The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
Over at The Adjunct Project, proprietor Josh Boldt kindly published my article on the use of “slave labor” as a metaphor to describe the predicament of underpaid, grossly exploited part-time university and community college faculty. Comments are already shaping up to be pretty interesting — check it out.
I’m about to post a follow-up on Adjunctorium — watch the RSS feed or drop by in an hour or two (just now it’s 8 a.m. MST, 5/3/2014).
Well, this is cool. The eBook Builder says our first adventure in self-publishing will be ready to go this week. And my old friend Jim Metcalf came up with a very handsome cover, despite the fact that every image of the rest of us could unearth with was totally, hopelessly politically incorrect. It is, IMHO, amazingly good.
🙂 I really like this. He came up with another with these sort of shadowy handcuffs. But those evoke law enforcement, to my mind, more than indentured servitude. The kind of cracked marble effect evokes the crumbling of the academy, a phenomenon epitomized by the fact that 50 percent of US faculty are now adjunct. Meanwhile, tuitions continue to soar: students get less and less for more and more.
This subject is starting to pop. The New York Times noticed us adjunct slaves a few days ago, and this morning the Diane Rehm show on PBS devoted an hour to the various attempts to organize adjuncts into unions (pretty damned forlorn, as you’ll know if you have any experience with academics, every one of which is a wild hare). So we’re anxious to get the book online as soon as possible.
This little gem will be my first experiment in self-publishing, after three books through scholarly and trade presses (William Morrow, Columbia UP, and Folger Shakespeare Library). I think of it as a sort of sandbox, since there’s no reason to expect it will sell many copies. It represents an opportunity to learn from mistakes, of which I’m sure there’ll be a-plenty.
Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a print version of Slave Labor. There’s an adventure, if ever there is one: I are a english major, i are not a artist, and while you could say I’m not very fond of Word’s eccentricities, I truly do hate the ditz entailed in trying to format documents in the Microsoft’s accursed program. It crashed my whole system again today: asked it to import a photo…can you imagine the effrontery?
At any rate, this afternoon I got about three-quarters of the way through importing copy into a Wyrd template formatted for CreateSpace and finally got around to registering an ISBN for the print version. So there’ll be a physical version of the magnum opus as well as a digital one.
So this one will be a learning experience, through which I hope to develop a little familiarity with so-called “indie publishing” — i.e., self-publishing. With any luck, this will redound to the benefit of the next few books I intend to market.
Waiting in the wings is How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, a diet guide and recipe book. That, I think, has more potential for sales. Who doesn’t want to lose 30 pounds these days, eh?
Then the first installment of The Cottrite Chronicles, set in the far future: a novel called Fire-Rider. I hesitate to call it science fiction. Looks like the term for it is speculative fiction. Now, IMHO, that one is a fun read. So I’m hoping it will actually build a readership…specially since I’m already launched in the second book for that series.
And I have an idea for another sci-fi story…completely off the wall. Haven’t started writing it yet, but whenever I contemplate its premises, the damn thing strikes me as funny as a Douglas Adams novel. But funny may be in the eye of the beholder. 😉
And of course, there’s the usual array of how-to’s and pet stories. Hope to have four books in circulation by the end of this year and eight by the end of next year. That’s how much copy I have in the can, languishing on the hard drive.
Welp, it’s past bed-time and I have to be out the door at 6:45 tomorrow morning. And so, to bed.
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…
So… Soon, before we even know it, Pup will be here. Lindsay, our Pup Breeder, wishes to know what we wish to name this dawg. We have no clue.
BUT…we have a blog. We have clever, creative, and brilliant readers.
Let us call upon them.
My latest book, How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, is about ready for publication. It soon will be available on Amazon.
As a special gift to FaM readers ( 🙂 ), I propose to give away one (1) advance copy, in the form of a PDF, to the person who comes up with the cutest, most appealing, or most appropriate name for this tiny li’l corgi:
By “cutest, most appealing, or most appropriate,” we mean “the one I subjectively like the most.” 🙂
No guarantees that this will be THE name that sticks with the pooch for life, since I usually end up naming a pet after I’ve come to know it. But we do need something to start with.
The full title (speaking of names) of the diet/recipe book is How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months…Without Hardly Trying: Diet Advice and 125 Killer Recipes from Funny about Money. Not all the recipes are dietetic — those that shouldn’t add too much fat to the frame are tagged with stars. But all are pretty darned good to eat.
The winner will get page proofs for How I Lost 30 Pounds, in PDF format, complete with four chapters of detailed diet advice (largely unscientific) and about 125 recipes, some but not all of which have appeared at Funny about Money.
To participate, submit a comment to this post with your suggested name for this magnificent little corgi pup.
The contest will be open for ten days, starting today: Thursday, February 27, 2014.
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.