Coffee heat rising

Angst

Creative Work: Good for Your Health?

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Next week, lhudly sing huzzah, I finally get to go back to the cardiologist for his requested three-month check. Not exactly looking forward to it. But I have some kind of cool stuff to report to him…some anecdotal stuff that’s possibly of interest to the rest of the world.

As you may recall, the bodacious CardioDoc delivered a large litter of kittens when he discovered that I’d discontinued gulping the pills he’d put me on, because three or four weeks into the thing they were still making me so dizzy it was dangerous to drive and I felt at risk of falling in my house, where I happen to live alone, with no one to notice me laying on the bathroom floor with a broken hip. He also tried to convince me that the side effects, of which these were only two, were all in my silly little head.

Despite his sh!t-fit, I still felt doubtful that my blood pressure readings were consistently so high that I should make myself sick by swallowing pills that may or may not be necessary. So I tried another cardiologist.

He said, having viewed the record I’d made of almost daily readings tracking progress on and off the drug, that he did not believe I needed to be on blood pressure meds, but he asked me to continue keeping track and to come back for another consult.

 So…after three months of dutifully pumping up a blood pressure cuff (dutifully checked against the doctor’s equipment) and faithfully recording every measurement every day, a few interesting phenomena emerged out of the fog of data.

First, I do occasionally experience alarming blood pressure spikes. These happen during or shortly after particularly stressful events or periods: a long, long hassle with a difficult, frustrating, ENRAGING editorial project; a visit to the doctor’s office (I just hate going to the doctor!); day-long stretches of ditzy, stressful work; a couple of days of drinking too much (three drinks in a day is too much for me). These subside, and in between the readings are in the normal range, and in fact fairly low for someone my age.

 Second, swearing off the sauce, weirdly, does not cause my blood pressure to drop. In fact, it seems to do the opposite. I hopped on the wagon shortly before Lent started, figuring this would be a good little Lenten sacrifice. Heh. What that has now done is provide data showing average BP on and off the sauce.

Five days off the sauce in March produced an average BP of 127/74, and that included a stress-induced spike of 140/80.
Five days on the sauce in February and late February: 118/69.

 Say what? Must be a fluke!

Trying again: five days on the sauce in early February: 126/75. Not great, but still less than the teetotaler’s average. That’s nice. I guess whenever Lent is over, it’ll be safe to go back to my evil ways.

But there’s more: These figures are showing something else that’s much more interesting.

Lately I’ve been working on another novel. This has caused me to spend several hours, whenever I could break them loose from paying work, at  creative writing. This is not necessarily easy work. At one point last week it took two days to grind through about three paragraphs.

That notwithstanding, every time I’ve taken the BP after an hour or more of living in a fantasy world and writing about it, the readings have been way down. I mean, like 107/69, 110/68, 112/67…wow!

D’you suppose there’s a connection?

I find I feel a great deal more relaxed after choir rehearsal, even on an evening that follows a perfectly crazy-making day. Haven’t tested the BP directly after walking in the door from rehearsal (it’s usually late and I want to go to bed, not fiddle with the annoying and uncomfortable gadget).

Huh. Kinda stands to reason, doesn’t it? If you’re doing something that makes you crazy and you do it all the time because (arrrhhhh!) you do it for a living, the stress load would tend to push your blood pressure skyward. Substitute something you find satisfying (even it it’s also fairly uphill work), and maybe you’d feel less stressed. Ergo, maybe those BP figures would come back to earth.

I wonder what would happen if all you did was creative work? That is, work of the kind that you enjoy because it’s challenging but satisfying, and because you find it fun or enjoyable. To use a current trope, work of the kind that puts you in “the zone,” where you’re not even aware of time passing.

The bead-stringing, for example, doesn’t fall into that category, at least not for me. It’s just another ditzy and frustrating activity…hours of focusing on something that’s so boring it glazes your eyes and that often has to be undone and done all over again.

But the fiction writing, even if I have to go back and rewrite – and I do commonly write and rewrite and rewrite again – is utterly absorbing, in a pleasurable way. It is, in effect, a form of daydreaming.

Come to think of it, I started writing the first novel during a period when something was needed to distract from a great deal of psychic pain. I had recently divorced and was discovering that was evidently a mistake – or if it wasn’t a mistake, the temperature out of the frying pan wasn’t any cooler than it was inside the pan. I was living with a guy who was driving me screaming nuts, and I didn’t seem to be able to get free of the relationship. Though I had a full-time job, pay was low and I suffered from bag-lady syndrome in a big way – probably for good reason. My father had disowned me. My son refused to speak to me. And the work and politics that come with an academic job are, shall we say, not much fun.

Today I’m certainly not wrestling with that kind of nonstop, day-and-night distress. I no longer need anything to spirit me away from a crazy-making job and a crazy-making personal life. But nevertheless, apparently dreaming up a fictional world, reviving old characters, creating new ones, and putting all that in action is a relaxing thing to do. De-stressing, we might say. Maybe even objectively stress-reducing.

You know, if I could make money off these things – and it wouldn’t have to be much money – I would cheerfully quit the editorial labor, drop the teaching, and spend the rest of my days living in various fantasy universes. If it’s true, as it appears, that one needs a great deal less money than one thinks, I really wouldn’t have to earn much on these things…maybe a net ten grand a year. Peanuts!

If I were doing this all the time – four to six hours a day – I’ll bet I could crank two of these things a year. Over the course of say, three years at that rate, one would build up a backlist of self-published e-books that just might return that much. Hm.

Let’s say, for the sake of a round number, that you netted $2 apiece on an electronically published novel. To net $10,000, you’d need to sell 5,000 copies. But if you had six books out, then to generate 5,000 sales you’d need to sell only 833 copies of each book. Per year, that is. And that, in the strange alternative world that is Amazon, may not be unreasonable.

Wonder if you can have your low blood pressure and eat it, too…

Another Day, Another Dollar…someday. Maybe.

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Okay, this is it. I have GOT to get my act together!

This morning I overslept big time. Awoke at 7:30, about the time the Thursday ayem meeting was starting. Called the speaker to let him know I’d be a half-hour or forty minutes late — he wasn’t there yet, either. Ten minutes later, FLEW out the door and hit the road.

No. Make that “hit a wall of traffic making like a molasses tsunami.”

The fake cowboy DJ on the radio remarks that there’s an estimated 95-minute back-up — that would be an hour and a half, he helpfully translates — on the eastbound 101 at a downtown exit.

We sit through six signals at the intersection of eastbound Glendale and State Route 51. Evidently every eastbound commuter who’s heard this news has dodged off the I-17 (which merges with the 101 downtown and is capable coming to a dead standstill when any significant event occurs). They’re all headed across the surface streets to the other southbound freeway, which arrives downtown several miles to the east of the wreck site.

So it’s quarter after 8 by the time I reach Scottsdale. The program is over and people are sitting around chatting. The chiropractor has already fled for another meeting, but others are socializing, and that’s nice. Chat for awhile; then burn some more gas to get back home.

The assembled company is looking and feeling a little groggy. At 3:49 a.m., reports George the Elder, an Amber Alert went off and rousted EVERYONE out of the sack with a shrill squeal and a desperate-sounding announcement. Some woman’s ex-boyfriend called the cops and claimed she threatened to harm  herself and her brats. She claims that is not so. The cops apparently doubt the accusation enough that they are not filing charges.

Whatever is true, the result was to jolt every cell phone owner in the city awake in the wee hours of the morning.

I’m thinking I may try again with the cell phones. So far I’ve really hated the android-type phones I’ve tried and deeply resent having to pay so goddamn much for something that a) I consider a nuisance; b) I can’t figure out how to work; and c) I hardly ever use and don’t want to use. However, it’s just so risky to be schlepping around the city without a phone when there are no pay phones left anywhere… My son has extracted 100 minutes a month with no contract for his iPhone with T-Mobile (whose service I loathed) for just $30 a month (plus the cost of the contraption). That’s annoying but not impossible. So if — and only if — I can persuade him to help me learn how to use it and help me get T-Mobile’s erratic billing practices as much under control as possible (they don’t bill you and then they cut off your service), maybe I’ll sign up for that. At least I know how to operate Apple’s hardware.

Lo and behold, it’s very easy to turn off the Amber Alerts on an iPhone. If and when I get this device, that will be the first order of business.

What an annoyance! As though in a city of 4.2 million people, I’m likely to spot some homeless woman’s three children at 4 in the morning! A homeless woman who lives halfway to Tucson…

Back at the Funny Farm at 9:30. Starved, of course: no time for breakfast, and I do not eat at The Good Egg (our meeting place), which like most chain restaurants serves processed foods poured out of boxes, bags, and cans. Still haven’t lost the two pounds I picked up on Monday at the IHOP.

And in the “still haven’t” department, it’s now 11:30 in the morning and I have not started on the client’s project, which I surely would like to get done today, so as to ship it off to him at the earliest. If I don’t quit writing this blog post soon, though, the possibility of reaching that little goal will be much diminished.

Met with him for almost two hours yesterday (imagine the number of hours that will be required to put all that content-heavy palaver on paper!). He arrived back from London with an airplane cold, thank you very much. By yesterday evening, it looked like I was coming down with it, in spite of my having driven straight to a store and purchased a package of sanitary wipes with which to scrub the hands, the computer, and the car’s steering wheel. But this morning I seem to have thrown it off.

What I have not thrown off, evidently, is stone laziness.

And so, to work. I suppose…

Lordie!

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…lordie, lordie! How many hours is it between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m.? Only 16? Really?

After tossing off yesterday’s FaM post, I worked until 6:00 p.m. on the client’s book. Then spent the entire evening setting up the Canvas site for the magazine-writing section that starts on March 3. It now has just enough students to make — if one drops between now and then, four hours of free work go down the drain. But if I don’t get started on it now, then I’ll have a bitch of a crush at the last minute.

All of the announcements have to be redone, Spring Break having thrown a monkey-wrench into my carefully calibrated calendar. (Oh! alliteration!!!) That’ll be another hour or two of work. Hope that’s all.

The client is pushing to finish the book before he has to leave the country in two weeks. And last night a new project came in from another client, one of the bright lights of the Far East whom I’m not about to turn down.

Gained another pound overnight, even though I didn’t eat much. That’s two pounds in two days, after Monday’s salt-filled breakfast at IHOP followed by a lunch of pasta and scallops. Am getting exactly zero exercise. The dog is sick and can’t walk far, and I haven’t had time to break loose an hour to go trudging around the neighborhood.

Helles belles. I didn’t even have the energy to brush my teeth before falling into bed last night.

Uh-oh…

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Dog is off her feed. She’s been showing some reluctance to eat over the past week or so but, being a corgi, finds it well-nigh impossible to turn down a pile of food.

She’s been licking the tile flooring, too. This is a sign of a doggy upset stomach. (Don’t we all lick tiles when we feel bilious?)

This morning she’s finally given in to whatever is ailing her: left half her food in the dish.

And that is unheard-of. Since corgis live to eat, it’s a bad sign.

Nice timing, just when I’m about to shell out a pile of money for a pup and then some more money and then some more money and then…and then…and then… Can’t really afford a big vet bill for Cassie just now.

Damn. It’s been one ungodly expense after another ever since the first of the year: the trees, the eyes, the glasses, the contact lenses, the landscape repair, the dentist, the puppy, the nagging need for clothes that fit… Holy mackerel. Or is that holy doggerel?

If I were still using the old bookkeeping system wherein I put $200/month aside for emergencies in a cookie-jar savings account, by now — the middle of February! — the short-term emergency fund would be drained. That savings account only had about $1,000 at the end of December. I’ve spent at least four grand since then.

It’s all coming out of the gigantic pile of dough I threw into checking for the purpose of supporting me through 2014. Because of course I’m earning a little each month — at last a check came in from the community college district, and the Social Security Administration is also throwing money into that checking account — the bottom line doesn’t look so gut-wrenching. Certainly not as gut-wrenching as a savings account balance of $0.00.

On the other hand, that pile of dough has to cover taxes and insurance, which in 2014 will come to around $5340, assuming I don’t have to buy a new car this year. What I’m concerned about is that if these extraordinary expenses continue, they’ll eat up the set-aside for those unavoidable gouges.

And that is not good.

To avoid running out of money this year, I’ll have to see to it that some $4,000 is made up by sheer, raw frugality: the slack will have to be taken out of the food, clothing, entertainment, gasoline, and household budgets. I bought another couple pair of Costco bluejeans yesterday, since running the washer every couple of days isn’t very practical. That will have to be the last clothing purchase for the next three or four months. At least.

It still astonishes me that I can get into a pair of jeans with the number “8” on them, and it’s even more amazing that jeans that fit and last can be had for $15.99. I returned the annoying bras to Soma — was amazed that they took the damn things back — but then replaced them with two more from Saks, where I finally found a sales-lady who was willing to wait on an elderly woman (rarity of rarities!). So no net gain was had there, except that now I have one (count it, 1) bra that doesn’t hurt outright and one that’s comfortable enough if I don’t wear it longer than about 45 minutes.

Welp, here’s Gerardo with his campesinos. And so, to work…

 

Creative Angst

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Report from La Maya this afternoon: her partner La Bethulia, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, had accepted a job offer from the largest medical combine in the state. Notice had been given to and accepted by her employer that she was quitting her handsomely paid position to move to the new one. Days before she was supposed to start, the new employer realized one of her many certifications, whose requirements the State of Arizona had retroactively changed, was never updated. At the last minute, they rescinded the offer.

This caused quite the flap. Not only would they be out more (significantly more!) than half their annual income, La Bethulia would lose her health insurance, which covered the grandchild whose custody the two women have assumed.

Mercifully, just as their canoe was tipping over the rim of Niagara Falls, Old Employer came through with a new job offer: same position, same pay in a different office.

Wow! That one got the adrenalin flowing!

So it was that La Maya spent some time this afternoon holding forth on the restless angst we all feel about our jobs, a sense that she describes as “boredom.” La Bethulia sought a new job (at about the same pay level) out of this restlessness.

La Maya still works for the Great Desert University, an institution that has spawned at least one psychiatric therapist (that we know of) whose practice specializes in GDU faculty and staff. Meanwhile, over the past number of years, she has been studying art — specifically fine-art painting. Of late, she has passed a kind of threshold where her work no longer looks like the efforts of a talented amateur but instead, suddenly, has taken on the look of truly professional art.

She has begun to wonder if it’s actually possible to make a living — “a good living,” she puts it — as an artist. We know it is, because one of her teachers, whose work is displayed in major galleries and commands figures like 14 grand for a single canvas, is doing exactly that.

Meanwhile, I have this novel. Soon it will be ready to send off to Amazon. Not only that, but I have plot outlines for two others involving the same characters and setting and a third that we might describe as “something altogether different.”

The whole idea of doing something creative — something altogether different — and making a living at it appeals. Enormously.

I don’t expect to earn $14,000 for any of my creative efforts (although one of the earlier efforts, done on contract, did earn my client 1.5 million dollah in the first year and a million in the second year after publication). At this point in my life, I don’t need much. All I need is enough to supplement Social Security and defray the amounts I have to pull down from savings. That would be in the vicinity of, oh, about ten grand a year. Give or take.

Ten thousand dollars is not, in the large scheme of things, very much.

What independently published books typically earn, I do not know. From all I can tell, no accurate figures exist, or if they do, they’re proprietary. Some reports suggest income is very low — and, knowing how these things go, I’m inclined to believe that. Others hint that, over time, it’s possible to earn enough to satisfy those who don’t need a day job.

That would be moi: I have no desire to quit the day job, because I don’t have a day job anymore. However, it would be nice to see enough income to go out to dinner now and again and make the occasional shopping excursion to My Sister’s Closet, an upscale thrift store.

To pull it off, I’d need to net about $5,000 to $10,000 a year.

Teaching two dreary community-college courses a semester nets $7,680/year for me. Assuming a 15% tax rate on book sale income, I’d have to earn about $8,830 after expenses but before taxes to come up with the same amount.

If you netted two dollars on each e-book sale, you’d have to sell 4,415 books in a year to come up with the desired (minuscule) figure.

That, obviously, is unrealistic. At least, it is when you’re talking about a single book. However, I could churn these things out at the rate of one or two a year. If you believe fantasy writer Michael Sullivan and grant that his experience may be typical (a big grant…), it’s reasonable to expect one would start out slow and build up, over time, to a respectable but not stellar income. This guy started out earning around $50 a month in 2008; by 2010 he was making $2,000 to $3,000 a month. He thinks that’s not enough to live on (heh!), but then says when a book took off, he suddenly (and briefly) found himself earning 45 to 55 grand a month.

Well, that strikes me as highly unlikely. But two grand a month would be…well. Grand!

Imagine how many second-hand designer tops I could buy for two thousand dollah! 😆

But back to the angst issue: Why on earth would I want to throw over what I’m doing, which does earn the requisite amount, to settle into my garret and spend all my time writing up my fantasies?

I think La Maya hit the nail right on the head: boredom. Much as I dearly love and respect my honored clients, I’m mighty sick of reading and polishing other people’s work. I would like to write and publish my own work.

Because what I’m doing is not what I want to do, it often feels like more work than I can handle. Objectively I’m sure that’s not so, nor even possible – I’m not doing that much work. Plus there’s the problem that as I age (or as I become more and more cognizant of the boredom factor), the flow of things that need to be done grows more and more gestalt. Where before I used to be able to move steadily through a day of work and activities, now I feel like I’m jerking around from task to task, often not finishing what I want or need to finish before I go on to the next thing.

I hate that.

I feel vaguely guilty about doing the things I’d like to do – i.e., write novels, hike, goof off – because they’re not money-makers, or I don’t know whether they could be (but think probably not).

What I would like to do is not what I need to do. What I need to do bores me blind. It’s hard to force myself to do editorial, teaching, and bookkeeping work, because I am so, so bored with it!

Also I feel guilty about creative writing because it feels like day-dreaming to me. I suspect that, as a daily activity, it might not be healthy.

Still…if I could get a book in front of the public and see if anyone would read it, then I might feel more comfortable about engaging this endeavor.

Please. Unnerve Me Some More!

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The credit union’s servers are down. Been down for a good half hour. I ask you: can anything be more unnerving?

Who or what has hacked their servers? Or if the things just collapsed of their own weight, how much data have they lost?

Oh well. I wrote two checks that I neglected to enter in the check register. Can’t get into the online account to take a peek at them, so…guess I’ll just have to enter mystery payees in Quickbooks.

Speaking of hacking, at the Scottsdale Business Association our IT guru reminds us that the CryptoLocker hack — where the crooks tie up your entire computer system by inserting an encryption code and then demand that you pay to get your data back — is spreading and is pretty serious stuff. The crooks now demand that you pony up money within three days. If you don’t do so, then at that point even they can’t  unencrypt it. He said most recently a large law firm had all of its data scrambled and lost. He says typically the ransom demand is around $300 and advises it’s best to pay up — and quickly.

He also reports that anything that’s mapped as a drive, such as an external disk drive or DropBox, is encrypted by the CryptoLocker hacks. About the best defense, apparently, is to back up data manually and then unplug the back-up drive. Meanwhile, never click on an unfamiliar e-mail message — that’s where most of the attacks are coming from: the instant you open the e-mail the software invades your computer — and of course keep your browser and antivirus software updated.

Or buy Apple hardware: Cryptolocker targets Windows machines.