask for some ketchup.

“For your sandwich?” Nick demands, eyes narrowed.

“No, no,” I say.  “For the french fries.”  Grudgingly, I am given the ketchup.  I  wonder what pastrami tastes like drenched in ketchup, but I do not dare to attempt it.  This, I know now, could cost me my life.

The Case of Cory Doctorow and the Pilfered Chicken

Matt, Jordan, Chris, and I sit and eat some of the most expensive and terrible tasting buffet food we have ever had in the Peppermill’s Island Buffet.  The conversation is good, but many of our friends are up for Hugos and an anxiety looms over the table.

Suddenly, we spot Cory Doctorow in a very nice suit strolling through the room like a man with a mission.  He aims straight for the buffet, tucks something large and brown under his arm, turns neatly, and walks toward the exit, passing us quickly.

Chris and I exchange glances.

“What…?” I say.

“Was that a whole rotisserie chicken?” Chris asks, voice even more full of wonder than mine.

We agree quickly.  Cory Doctorow appears to have taken a chicken from the casino buffet and fled.

“We can’t question this too deeply. I am sure there is a rational reason, but I don’t want to know what it is,” I say.

The Long Walk Back

Nick and I pick our way across the crumbling sidewalk back towards the Peppermill.  Forget frying an egg in this heat; you could cook bacon on my forehead.

I look up at the massive marquee out front facing us. It says “Renovation!” in large letters.  I watch as a car slows down, its occupants staring up at the marquee with consternation.  They drive on.

“It occurs to me that naming a convention “Renovation” might not be the best idea for the hosting hotel,” I say.

The Electronic Publishing Panel

I come into the panel 20 minutes late, and already the audience is asking questions like “But how do you handle the design?”  I quickly check Twitter and find that Pablo is present and about to lose his mind.  I boggle at the sight of Gordon Van Gelder, a man I have long considered one small step above a Luddite, front and center in the panel discussion.  An argument between art and commerce breaks out for no apparent reason.

I am pretty sure this panel was beamed here from 2003 just to piss me off.  I commiserate with fellow internet aficionados in the hall afterward.

A Business Plan For Riches and Success

I wake up one morning with this thought on my head:

“Why isn’t there a strip club across the street from the Peppermill called the Salt Shaker?”

Someone is going to make a mint from that idea.  My wife informs me that it will not be me. Sad panda.

The Prostitute and the Old Man

A group of us sit listening to the worst cover band ever to play for human ears. They perform by rote, with no passion or emotion whatsoever, except perhaps a hint of despair.  The keyboardist’s eyes seem to shimmer with tears.

“I’m pretty sure they are all going to pull out guns and kill themselves as a finale,” I mutter.

“Wow, look at that,” Chris points out to John and me. “That can’t be what I think it is?”

I turn and look.  A rotund man in his sixties sits with a very petite Asian girl, touching hands and talking very intimately.  They are most definitely not father and daughter.

“Forget the prostitute thing, that’s just a given,” Chris  says to general agreement.  “But she cannot be legal.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She could just have a youthful appearance.”

At that moment, she tilts her head back and laughs loudly, revealing a full set of braces gleaming in the bloody light of the bar.

“Uh, do you suppose those costs extra?” I ask.

The Art Show Bet

“You want to go see the art show?” Nick asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “But let’s make it interesting. I bet there will be…” I pick a number from thin air. “Seven animals with completely unnecessary sets of wings. How many do you think?”

“Not nearly enough,” Nick quips, and off we go.  We are accompanied by a cadre young, enthusiastic women writers: Elsa, Jaym, and Carrie.  They gleefully point at naughty bits and women in ridiculous poses. “See! Sexism is dead,” they proclaim.

“I wish I was rich, so I could collect all the really awful stuff,” I say.  “I could invite people to come see collection, just to see their reactions when they realized it was made up entirely of picaresque paintings of kittens cuddling with baby dragons and Kirk tastefully plowing a very stoic Spock.”

“Look at this one!  This wench is gonna get raped,” Elsa says. She points at the painting of a drunk woman in a corset sprawled at the base of a tree. She is surrounded by empty bottles with little Xs on them so you don’t confuse their contents with, what, apple juice?  I think the girl in the painting has eyes that look in different directions. I am not even sure if that’s intentional.

“Why would anyone paint this?” I ask not just my companions but also the universe.  Elsa makes a very filthy comment about the painting, and I find I’m actually blushing.  Also, laughing. We move on.

I count the animals with wings; wolves and cats mostly.  We disqualify the griffins and chimerae.  The total comes to seven exactly.

“I win!” I declare. “But really, I think we all lose.”

Waiting for the Awards

The Hugo Award ceremony is about to begin, but we are sprawled on comfortable chairs while nearly half the convention stands in line outside the doors.

“Look, the cast of Wall-E is here,” someone says, and points at the scores of disabled and large fans sitting impatiently on red scooters.  I laugh, but I immediately feel bad about it.  So I’m probably only going to what, the third or fourth level of hell?

Music strikes up from some kind of 8-bit keyboard played by a man who is almost certainly called “Filthy Pierre.”  It’s the Star Wars theme song.  He segues into a number of other classics.

“Is this music part of the ceremony?” Alex asks. “This is my first Hugos, and…”

“Nope,” I say.  “It’s just something the fans do.”  For all I know, it really is, but I’ve never heard it before.

Now the line is wrapping out of the room and down past the restaurant.  We begin to exchange nervous looks.

“Maybe we should get in line?”

“You guys get in line. I’m going to sit comfortably right here.  There is no way they are filling that place up,” Alex says.

We jump in line, leaving behind Alex to the comfortable seats to shuffle slowly forward.  People behind us begin to moo loudly, and a middle-aged woman demands we stay four people deep in the line.  “This is the line for the Hugos,” she growls at a small family of four attempting to escape the cattle sounds.

After a long and arduous walk, we take our seats in an arena that appears to have been built on Hoth.

“You just wait,” I say to Jordan. “You’ll be happy for it once this place is packed with people.”

Soon enough, it grows very warm.  I look over my shoulder.  Alex has stepped in moments before the awards.  He takes a seat two rows back from us.  My feet hate him.

In Summary

I can’t wait until next year!  See you all there.  Or better yet, at World Fantasy.

Moving is probably my least favorite life activity–with a caveat that ‘dying’ will probably suck more, but I hope not to know for sure for some time yet.  I am always astounded by how much we own when it comes time to pack. I use very little of my belongings on a day to day basis.  I could probably survive with only a few changes of clothes, a toothbrush, a cell phone, and a laptop to my name.   If I wanted to save a little more money, I’d probably need a microwave and a butter knife too.  Everything else seems mostly extraneous, especially when you’re lugging it up a long flight of steps in 90 degree temperatures.

Early on, I managed to pawn off half my books and all of my graphic novels on Paul and Mo Hummer.  Suckers!  I’m a big convert to the Kindle app on my iPad, and real world books seem almost vulgar to me at this point.  I still have an affection for them, but with space at a premium, my affection only goes so far.  Honestly, if there were some kind of Netflix-like service for ebooks (an ebook lending library? Lendle doesn’t count.), I would make the leap and get rid of everything that doesn’t have a strong emotional attachment (books from my childhood, signed copies by favorite authors–that sort of thing).

We go through life accreting belongings like a caddis fly larva builds its shell of stream pebbles.  An inherited table here, a box of books there, and the next thing you know, you’re 33 and your belongings take 3 trips in 4 different vehicles to move from one space to another.  It feels like only yesterday that I moved everything I owned from Lawrence to Grinnell in the back seat of a Jeep Cherokee.  Of course, now I’m married and my belongings are really the possessions of two people.  And she’s pretty attached to that table in the same way I’m attached to my signed copy of Perdido Street Station.  What’s a few pebbles on the back in the name of love?

If I’m lucky and not-lazy (fat chance!), we may get everything unpacked in time to move again.  Not that I’m planning to do that any time soon.  Three times in four  years is plenty, thank you very much.  But life has a way of zigging when you expect a zag.  There’s no sense in fighting it unless you enjoy being frustrated.

In that last sentence you can see a bit of a shift in my life attitude, actually.  Railing against the injustices of the world was practically my number one hobby. If “getting angry at things you can’t change” were an Olympic sport, I would be on a box of Wheaties in a supermarket near you.  But you can only stay stressed and irritated for so long before you finally realize that getting frustrated, angry, and so on is often a choice.  You can choose to roll with things as best you can instead.  And it’s the healthier reaction most of the time.  Pick your battles, because your time is limited and nobody has ever said “I wish I had spent more time complaining about my life” when it enters the final act.

I was 9 or 10 years old and my mother was driving us on an old highway to Carbondale.  Suddenly, the car shakes, my mother gasps, and we pull over. We look through the  rear windshield and see a massive mushroom cloud and fireball rolling up into the sky not more than a mile back the way we came.   There is a tower of flame rising up from the highway itself.  If we had been 30 seconds slower that day, we would have been sitting right on top of that gas main when it blew.

Later, on the news, we saw that it had created a 15 foot deep crater.   It burned for a day or two before they finally put it out.   “Wow, that was close,” I thought, and went about my very busy life of playing with action figures and reading kid’s lit mystery novels.

CUT TO last night, and Sarah and I are trying to make it back to Osawatomie after visiting an old friend of mine (Hi Hans!) up in Eudora.  We’re driving south on a country road and the sky is dark and ominous ahead of us.  Eventually, we start to see the lightning, and it begins to rain big fat drops.  We turned onto 56 for a bit… and someone dumped 2 tons of water on us.  I drove up a ways, but I finally couldn’t see the road anymore.  I pulled over.

The wind was fierce, and we could barely see anything except for the flashes of lightning.  We waited a bit, and then I saw this blue-green flash in the sky ahead, low to the ground, and I felt really uneasy, but couldn’t place why.  I had actually seen that color of electricity once before, but I hadn’t remembered it.  The rain slackened a little bit, and we pulled back onto the road and continued up.

Maybe a 100 yards up the road, right where we would have been parked if we had driven another minute further in the storm, was a downed power pole, lines and all.  We skirted around it and continued slowly.  Every other pole had been torn down, some broken in half, and lay on the side of the road.  At one point, we drove over a line that lay across the road  that must have run directly over it before (we felt safe doing this because someone did it right in front of us and didn’t go blewey).  We needed to turn right in a few minutes, and this entire line of poles was down on the road. We were almost certain that our route home has been cut off.

It turns out the reason I recognized that blue-green flash was because I once spent a tense night in Amarillo Texas watching power transformers explode under the weight of ice all along a highway leading to the airport I was supposed to be flying out of the next day (I didn’t leave for 2 more days). The transformers exploded with that same blue-green colored burst of fire and light.

Miracle of miracles, the power line pole on the OTHER side of that turn was still up, so we made a wide turn and made it onto that road. 15 minutes later, we were pulled over again in another torrential downpour.  I turned on the AM radio and spun the dial looking for weather alerts.  Instead, I found a KC Royals vs New York Yankees game and left that on.  Every time lightning crackled across the sky, the radio burst with static.  We could hear the lightning around us.  It got to the point where we could barely hear the radio at all.   Eventually the storm passed, and we made it home without another incident.

How did those poles get knocked down like that?  The wind we saw was strong, but not that strong.  My suspicion was that, just up the road, a small twister sat down for a bit.  All I saw was the flash.   So we were possibly a hundred yards away from being inside a tornado, and the worst part of it is, it was raining so hard, I didn’t even get to see the funnel!

I should probably at this point take bets on how Kansas will attempt to kill me next.  It’s tried fire and air.  It’s got earth and water up its sleeves still.  If I survive those attacks, I bet I level up and get cool new powers.

I’ve been awash with minor observations about Kansas this trip, as I always seem to be.  I’ve lived elsewhere for 15 years now, and I feel like I have an outsider’s perspective.  I feel like a mostly neutral observer.  Sometimes not neutral at all.

It’s spectacularly green this year, although the rain has been manageable and there hasn’t been any flooding yet.  It was in the 60s when we arrived and it hit 92 yesterday.   I love the countryside, but the weather is doing everything it can to make it miserable for me to enjoy.  I’ve adapted myself to life in the dry mountains.  Humidity makes me look like the villain from The Incredibles, especially my hair.

Since Saturday, we’ve been holed up in the monster of a house in which my mother, step-father, and younger sister live.  It’s something like 3500 square feet, and pretty much my idea of a dream home at nearly 100 years old.  The only problem is that it’s in Osawatamie, The Little Town That Couldn’t.

Once, this was a thriving place, with railroad work to be had and the creepy state mental hospital up on the hill overlooking the town, which sits nestled between the junctions of the Osage and Potawatomie Rivers.  The hospital only houses the criminally insane and the railroad work left a long time ago.  What’s left is a depressed and decaying little place just too far south of Kansas City to turn into a commuter burb.  Although nearly everyone who lives here works in the city now, if they work at all.

I went for a walk this morning as people were getting into their cars and headed to their jobs.  There wasn’t as much traffic as you’d expect.  It was actually very quiet along some of the roads.  The houses were once beautiful Victorians, but now are decaying, with bowed porches and paint-chipped flanks facing dusty gravel alleys.  Every once and a while, you see some kid’s toys in the yard, but mostly the yards are empty, mostly well-kept.  None of them are weed-ridden and completely abandoned.  But there are dozens and dozens of for sale signs.

My mom and I went to breakfast and she pointed out some of the houses and told me how much they wanted for them.  “That one’s listed at sixty-five thousand.”  “That’s a shame, those people worked really hard on that place.  The bank’s only asking thirty-five grand for it.”

I’d been picking up on this sense of loss, sadness, and depression since I arrived, but the stories told by these for sale signs really gives a voice to that feeling.   Add to that the little shops in their downtown area.  No restaurants or coffee shops here; just “antique” (junk) shops, an over-priced electronics store, a barber shop, a couple of banks,  and a lot of empty storefronts. There’s a bed and breakfast down the street the size of a small mansion that sold for $300,000 about 6 years ago and is listed at $150,000 today.   It sits empty on the main street, windows dark.

And really, who the hell would come to stay in a B&B here?  What would they come to see?  John Brown’s cabin?  An old church made of limestone?  You can see those sights in an hour, and then hit the road for more interesting places.  They’re not going to stay for the meth houses that keep cropping up along Main Street.

When my parents first moved here in 2001, things were growing slowly.  They had a Sears and a tire store, and a few more restaurants.   In 2008 or so, the town suffered horrible flooding, and the local economy never had a chance to recover thanks to the national economy tanking shortly afterward.

Each time I visit, it’s a little more quiet, a little more sad and empty.  My parents want out, desperately want to sell and get closer to the city, but nobody’s buying.  When I talk to my Mom about it, it reminds me of how I felt in Wyoming; trapped within the geography of it all.  I could escape temporarily, but for a while I didn’t think I would ever get away.   Luckily, things can change.  They just take some time.

The low property costs plus the proximity to Kansas City would seem to indicate that Osawatomie just might recover some day.  That’s assuming gas prices don’t spiral so completely high that the whole town is abandoned overnight, anyway.   But then maybe the city will put in a light rail system that comes through the area.  Suddenly Osawatomie would be a very desirable place to live.  If I were a local politician, I’d be aiming to make that happen.  But I’m just an outside observer.

I  call it the Little Town That Couldn’t Anymore.  Its glory days are behind it.  But I can’t help but hope for some optimistic future. Things like towns don’t die easily in my experience, especially not ones that are 150 years old.

I want it to be the Little Town that Will.    Why?  I guess that’s just the kind of weird, pessimistic optimist I am.  And I hate to see anything die—town, person, or ideal.

The long of it is, I had 3 weeks of completely fallow work time in February.  I took this as an opportunity to try and reorganize my marketing efforts for Clockpunk Studios.  I put together a new design, refocused all of my copy, and tried to show off what I’m capable of in design and coding.  I’m proud of the work I did.  There are some things I wish I could have spent more time on, but could not.   You should go check out that new design if you haven’t yet.  Especially check out the contact form.

Yesterday was a really rough day for me because the abovementioned new site was rejected from a major CSS gallery.  My biggest fear for a long time has been that I’m no good at what I do, and that other professionals think I am a joke.  This rejection brought those fears home to roost and I didn’t take it terribly well.  I definitely take writing rejection easier, but I think that’s because I never rely on my writing to pay the bills.  Any money that generates is a surprise.  Having my career seemingly invalidated by such a small motion hurt.  And thinking that it invalidated my career was absurd anyway.

Truth is, quite a few people like the work I do for them.  I’ll never win awards, but honestly, having clients happy with the work is mostly all the recognition I need.  If only I could pay the bills with client satisfaction.

While last year was a great year for me, this year has started out pretty rough.  Starting around mid December, business started dropping off and it’s only continued its trend downward.  Possibly this is related to some kind of business trouble for publishing as a whole.  I almost certainly need to do more work in developing my business outside of that niche.  But I do like the niche!

I’ve dedicated myself so thoroughly to the business that I’m not giving myself any other outlets.  This blog has been weak lately, as you may have noticed.  I haven’t written anything significant this year either.  And I haven’t picked up my camera since June. 

This is the dark side of being an independent business owner.  Its success or failure rests solely on your shoulders.   You can never sit back and coast.  And when the going gets rough, it really gets rough.  You never expect it.

I’ve got some new projects to get me through March, but beyond that, I have nothing lined up.  This will really be the year that determines if my business has any long term potential.  If things don’t turn around by July or so, I’ll start looking for a job alongside Sarah.