Archive for the ‘personal’ Category

Four Things I learned at World Fantasy Convention 2010

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

1. It is pos­si­ble to cram 600 peo­ple into one hotel bar.

convention

I might be exag­ger­at­ing just a bit, but I have never seen a bar so packed with con­ven­tion goers.  This was a bit early in the evening actu­ally, and there’s con­sid­er­ably more peo­ple than I could get with the iPhone.

2. I can only take the pres­ence of so many peo­ple for so long before I go crazy.

It should prob­a­bly not shock you to know that I’m a bit intro­verted.  However, I don’t get to see SF/​F types in per­son but once every cou­ple of years if that, so when I go to these things, I start out in a manic “must see EVERYONE” phase.  The first day is a flurry of me meet­ing new peo­ple, greet­ing old friends and clients, and gen­er­ally just being very not like me.  Some peo­ple have said that I seem at ease with peo­ple, but it’s REALLY not the case.  I’m scared and anx­ious almost the entire time I’m in these sit­u­a­tions unless I’m with peo­ple I’ve known for a long time.  I don’t like being the first per­son to speak up in a con­ver­sa­tion, and in large crowds, I tend to hide in a cor­ner where no one can sneak up on me.

As the week­end grinds on, I become more and more drained by it all, and I basi­cally strug­gle with mini depres­sive episodes.  The eas­i­est way, I’ve finally learned, of deal­ing with this is to go to my room and spend some time alone. 

This results in me get­ting angry with myself for not tak­ing bet­ter advan­tage of the time I have to soak up all that social won­der­ful­ness while I have a chance.  I spend a lot of time moan­ing to myself about how I don’t have that many friends locally to me, and almost no SF/​F com­mu­nity.   When I’m sit­ting in my room while a huge party is going on 4 sto­ries below me, I start to get angry with myself, which just causes a crazy feed­back loop.

I still need to fig­ure out a way to deal with it.  Accepting that I won’t be able to make use of every sin­gle moment of my time at a con­ven­tion is prob­a­bly the first step.

3. I really need to get my ass in gear.

I’ve strug­gled with whether or not I want to be a writer, and how hard I really want to work at it.  But being around so many suc­cess­ful, amaz­ing peo­ple clar­i­fies my pur­pose.  I really do want to write, and to write well, and to grow my career in that depart­ment.  I often feel like I’m behind my “peer group’ of writ­ers who I started out with because I lost so many years to an absence of pro­duc­tiv­ity after my Dad.  It’s time to buck up, buckle down, and get to work.  I have goals, and it’s going to take reg­u­lar, hard work to meet them.

4.  There are total strangers pay­ing atten­tion to what I say.

It turns out that more peo­ple than just my friends and fam­ily are fol­low­ing my progress.  For that, I am thank­ful.  When strangers come up to me and tell me that they love my tweets or my blog, it almost always shocks me.  There’s a big dif­fer­ence from look­ing at ana­lyt­ics num­bers of fol­lower count, and actu­ally meet­ing some­one who’s read­ing your work. 

And auto­graphs!  I’m still not used to being asked to sign books.  And this year, I signed copies of Way of the Wizard for peo­ple who I didn’t per­son­ally know!

A guy could get used to that kind of attention.

All in all, a great experience

So that’s just a few things I’ve been digest­ing on the long drive back to Kansas.  I’m likely to have more thoughts later as I’ve had more time to mull it all over.  I was going to hold over for a day here in Kansas to recover, but I’m anx­ious to get home and get back to work, so I think Monday will be a dri­ving day and I’ll be back to work on the free­lance and writ­ing full time on Tuesday.  I miss my dual monitors.

Thanks again to each of you who came up to me and chat­ted dur­ing World Con.  I didn’t meet a sin­gle per­son who wasn’t kind and won­der­ful and the kind of per­son I would love hang­ing out with reg­u­larly.  You’re all an amaz­ing bunch and I hope to see you again in the future.

This post is going up on Sunday night, but I’m count­ing it as Monday.  Regularly sched­uled blog­ging will resume Tuesday morning!

Fish!

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

fish

The prod­uct of an evening’s fish­ing at a small local lake.  I’ve writ­ten about my guilty love of fish­ing on the blog else­where.  I’m only per­son­ally respon­si­ble for one of these guys—the one on the left.  My step­dad Mike caught the other.  Between us, we caught half a dozen or so tonight, but these were the only two that exceeded the 15 inch limit at the lake.

I’ll be hav­ing these pup­pies for din­ner on my way back through Kansas on Monday!  Can’t wait. Mmm, cat­fish.  Also, hush pup­pies.  A cats and dogs kind of meal.

The Best Meal Ever

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

photo

Lazy trav­el­ing blog post time, in which I reveal myself as a bit of a mama’s boy.  If I under­stand that term correctly.

Sarah’s a damned good cook, but she can’t make this (mostly because of its heavy use of eggs, to which she is deadly aller­gic).  I’m pretty sure she’s come to terms with the fact that this is the one meal I just can’t get enough of.  Specifically, my mother’s chicken and noo­dles.  I could eat this for days on end (and when I come home for a visit, I do).

Thick, lumpy egg noo­dles, chicken, and broth over mashed pota­toes.  A yeasty bread roll to sop up the extra juice is nice, but not nec­es­sary.  Add pep­per and salt to your taste. 

Weirdly, it’s almost even bet­ter the sec­ond day, after the chicken broth has had some time to con­geal.  It microwaves up quite a bit thicker, and oh so tasty.  The photo above doesn’t begin to do it justice.

Anyway, I’m here in Kansas, work­ing away on var­i­ous tasks.  My plans are loose; I’ll prob­a­bly go fish­ing tomor­row night.  I’m plan­ning to start the drive out to Columbus on Wednesday after­noon, hop­ing to shave enough time off the 12 hour drive so that I arrive at a rea­son­ably early hour on Thursday.  Half way puts me in the mid­dle of Indiana when I stop for the night, which is cool.  I’ve never been to Indiana or Columbus.  Hopefully it’ll make for some pretty scenery.

My Love-​​Hate Relationship with Kansas

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

You can­not live in a place for 18 years of your life with­out part of it get­ting inside of you.  Even if the pop­u­lar image of that place is that it’s full of God-​​fearing big­ots who want all gay peo­ple to burn in Hell and to ban evo­lu­tion­ary the­ory from schools.  The peo­ple can be small-​​minded, con­ser­v­a­tive, ter­ri­fied of any­one dif­fer­ent from themselves.

There’s a lot to dis­like, or even be ashamed of, for Kansas.  But there’s a lot I love about my home state too.

I love how friendly peo­ple are in every­day inter­ac­tions.  Shopkeepers are gen­er­ally friendly, pleas­ant.  It’s rare that I get truly rude service.

I love the wide open prairie.  I love the thun­der storms that come rolling across in the late sum­mer.  I even like the thrill of tor­nado warn­ings, hid­ing in the base­ment, lis­ten­ing to the radio and won­der­ing what kind of dam­age will be done.

I love fish­ing in the rivers and lakes for crap­pie and cat­fish.  Nothing beats reel­ing in a 8 pound chan­nel cat.

I love walk­ing on the board­walks in the wet­lands and spot­ting dozens of dif­fer­ent species of waterfowl.

I love walk­ing down­town in Lawrence, watch­ing the crowds.  I love the lit­tle shops and restau­rants that have been there doing their things since I was a kid.

I love the night sounds of cicadas and cricket frogs on a sum­mer night.

I love the way it smells, just as the sun sets, when the fire­flies are out.  (We don’t seem to have fire­flies in Colorado).

I love count­ing the red tail hawks sit­ting atop fence posts and bill­boards as I drive down the highway.

I love that it doesn’t snow very often.

I love the dis­tant sound of of the Santa Fe Rail trains mak­ing their way across the plains for Denver.

I love that my fam­ily is gath­ered all in the same 100 mile radius, and I can see most of them when­ever I come back.

I con­stantly fight the urge to move back there.  I know that so much about the place would bother me if I actu­ally lived there.  I write about Kansas con­stantly.  I think my love is best appre­ci­ated from afar, perhaps.

Shout out, fel­low Kansans.  What do you love and hate about Kansas?

Why I Still Play Role Playing Games at Age 32

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Geeks have come a long way since I was a child, but many adults still think a 30-​​something guy with a  “pro­fes­sional” “career” should have more adult hob­bies than pre­tend­ing to be a wiz­ard or an elf.  Like, I don’t know, get­ting wasted and cheer­ing for my local ath­letic mil­lion­aires, or shoot­ing small ani­mals with very large guns.  You know, whole­some, nor­mal hobbies!

Role play­ing games were my main social out­let when I was that nerdy kid being bul­lied. Going and play­ing Dungeons & Dragons with the junior high school kids was one of the few places where I could be treated as a nor­mal per­son, iron­i­cally.  I’m not going to draw any par­al­lels between how, in real life, I was a scrawny weak­ling who was beat up a lot, but in D&D, I could play Throg, half-​​orc bar­bar­ian, mas­ter of all he sur­veyed.  That really wasn’t what it was about for me.  For me, it was a way of hang­ing out with cool, older kids who didn’t make fun of me.  And it’s con­tin­ued to be a great intel­lec­tual, non­drink­ing social activ­ity ever since.

People tend to empha­size the R and dem­pha­size the G in RPG when they want to make fun of it.  But these days, it’s as much about mov­ing fig­ures around on a board and rolling dice as it is adopt­ing a per­sona.  I enjoy play­ing them more than I enjoy play­ing com­puter or video games because it involves get­ting together and hang­ing out with actual, real life people. 

I don’t do a lot of heavy role play­ing any­way, because I have almost always played as the Game Master—that means I play as the game’s direc­tor, rather than as one of the actors. I take on the per­sonas of bit char­ac­ters and vil­lains, but mostly I act as a referee.

As a writer, run­ning a D&D game is a lit­tle like writ­ing for a live stu­dio audi­ence.  You get to shape a story with the help of some oth­ers in real time. Running and prep­ping games can hone your instincts for effec­tive story tech­nique.  Also, it gives you some­thing you rarely have at the key­board, which is some­one to observe as they inter­act with the story.  Judging the player’s involve­ment and excite­ment can be very use­ful when you’re try­ing to craft a com­pelling sto­ry­line.  It’s not the same thing as writ­ing straight up fic­tion by any means (for one, your pro­tag­o­nists act with a lit­eral mind of their own), but it stretches the brain in some use­ful ways.

The only rea­son I’ve con­sid­ered giv­ing it up, and do give it up for peri­ods of time, is that cre­at­ing the world for the play­ers taps into the same cre­ative energy that I use to write my fic­tion.  And when I eval­u­ate the use of such lim­ited energy, some­times I think spend­ing it for the enter­tain­ment of just 4 peo­ple, as opposed to hun­dreds or thou­sands, seems like a bit of a waste.

But then, it’s not, because play­ing makes me new real friends, whose lives I learn about and inspire me with more story mate­ri­als.  It all feeds back even­tu­ally.  More often than not, the games give back more than they take.  I some­times come home from a good ses­sion, hit the key­board, and write, amped up by the excite­ment.  If it did that every time, you can bet I’d never give it up. 

One of the things I’m learn­ing as I rely on my cre­ative energy to make my liv­ing is how to go with the nat­ural ebb and flow of that energy.  Forcing it is some­thing I really try and avoid.

How about you?  Still gam­ing? Thinking about tak­ing it up? Or have you given it up, and why?

A short per­sonal his­tory of bullying

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Warning: this is a pretty per­sonal post con­tain­ing some of my child­hood expe­ri­ences and they might make you uncom­fort­able.  It won’t hurt my feel­ings if you skip this entirely.

My good friend Paul recently had an inter­est­ing blog post about bul­ly­ing.  Bullying has been in the news a lot lately, he says, which I seem to think I’ve noticed some talk about it on Twitter.  Paul’s argu­ment is that we’re blow­ing bul­ly­ing out of pro­por­tion, which I agree is usu­ally the case with things like this.  We have two modes of reac­tion cul­tur­ally in the U.S.—full blown over­re­ac­tion and com­plete apa­thy.   I could spend a lot of time won­der­ing why that is—is it an effect of our increas­ingly polar­ized polit­i­cal sys­tem?  Is it a side effect of a media that seems to go into a news cycle feed­ing frenzy on a topic every once and a while, lead­ing to con­stant cov­er­age and debate about it?   Anybody remem­ber the Summer of Sharks? 

The way I learned that life wasn’t fair was by being bul­lied.  I was a shy kid to a cer­tain degree, and not very good at under­stand­ing other kids.  I liked what I liked and I didn’t think much about what oth­ers thought about it.   And I didn’t spend a lot of time think­ing about whether I liked other kids.  I guess I liked most every­one pretty well, when I wasn’t lost in a book or whatever.

Other kids didn’t like me for a lot of rea­sons.  I was a know-​​it-​​all.  I wasn’t very socially con­scious.  I had a weird name and huge, funny-​​looking ears. I was poor.  Eventually, I had glasses.  How weird is it that kids picked on other kids because of glasses?  I guess it’s just any­thing dif­fer­ent from the herd that gets you tar­geted?  But what a silly thing to mock other kids for.  I never got that.  Anyway, I was that stereo­typ­i­cal last-​​kid-​​picked-​​for-​​the-​​team kid.  I was obsessed with read­ing and fos­sils and nature, and I didn’t care about sports.

I was bul­lied and mocked pretty mer­ci­lessly. They called me Dumbo and any other name they could come up with over my appear­ance or my stu­pid name.  They’d taunt me with that song.  I was prob­a­bly over­sen­si­tive.  It never failed to get a reac­tion out of me.  I cried a lot.  I didn’t under­stand why every­one hated me so much.  I didn’t have any real friends until 4th or 5th grade, and they were junior high kids that played D&D.  I didn’t start hav­ing friends my own age until I was myself in junior high, and that was a whole new kind of hell (mostly one where I was reg­u­larly accused of being gay for some reason).

The thing that both­ered me the most, the part that made it hurt so much, was that it felt like nobody did any­thing to stop it.  I told my par­ents, I told my teach­ers.  And some­times they might have had a word with some­one, but it never really stopped.  Adults have no con­trol when they’re not around, and grow­ing up basi­cally a latch key kid in a poor apart­ment com­plex where a lot of the par­ents were sin­gle work­ing types, adults were not around a lot.   I went out of my way to avoid other kids. I spent hours alone in the woods, or in my bed­room.  But there was always school, and the way to and from it.

Somehow I was blood in the water for them.  I was an irre­sistible tar­get.   And it wasn’t fair.  I didn’t want to hurt any­one the way they wanted to hurt me. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

Hm.  I’m about to write some­thing I’ve never writ­ten about, but it’s impor­tant here.  Bullying was how I decided I didn’t believe in God as he’d been described to me.

I wasn’t just bul­lied by other kids.  I was bul­lied by my step­fa­ther too—a hor­ri­ble man who later went on to abuse my mother, nearly stran­gling her to death.   I can remem­ber him com­ing home in a fury over some­thing. I silently begged God that he wouldn’t tear into me.  I don’t remem­ber over what, just that utter hor­ri­ble fear that he was going to come after me.   He tore into me any­way.  Physically abu­sive, to some degree, sure.  He smacked us around when he thought he could get away with it. Mostly he shouted, called us names, called us stu­pid. I don’t remem­ber the time too clearly except for this incident.

In this case, it’s not the bul­ly­ing and emo­tional abuse that sticks in my mind.  I remem­ber this moment because it was the moment in my life when I con­cluded once and for all that I didn’t believe in God.  Afterward, I lay in my bed in my room sob­bing, say­ing “you’re not real. There is no God” qui­etly to myself.  Because I couldn’t under­stand how the lov­ing God I was sup­posed to believe in would allow a man like my step­fa­ther to get away with slap­ping us around, call­ing us names, and being a gen­er­ally evil fuck.   I thought in small terms back there.  My life was full of pain and emo­tional dis­tress, I prayed and begged for help, and it never came.  Thus, God did not exist, as far as I was con­cerned. My rea­son­ing became more com­pli­cated later in life, but that was the start of it.

My step­fa­ther was spy­ing on me out­side my door, lis­ten­ing to my sob­bing.  He stormed into the room and began slap­ping me around and shak­ing me.  He pulled me out of my bed and forced me into a cor­ner and began to berate me.  You see, he over­heard what I was say­ing.  But what he thought was that I believed he was God. He was a reli­gious man, and if I thought I had it bad before, this was much worse.     I think that assump­tion of his, that I some­how wor­shipped him, was how I first real­ized that he was absolutely fuck­ing insane. 

It took a few more years for my Mom to leave him.  Haven’t seen the man since, and I’ve always been afraid that if I ever did meet him again, I would kill him, that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from going after him with any­thing I could impro­vise as a weapon.  I sus­pect my sib­lings feel some­what similarly.

There were times later on when he would be in a shout­ing match with my Mom, slap­ping her around or worse, and I would run away.  I never stayed gone for very long.  I didn’t really have any­where to go, and I was not good at plan­ning things like tak­ing a change of clothes and some food.  I always came home before any­one even noticed I was gone.

Eventually, run­ning away turned to thoughts of killing myself.  I just wanted out.  I wanted to stop hurt­ing.  I had dark thoughts as a teenager, as most teenagers do, but I was closer to killing myself when I was 11 than when I was 16.   The whole world had con­vinced me that I wasn’t worth a damned.  Even my teach­ers thought I was an idiot until I scored in the 99th per­centile on some stan­dard­ized test and sud­denly every­one real­ized I was kind of the oppo­site.  Funny thing was… I think if I had still believed in God and Heaven, I would have done it.  The notion that sui­cide was an unfor­giv­able sin wasn’t one that my church going had got­ten across to me, so whereas some people’s reli­gion might stop them from that course of action, it wouldn’t have been a bar­rier for me.  I’m pretty cer­tain that my atheism/​agnosticism was the only thing at one point that kept me from doing it.  I was afraid of obliv­ion then as much as I am now.

Life got bet­ter with time and I got on with the busi­ness of liv­ing it.  I’m still not very good at tak­ing crit­i­cism or rejec­tion because bul­ly­ing eroded my self esteem pretty badly. As I get older, and I’m sur­rounded by won­der­ful, lov­ing friends and fam­ily, it gets eas­ier.  But some­one call­ing me a name or belit­tling me can send me right back to that cor­ner of my bed­room being shouted at and belit­tled by a man whose breath smelled of cig­a­rettes and beer, shout­ing at me for “believ­ing” he was “God.”  

Externally, I’ve lived a pretty suc­cess­ful life. College, mar­riage, good career.  Yes, I’m okay now. But bul­ly­ing did seri­ous dam­age to me.  Parts of my psy­che may never be nor­mal for the shit I went through (although, what’s nor­mal?).    So while I can under­stand where Paul’s com­ing from,  I have to dis­agree on its long term effects.  And if I had been gay, if they had had that to use as a weapon against me, I would not have made it.  I know this.  I would not be here today.   I was mocked with that as a taunt enough with­out it being true.    I should point out that I don’t think there’s any­thing wrong with being gay, but I grew up think­ing there was because every­one around me used it as an insult—the worst insult.  There was noth­ing worse than being gay.  So these kids who have been com­mit­ting sui­cide from bul­ly­ing have noth­ing but sym­pa­thy from me.  I’ve been there.  A flip of a coin, switch of a gene, and things might have gone dif­fer­ently for me.

I’ve always sworn that as an adult, I won’t stand for bul­ly­ing among chil­dren.  The oppor­tu­nity to do any­thing about it hasn’t  arisen much, but I do hope to have a kid some day. I won’t be one of those adults who doesn’t do any­thing if my kid is bul­lied. I won’t think it’s a nor­mal part of grow­ing up.  I’ll fight back.  Because if there’s one thing I can do dif­fer­ently, it’s that I can carry on the illu­sion that the world is fair for my kid a lit­tle longer than I was able to believe it myself.  Maybe that’s tan­ta­mount to let­ting them believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.  Sheltering them may not do them any favors, but I’m not sure.  Maybe shel­ter­ing them for a part of their life will help them develop the self-​​confidence that I never had, and that I’ve strug­gled to grow ever since.

So that’s a lit­tle of how I feel about bul­ly­ing. It’s shaped who I am as an adult, and yes, I sur­vived, but if I could go back and stop it from happening…

you bet your ass I would.

The Proper Way to Choose Your Funeral Music

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My father’s funeral was, as you can imag­ine, a pretty trau­matic expe­ri­ence and not one I like to think too much about.   Someone assem­bled a video photo col­lage of my father, show­ing pic­tures of him from when he was a baby all the way up to a month or two before his death. The sound­track was two of our favorite songs—Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” and Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind”.  Let me tell you, watch­ing your father repeat­edly move through his life in pho­tographs is a sure way to make sure you never want to lis­ten again to the songs that were the aural back­ground of the experience.

I was think­ing about this the other day as I stared at the box set of Led Zeppelin’s com­plete works, con­sid­er­ing rip­ping the CDs to MP3s.  I inher­ited the discs from my father, and I’m often reminded how much I love their music when I hear the odd song on the radio or in a TV com­mer­cial, but I can’t bring myself to rip the damn things for some rea­son.  Mostly because of the funeral asso­ci­a­tions.  And it struck me—we went about choos­ing the music for his funeral all wrong.

I’m going to leave pre­cise instruc­tions that my favorite songs not be played at my funeral.  Don’t play them at all, any­body, for, like, a year after I die!  I have a much bet­ter idea. 

Here are the 3 songs you are to play at my funeral: “MMMBop” by Hanson, The Chicken Dance song, and, please, please, play “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night.    I was taunted by that song my entire god­damned child­hood.  Most peo­ple say they would kill Hitler if they had a time machine, but I would make sure Three Dog Night died in a bus crash before work­ing on fix­ing more impor­tant mis­steps in history.

What You Do is Amazing (when you stop and think about it)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Let’s say you’ve just fin­ished writ­ing a story.  You don’t know whether peo­ple will like it or not.  You don’t know whether it’s good, or bad, or just mediocre.  It might sell, or it might lan­guish in slush piles until you trunk it.  Your story is full of poten­tial energy, and you’ve yet to give it that nudge off the cliff, out of the nest, and into the wider world.

When the story starts falling, that’s when a lot of angst kicks in.  Hold on a sec­ond.  Today, I’d like you to think about what you’ve accom­plished before that.

You just wrote a story, the most impor­tant unit of knowl­edge of our species.   You knit­ted some­thing into exis­tence out of thought and expe­ri­ence.  You made up entire peo­ple.  Sometimes,  you have made up an entire world, or worlds, or even uni­verses, with strokes of the keys.   It has a plot, com­posed of ris­ing action, cli­max, denoue­ment, and maybe some even fancier parts.  You said some­thing you needed to say, whether you meant it or not.  Creating a story is the syn­the­sis of a dozen dif­fer­ent ideas and con­cepts. There are more mov­ing parts in a story than there are in an antique watch.   

Regardless of qual­ity, or suc­cess, what you did was amaz­ing.  Nobody else can do what you did, exactly the way you did it, even if they set out to delib­er­ately do so.  Right or wrong, you added some­thing to the world that wasn’t there before.  It has value sim­ply by exist­ing.  Immeasurable value. 

Who cares if it doesn’t tell the time right yet?  You just made a tiny lit­tle pock­et­watch out of words, sen­tences, and paragraphs. 

Celebrate the mag­ni­tude of that, just for a lit­tle bit.

Thinking Ahead to the Future of Clockpunk Studios

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve been think­ing a lot lately about what my options are for grow­ing my busi­ness.  I quite enjoy run­ning a web design and devel­op­ment com­pany with a staff of one, but it behooves me to think about what the future will hold, and if I want to achieve cer­tain goals in life, I will have to grow as a busi­ness.   The way I fig­ure it, I can grow via the fol­low­ing methods:

  • hire reg­u­lar sub­con­trac­tors to assist with projects, and take on more projects.
  • raise my rates
  • increase the num­ber of bill­able hours I do in a day
  • hire full time staff
  • find pas­sive income streams

Hiring reg­u­lar sub­con­trac­tors is tricky.  You want reli­able and depend­able free­lancers who are skilled, but don’t cost so much that you might as well do the work your­self.  It’s dif­fi­cult to find those peo­ple, but if you are one of those peo­ple, please con­tact me.  I’m very inter­ested in hear­ing from you.

Raising your rates is a risky game of chicken, and you never know when you might price your­self out of your niche.  I’m def­i­nitely push­ing the upper bound­ary of my main author web­site niche.  Publishers are happy with the costs, but new, indi­vid­ual authors find my ser­vices on the pricy side.  I don’t want to leave them behind entirely if I can help it.  They’ve been the core of my busi­ness since I started part-​​time a few years before I founded Clockpunk Studios.

Increasing the num­ber of bill­able hours is also a tricky game to play.  The more hours I’m focus­ing on income, the less time I’m spend­ing work­ing on main­tain­ing my skill set and look­ing for new work.  Like every­thing in small busi­ness, it’s a bal­anc­ing act.  How much time does one spend on each part?  I’m fairly happy with the num­ber of hours I work right now, so I’d like to avoid this growth method if I can.

Hiring full time staff is some­thing I’d love to do in the long run, but right now, that’s not going to hap­pen.  I’m think­ing of it as a five year goal.  I need to con­quer a lot more ter­ri­tory to make this pos­si­ble, and doing so will involve restruc­tur­ing the basis of my busi­ness (incor­po­rat­ing, for one).

Passive income streams are the holy grail of the infotech-​​based small busi­ness.  The idea here being you do some upfront work and develop a prod­uct which pays div­i­dends over time with­out much effort.  I’ve played around with stock pho­tog­ra­phy, and the best that’s man­aged to do is help defray my costs of buy­ing stock art for my projects.  I’m also toy­ing with devel­op­ing and sell­ing WordPress themes on pop­u­lar theme mar­ket­places, but it’s start­ing to look a lit­tle over-​​saturated out there.

Then there’s the whole online-​​game project, but it’s a huge gam­ble and dif­fi­cult to jus­tify the large num­ber of hours of devel­op­ment time before it stands a chance of return­ing on the investment.

The truth is, the future is prob­a­bly a com­bi­na­tion of the above.  I’ve recently started out­sourc­ing some small tasks here and there where appro­pri­ate, and I’ve recently bumped up my weekly hours quota.  And I’m still inves­ti­gat­ing the idea of devel­op­ing WordPress themes for sale.

Do you have any thoughts or sug­ges­tions?  Please feel free to share them in the comments! 

Writing with Careful Deliberation

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve been immers­ing myself in the writ­ing of Samuel Delany these past few weeks.  I started with About Writing rec­om­mended by Nick Mamatas.  About Writing is com­posed of essays, let­ters, and inter­views.  The for­mat is not one I’m used to with “how-​​to” books.  Its top­ics are wide-​​ranging and var­ied, but Delany has yet to fail at impress­ing me with his insights.  I’ve been twit­ter­ing about the book all week.

I can only read non­fic­tion for so long before it wears me out, and I recently fin­ished How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, so I needed a new novel to read.  Again, I turned to Nick, ask­ing him what novel of Delany’s with which I should start.  He rec­om­mended Dark Reflections, which is not sci­ence fic­tion (the first assess­ment I made).  The syn­op­sis on Amazon didn’t really grab me—books about writ­ers or poets are not usu­ally my cup of tea unless they end up being trans­ported to an alien world or magic king­dom.  Still, Nick has never steered me wrong, so I bought it for the Kindle app and opened it to read just the first few pages.  The next thing I knew, I’d read a 5th of the book.  It is mas­ter­fully written.

An aside; who­ever designed this ebook did a great job. The type­face makes it feel more like a real book than any other ebook I’ve read yet, which is say­ing some­thing, con­sid­er­ing that I’ve read a cou­ple dozen so far on the iPad, and read dozens more before on my old PDA.  Reading on my PDA used to be my pre­ferred way of keep­ing up to date with the Big Three mag­a­zines, actually.

I’m only halfway done with both books, but I can’t stop think­ing about either of them when I’m not read­ing them.  They draw me in every time I find myself with a few moments.  Alternating between the two has started to make me feel like I’m liv­ing inside Delany’s head. It’s an inter­est­ing effect that I’ve only pre­vi­ously achieved by read­ing a series of books by an author in quick succession.

The impact on my writ­ing has been noth­ing short of aston­ish­ing so far.  I’m about 1500 words into the first short story I’ve attempted in a month, and my process is far more delib­er­a­tive than it ever used to be.  For me, writ­ing was about spilling my brain onto the page as rapidly as possible—if I didn’t go quickly, I couldn’t be sure I would cap­ture the entire story in my head, or worse, I would lose inter­est and dis­card it half-​​complete. 

Now, I find myself writ­ing much more slowly, care­fully con­sid­er­ing each word, and visu­ally imag­ing the scene as I write it very care­fully. Notice which details stand out. Looking closer, and seek­ing pre­ci­sion.  The 1500 words I’ve man­aged so far are eas­ily some of the most descrip­tive I’ve writ­ten in some time.

Whether any of this means I’ll actu­ally write a bet­ter story, I have no idea.  But at the very least, it feels like some kind of improve­ment.  It’s some­thing new, any­way.  And lately, I’ve really hun­gered for some­thing new.

Have you read About Writing?  What did you think?  Others have told me that read­ing it has had a sim­i­lar effect on their writing.