Category: Work

Willed from Wires is Still Alive

When I got rid of all my stuff and left NYC in 2010, the only thing I wanted to do was hang out with my friends that I hadn’t seen in a long time. In between all those hang sessions were quiet times in coffee shops and bus stations. With some of that downtime I started drawing again. As you can see by the photo above (from 2012), I was drawing quite a bit.

Then someone offered to buy some of my robot drawings. I got custom orders. A few bulk orders. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but I was selling drawings of robots out of my back pack.

I made a small run of a zines filled with my robot drawings. I made city-specific pieces and posted them online to help pay for bus fare, or coffee for the week. Over the years my Willed From Wires Big Cartel store sat there, doing it’s job.

It’s 2018 and I still get the occasional order for a robot drawing or two. Mostly former clients, but the occasional random order. Willed From Wires remains a hobby, very much on the side, one that I don’t push much. I last made this depressing Tweet from the @willedfromwires account in 2013.

I’m writing about all this now – in 2018 – to illustrate that everything we do creatively can still live and grow without feeding the social media beast. I can’t do several things full-time. No one can. But we can do side things that are actually on the side, and they can still flourish and grow.

The Answer Isn’t More

You’re already doing enough.

Live blogging wasn’t fast enough. Now it’s live video from your phone.

It wasn’t enough to just be on one social media network. Better be on two. Or three. Or half a dozen.

Oh, just a monthly email newsletter? Why not a weekly vlog series, too?

It’s okay to look at all these things and:

  1. Be overwhelmed
  2. Not do any of them

Growth is hard in 2018, what with media’s saturation of damn near everything. Seemingly ever channel has been over run with marketing, links, polls, videos, and branding. Click this, watch that, share this and follow these four accounts to enter our give away.

So step back. Look at what you’re doing already that does work. If you only have two online sales a month it doesn’t mean you’re not hustling enough. It means you have two opportunities to absolutely delight someone. Focus on how you can do that while not running yourself into the ground

Do Your Thing

There isn’t one true way to win this internet thing.

You can hustle and post 902,832 things a day, and live stream, and do all the conferences.

Or you can keep a simple email list, and set up at local flea markets.

Neither are right or wrong, and you don’t have to be in one camp or the next. You, your brand, whatever you do or whatever you make – it doesn’t have to align with something that’s already in existence.

I used to fight this with Skull Toaster – metal is supposed to be aggressive! In your face! Extreme! But ummm..

I didn’t get the memo, I guess.

Now, doing your own thing doesn’t always mean riches and speaking gigs and book deals. But over time you attract the people who’ve been seeking you out. You didn’t know who they were, and they don’t even know who you are, or what you do. That’s why you just keep showing up, doing the work. Because there are amazing people out there, with amazing potential. All destined to make the world a better place.

And sometimes that person is yourself, and being surrounded by other like-minded people pushes you to keep making, and creating. So keep doing your work.

 

We’ll Be Fine Without Social Media

This blog post is basically my Twitter replies to my friend Jocelyn’s Tweet above.

If the “fix” is something to replace this bloated social media websites that employ 2039482 people, I don’t think we can do that. But if we seek focused, sustainable, and healthy sites and events, I think we’ll be fine.

I don’t believe the answer is a daily newsletter with links to cool things that our creative friends are doing because it’d be so easy to lose track, then we’re not even opening the email, and it’s just one more thing we archive / delete. I also don’t believe it’s private Slack channels where it’s like a run-away group text, where you leave for an hour and then there’s 234,902,984 new messages.

Because we can’t do the “real life” thing if we’re scrolling through an app for hours a day. That’s not “keeping up” or “staying informed,” that’s taking time away from our creative pursuits! And emailing friends! Calling people. Have coffee with friends.

What we need is hyper-focused print. Video channels. Occasional email newsletters. Gatherings. Retreats. Live streamed conferences for accessibility and budgets (* see also ‘The End of the Conference Era‘).

And any creative media endeavor that’s “hey, this is about ART!” or “MUSIC!” is too broad. No one is lacking for “we interview creative people” podcasts.

Give me magazines and zines devoted to noise rock, pottery, or band posters. These would be small operations, quarterly, sustainable – the exact opposite of Instagram, or any social media outlet. Online things updated multiple times per hour ain’t doing anyone any favors (as well as using unpaid labor for all that attention). It’s time to slow the heck down.

“Aim for the edges,” as Seth Godin says (back in 2015).

“And that’s the secret to thriving on the edges: Build something that people will look for, something that people will talk about, something we would miss if it were gone.

Not for everyone.”

The more it’s for “everybody,” the more it’s for nobody.

Kickstarter is a Grand Ending

Seth Godin started a podcast called Akimbo and I’ve listened to his first episode at least three times now. I’ve been reading his books since the early 2000s, and watching his videos. He’s got a podcast now? Boom. Subscribed.

“In order to have a Kickstarter to succeed, you need to begin with a following. You need to begin with people who trust you. A Kickstarter is the end of a multi-month or multi-year effort to earn trust and attention. It’s not a Grand Opening, it’s a Grand Ending.”

Listen to Seth talking about Kickstarter right here.

I got hired for something like that years ago.

Someone put together an entire movie, and needed like $10,000 to really launch it or something. Did they already have a Twitter following of people passionate about the subject of the film? Nope. Did they have a Facebook group where they chatted with people, shared behind the scenes footage, and listened to people’s tales?

Nah.

They made social media accounts AFTER it was done, not before. They wanted to get the word out to a bunch of people they didn’t even know, so they’d give money to a person they never heard of (until they needed money).

Valuable to Whom?

Erin Bartram’s post, ‘The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind‘ hit me square between my vision orbs.

“But your work is so valuable,” people say.  “It would be a shame not to find a way to publish it.”

Valuable to whom? To whom would the value of my labor accrue? And not to be too petty, but if it were so valuable, then why wouldn’t anyone pay me a stable living wage to do it?”

If it’s so valuable (or, “if I’m so smart”) then why can’t I pay rent with the knowledge/ wisdom/experience? If I had a week’s salary every time I asked this question after failing to land yet another job, well, I’d be pretty well off.

For each automated rejection email in my inbox, or every time I don’t even get an interview, or I’m told “oh, we’re not hiring for that position anymore” (after being told the company wants to fly me to their office for a few days), well… I just double down on my personal projects (like Skull Toaster) and go for a run.

TURN YOUR IDEAS INTO THINGS

Often I’m asked about people’s ideas, and this is what I usually say:

Don’t ask, just start. 

Do it often, make your mistakes, and keep learning. You need to be child-like in your zeal for the idea that you have.

Make 10 instances of your “thing,” then get some feedback.  Send it to people who might enjoy it, and see if they share it. If they don’t, DON’T ASK THEM WHY. Make another thing. And then another. Make them until they’re so good your friends are finally asking, “WHEN IS THE NEXT ONE?!”

But don’t seek approval before you even start. Just start it. Make it, stay busy with it, and refine it. Solicit opinions from people you trust, but don’t spend a lot of time monitoring comments sections or writing emails or having mega long conversations. That’s time you could be spending working on your thing.

Remember, you’re just starting something. You need a thing before you can really have conversations about your project!

So get busy working on your thing. 

Wait, how? 

Guess what – that’s for you to decide! Do you buy a domain name, then secure the 14 social media networks with that name first? Publish weekly? Release something every month? That’s up to you!

Make 10 of your things. From there you’ll be nailing down your process. The busy work, the technical parts, the images that you’ll use, tone, maybe working with other people – there are so many moving parts! Figure all of that out behind the scenes, quietly, before you’re bumbling and stumbling around in front of 1,000 people a day. Oops.

But work on it everyday, and get something out there as often as you can. It’ll force you to trim the fat from your process, and you’ll learn that quicker by a putting out a lot of stuff, rather than sitting on something until it’s “perfect.” You don’t want your production to be so arduous that it takes you weeks or months or years. That much time between releases, at least to start, and you’ll miss out on learning valuable lessons. 

At this stage in the game you need those lessons. Those lessons add up. And while this thing you’re working on now might not work out, you’ve learned a bunch, so it was never a waste of time. Just take those lessons now and apply them to your next idea. Go!

This piece originally posted on Patreon on April 3, 2016.

GETTING BACK TO BASICS

In 2013 I was in Nashville, TN and hanging out with a photographer friend. He was helping a friend who needed photos so I tagged along, just to see how these sorts of things worked.

Not being a photographer, and only loosely understanding megapixels and such, I was shocked to see some of his cameras. I would think it’d just be super expensive digital cameras, but then I saw cheap 35mm point-and-click cameras. 

Wait, what?

Turns out that you don’t always need fancy gear to make great things.

It reminds me of a time visiting a guitar shop, and this kid was sitting there riffing quite loudly (and annoyingly), all the while talking about GEAR. The “best” pickups, and the “worst guitars.”

Sure.

There’s this progression: as a beginner you covet the new gear. If you have the new, the fancy, the shiny, and high-end, well then you’ll sound better, or make better photographs.

But after many years, with enough skill, you find you don’t need expensive gear. There’s more to making beautiful things than how much you’re able to pay for the tools to make them.

This piece originally posted on Patreon on March 28, 2016.

YOU NEVER KNOW WHO’S WATCHING

I love Billy Eichner. HE’S FANTASTIC.

On a visit to Seth Meyer’s show a year ago (the video clip is no longer available for some reason), Meyer’s explains that he and his fellow SNL friends watched Billy’s videos back in the day. Billy had no idea, but found out many years later.

Creating and publishing something for years without knowing if anyone is really paying attention is difficult. It’s easy to look at the standard metrics like pageviews, plays, or RTs, and base your success on that. For validation. But please, you are so much more than that!

Never lose sight of the real people behind those metrics, and then never refer to them as metrics, or eyeballs, or traffic. Ever. They are lovely people, and some of them have just never emailed you yet telling you how amazing you are.

Hard work isn’t a guaranteed ticket to stardom and appearing on late night TV shows, but you spend the time and do it the right way. Treat every video, every song, every appearance as if Amy Pohler might watching.

This post appeared on my Patreon on March 12, 2016, but I’m posting it here because I’m deleting those old posts. It also had this note saying “This post originally posted on Jul 21, 2015, but had been modified for Patreon.”

NOTHING IS NEWS

I remember December 29th, 2009. I was checking email around 12:30am while laying down to sleep when I got the news that Avenged Sevenfold Drummer James’The Rev’ Sullivan passed away. A few emails later we had a post up at 1:15am.

This year, on Christmas Eve, I saw some Tweets that Netflix was down. That meant some editors and bloggers had to mobilize. A post had to be written! Hurry!

Dec 24, 11:06pm – Netflix Hit by Outage, Blames Amazon
Dec 24, 9:46pm – Amazon AWS Takes Down Netflix On Christmas Eve

The same happens with my celeb / pop writer friends during the holidays, hoping that no movie stars get caught kissing someone that ain’t their significant other.

In 2009 this worked. It works today, late in 2012. But it can’t continue. There’s too much. When everything is a story, nothing is a story.