Foundation

To beg or not to beg… that is the question.

Actually it’s not begging at all—but it sure is hard to shake the feeling that it isn’t. David and I are both hardworking individuals, we’ve never needed charity and have been gainfully employed our entire lives.

But we’re both artists—him more acting/directing; me more writing/acting. We come from an era where it was not as easy to break into the business … especially in regards to physical geography (East Tennessee) and the internet (not having been invented). So, much of our artistic devotion has been for love, not money—through passion projects and a LOT of community theatre.

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Creative Contact

When David proposed the idea of doing a podcast I really didn’t think it would pan out. We’re both busy guys. He travels all the time. I’ve been slowly developing an indie-writing career in addition to my main job.

But the seed was planted and things eventually took root.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. In the beginning, to learn from other indie writers about the self-publishing industry, now more for pleasure. So, I was familiar with the medium. When I asked David what would be our subject matter he immediately answered: horror and science fiction… subjects we have been more than comfortable with for a very long time.

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Monster Therapy

I am convinced that writers may be the pedigreed mutts of America’s Artistic Kennel Club.

Stephen King was at one time a janitor. Kurt Vonnegut was a car salesman and managed America’s first SAAB dealership. William Burroughs was an exterminator. T.S. Eliot composed The Waste Land while working as a clerk at a bank in London. Margret Atwood worked as a cashier in a coffee shop. Charles Dickens worked in a factory, and Richard Wright, William Faulkner, and Charles Bukowski were all disgruntled postal workers. Langston Hughes was a busboy, Harper Lee sold tickets for Eastern Airlines, and Zane Grey was a dentist.

So many authors boast an entire menagerie of collected odd jobs. Douglas Adams worked as a hospital porter, barn builder, chicken shed-cleaner, hotel security guard, and a bodyguard. Jack Kerouac was a gas station attendant, cotton picker, night guard, railroad brakeman, dishwasher, construction worker and deckhand. Harlan Ellison claims to have been a tuna fisherman, crop picker, hired gun, nitroglycerin truck driver, short-order cook, cab driver, lithographer, and a door-to-door salesman. The list goes on… and I encourage any of you to spend an hour surfing the subject on the net as it is not only entertaining but will work wonders for your self-esteem.

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Politics and the Artist

I wasn’t going to write this post, but I have been wrestling with its subject for two days now and cannot stop thinking about it. If you’re a writer, you know as well as me, that when you reach this point it’s time to purge.

Like any person out there I have political beliefs that I am passionate about. However, I learned long ago (from Facebook in particular, but also from my parents), that it is often best to keep those beliefs to yourself and maybe a close-knit group of friends.

I am not being pious. I’m as guilty as the next person for having posted political ideologies in the past… especially into the vast void that is Facebook. But I dropped that habit almost ten years ago when I saw the expanding political cesspool that social media was becoming and decided to turn my energy toward more positive things like art… reading and writing in particular.

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