My natural reaction when faced with so much failure is to give up, but I am not going to give up today. I’m going to apologize and do better next time. Hopefully EP listeners and offended friends will forgive me.

All things considered, I’d rather be back in Antelope Canyon with my camera right now.  That would be hard to screw up.

Click on over to Tor if you’d like to see my latest science fiction photography project–a postapocalyptic nightmare landscape and a badass survivor.  They’re giving away a copy of the print along with some other awesome swag as part of the caption contest.  Go enter!

How do I take advantage of this wonderful offer?

I’m glad you asked!  Paypal the price to jeremy dot tolbert at tuginternet dot com.  Include in this message your address and the name and/or link to the photo you want.  In 2–3 weeks, you will receive a beautiful Fuji Luster print ready for framing.

Okay, I’m sold!  Where can I find photos?

You can find photos on my Flickr account or this blog.  Here’s the flickr stream.

Might I recommend checking out the photos in this set?  or this one?

You don’t really expect us to go for this do you?

Nah.  But I thought I’d give it a shot.  And anyway, who knows?  A print from me may one day be worth quite a bit more money than you paid…  it’s probably equally as likely to make you money as putting it in the stock market these days.  So consider it an investment int he arts.

Act Fast!

This offer is limited to the next ~48 hours!  If you don’t take advantage of it, you will just have to wait until my print store opens later this year.

So, The Deadly Mr. Whiskers was a fun photo to shoot and challenging to boot.  The model in this case is our cat Gildenstern (his brother’s name is Rosencrantz).   The toy was something I spent the morning making, and I have some behind-the-scenes photos of it before the cats savaged it. It doesn’t really read very well in the cat photo unfortunately, but it’s made up to look like a little faery.  It had wings, but the cats demolished those early in the shoot, and they weren’t reading very well anyway, so we snipped them off.

Taking staged pictures of animals is a pain in the ass.  Keeping the cat in the lights was impossible.  Getting him to play with the toy involved copious amounts of catnip and even then, I couldn’t get him to attack it the way I wanted him to.  I have more pictures of my cats now than I ever really wanted.  This one was pretty much the best for what I was aiming for.  And with that, I’ll save further details for a members-only post on the Clockpunk site.

I hope you all have a wonderful week.

In other news, I am weighing a sale for my inventory of images that I have printed.  I’m considering $30 memberships from now until the end of the year or until I run out of pre-printed stock, whichever comes first.

I’ll admit that I’m disappointed with my success regarding membership kits.  I sold 9 kits, and I really appreciate those of you who bought them.  Unfortunately, sales have dropped off entirely.  I’m considering giving up entirely on limited editon prints and selling everything on the site for $20 a piece.  Any thoughts?

It’s hard to keep at this so much when I feel like it’s not as popular as I want it to be.  Traffic is low, sales are nonexistent.  I know what you’re thinking–do it because you enjoy it, not to make money.  Well, no.  I’m sorry, but I’d like to make a living from my creative endeavours and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.  I enjoy the project, but if there is not a large enough audience to justify my time and energy in the project, then I will have to move on to something else.  I have a lot of faith in the general concept of the project, but I am increasingly certain that it won’t turn a profit at all.  My best bet is probably to use all of it as background research and turn out a novel.  Keep the site updating on a lower frequency and turn the whole thing into a good reason to publish the book (beyond it being really good or something).

I’ve been meaning to write a book for a number of years now.  I started writing my first book attempt just before my father was diagnosed with cancer.  I’ve given up on that book along wth most of  of my writing.  But the truth is that I haven’t been able to let go of that creative urge, that drive to make something that matters, even if it only matters in the form of fleeting entertainment.

But even though I’ve given up so much, I haven’t been able to give up on Roundbottom.  Maybe it’s because the character is a thinly disguised version of what I wanted to be once upon a time.  I don’t know.  But I want to keep trying to make something of this in some form, even if it’s not the website and the weekly updates.  I just don’t know exactly what the best use of my time would be.  Look, I have student loans that would make you wince.  I may never be out of debt in my adult life without developing some sort of alternative revenue stream to accelerate my payoff. I’m trying to buy my freedom here.  If this doesn’t work, I’ll find something else to sell, and I’ll keep trying until something comes out of my gourd.   Because I want my freedom so bad I can taste it, and right now, these projects are the best thing I have to accelerate my earning that.