Oh sweet baby mother-humpin’ Jebus…

I’ve had this screen open and blank for half an hour as all my little chillun’s keep coming into my office expecting me to work while I’m in the office instead of the rampant fucking off I had intended for my last workday of the year. Meh, that’s why they pay me the medium bucks, I suppose.

So the deal to buy my dad’s house is a no-go. Turns out the credit union I was talking to doesn’t make their own mortgages, they go through Wells Fargo, who goes through Fannie/Freddie and has very specific rules about buying a house that you aren’t going to live in. One of those rules is a 25% down payment, and since I don’t have an extra $45K just randomly lying around, that deal’s pretty much off the table. So now my dad needs to look at a reverse mortgage, which would allow him to live in the house for the rest of his life without making any payments, and keep the tower revenue, and at the end of his life the bank takes the house. The only catch to that is that if my mother outlives him, she has no home. Now my mother has dementia and there’s no way in hell that she could live there on her own anyway, so it’s not a huge issue, but we certainly hope that my dad either outlives her or outlives the dwindling remainder of her faculties, so that she would be blissfully unaware of the fact that she was placed in a nursing home.

On the other hand, once my dad dies we (the family/heirs) have a year to figure out what we want to do – either buy the house back from the bank, or empty the place out and call it done. I never intended to move back to Bullock Creek, SC, I was just trying to make sure my dad still had a place to live. I can’t ever see living somewhere that I can’t get cell phone reception and high-speed internet access again, so it’s not really a viable option for me. I just hope that everything will work out for my folks and my sister, who currently stands to inherit the house if she wants to deal with the debt attached to it. Of course I have fond memories of my childhood home, but it’s just a building. My family isn’t a building, it’s people, and the memories I have for them, so I don’t have some odd attachment to the building just for its own sake.

So now I don’t have to try to scrape together another $400-500 each month to make a second mortgage, I can focus on paying off some credit cards. I had a good run there a year or so ago where I had zero credit card debt, and I loved it. Then I got a free hot tub that ended up costing me several thousand dollars to get running, and I got a little stupid with my spending, not to mention dealing with a couple of weddings that I had my own expenses as well as some other folks’ expenses to help out with, and all of a sudden I’ve got $8k in credit card debt. Big bag o’ suck. So that’s where my focus will shift for the first part of the year – to paying that crap off and living like a reasonable human being again instead of like some asshat that’s made of money.Unless I win the PowerBall tonight, at which point I will BE an asshat made of money, and that will be just fine with me.

So have a good New Year’s – don’t do anything on Amateur Night that would find its way to Texts from Last Night or any other embarassing website.

Year in Review…or not

I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of looking back over a year’s worth of posts and scribbles to tell you that this was a goofy year, one full of fun and change and upheaval and all sorts of other jazz. I started the year off right, getting in hot water with my boss at PokerNews and getting booted off a couple of assignments, which cut into my frivolous spending money a bit. Then I got back in the good graces of said boss in time to cover the WSOP for the third year, but then saw said boss get sacked at the end of the WSOP and a new boss be brought in. The new boss’s arrival (who I like and is doing a good job with the site, BTW) coincided with a desire to focus on work and creative writing, so I made what I think was a graceful exit from the employ of that site and focused on my poetry and fiction writing for most of the year.

It turns out that one of the best things for me as a writer was getting put on probation with PN back in the spring. It woke me up to the fact that while I was being paid (and paid well) to write for several years, what I was writing was formulaic crap. There really are only so many ways to say “he got all his money in ahead and lost, too bad” while trying to add some slight flavor to the story. My work for PN was pedestrian and followed a formula, but it was dependable and harmless. Kinda like chicken fingers. It’s hard to screw up, but there’s not a lot of flavor there, either. So from a purely financial standpoint, I miss doing that work (and am still available for hack jobs if anybody is hiring). But from a creative standpoint, I enjoy what I’m doing now much more. The edict for the PokerStars blog is different from the PN stylebook – I’m encouraged to be a little freer with the language and style and I’m not really supposed to follow the AP stylebook like I tried to do at PN. That makes it a little more fun to write, and I only do a couple of articles a month for them, so it’s less of a load on the whole day-job mortgage paying life, too. I could probably stand to pick up another 3-4 articles each month if anybody was looking, but barring the WSOP or another short-term high-intensity series of assignments, I’m mostly done as a poker writer.

And I’m not in much better shape as a player. This will mark my third losing year in a row, ranging from stuck a couple grand in 2007, to stuck less than a hundred bucks last year, to stuck about $1,500 this year. I do think that later in the year this year I made a few adjustments to my game that were good ones, and had it not been for a disastrous run at the WPBT trip I might have struggled back to even for the year. But I may have to look at the hard evidence that I’m a losing poker player and need to make some adjustments to my game. I definitely need to tighten up – a lot, and go back to the basics a bit. So I’ll start that quest on Friday with my annual pilgrimage to the House of Blood for the New Year’s Day tourney (won in 2006, cashed in 2008, I remain the only out-of-towner to ever win this event) and we’ll see where we go. Playing poker has taken a back seat to my creative writing work and the podcast later this year, so it’s more of a recreation to me than it has been in previous years. I still look at the WSOP schedule whenever it comes out and look at the NLHE Shootout event, thinking that if i can run the $200 in my Full Tilt account up to something close to the buy-in between now and summer I may take my shot. But if it doesn’t happen, it’s no big deal.

With the attempt to purchase my dad’s house in full swing I’m looking at options to make that work financially and I may end up sacrificing some long-term to make things work in the short term. If I take a bigger mortgage and use cash from that to pay off Suzy’s car and my student loan, then I can negotiate things so that I’m actually laying out less cash each month. Unfortunately that means I’m then paying off those things for the next 30 years instead of the next 3 and 5 respectively, but it may still be the best option I have to get this house purchase worked out and be able to afford everything. It means that I don’t have the nirvana of having an extra pile of cash each month in a few years, but it also means that I’ll own a 9-acre plot of land in the country that in a few years will generate enough each month to pay for itself.

If you’re in Charlotte or the surrounding areas, block off the evening of January 23rd for the next Carolina Writer’s Showcase at Story Slam. And I’ll be reading two original pieces at Just Do It on January 15th at Theatre Charlotte. Hope to see you there!

Working through the weekend…and crap willpower

Last night I covered the PokerStars Sunday Million in addition to the Sunday Warm-Up for the PokerStars Blog. This is a little unusual as California Jen typically handles the Million so us more easterly bloggers can get a little shut-eye. But I had vacation time left over from last year and needed to fill a hole in my writing revenue stream after getting Shamus to cover my week on the Warm-Up earlier this month when I was busy drinking my bodyweight in Coors Light in Vegas, so when Jen said she’d be out of town and needed some help covering, I volunteered. There were some technical issues (probably on my end) that made the night a little nerve-wracking, and there’s always the inherent jealousy that goes along with watching total strangers parlay a $215 entry fee into a mortgage-wiping score in one night, but the real challenge for me was the waiting.

Tom Petty was right, it really is the hardest part. Waiting for people to bust out so I can write the wrap-up, waiting for everything to load so I can check my work, waiting for more people to bust out so I can cover the next event, etc. etc. So of course instead of using the time in any type of constructive way, I played Dragon Age on Xbox (best Christmas present of the year!) and read a Mercedes Lackey book that I picked up the day after Christmas.

Yeah, I know I issued a moratorium on book purchases until I’d waded through the dozen or so books that I have scattered around the office at home. Yeah, I know I issued a moratorium on frivolous spending as I’m trying to buy my dad’s house. Yeah, I know I could have just asked for the books for Christmas and done a little responsible consumption instead of my normal Cookie Monster on a Tollhouse binge shopping method. But I got a coupon.

Those may be the most evil words in the English language. I knew I was screwed when the header showed up in my inbox. 40% off any one item. I was dead at that moment. I knew Books-A-Million carried the Absolute Sandman series. I knew they’d probably have Volume 2. I didn’t have Volume 2. I knew that Volume 2 went for around $65 on Amazon, and $100 retail. That meant that with my 40% off coupon, I could walk into an honest-to-god real live bookstore and buy something cheaper than on Amazon (the shipping v. sales tax argument doesn’t work with me – I buy enough crap on Amazon in a year to justify the Amazon Prime membership that gets me free shipping. And it really does work out to be a money-saver over the course of a year, which says sad, sad things about how much crap I purchase). So I did.

I went over the BAM at Cotswald and found Volume 2. And after tax I paid $64 and change. And then I bought a bag full of other books off the clearance rack. And one paperback because the third volume of a series I’d already read the first volume of was on the clearance rack, but you can’t read 1 & 3 without reading 2, so I paid full price for the paperback version of the middle book. But I had a $5 off coupon, too, so I had the nice sales cutie ring me up as two separate transactions so I could use both coupons, so I guess I got the paperback cheap, too. And my other bag of books cost me about $33. So I told my wife that I bought the Sandman Volume 2 for full price and got the other bag of books free! Which is mathematically true, if not a completely accurate statement.

I have the willpower of a bulemic on an ipecac bender. Hope you had a Merry Christmas or whatever you celebrated!

Track Listing

In lieu of a real post today, I give you the track listing for my end-of-year CD for 2009. There was no CD for 2008 because there wasn’t enough good music released.

Y2J ’09

1. Circles Around Me – Sam Bush

2. The Worst Day Since Yesterday – Flogging Molly

3. For Today – Jessica Lea Mayfield

4. Say it to Me Now – The Frames

5. The Perfect Space – The Avett Brothers

6. Don’t Stop Believin’ – Glee (shut up)

7. Can’t Find My Way Home – Steve Winwood & Eric Clapton live from MSG

8. Backyard – Kevin Costner & Modern West (yeah, Fishtar’s Kevin Costner)

9. I’m Yours – Jason Mraz (live)

10. Johnny and June – Heidi Newfield

11. Gold Heart Locket – Sam Bush

12. Whipping Post – Mountain Heart

13. Steal My Kisses – Ben Harper

14. I and Love and You – The Avett Brothers

15. Always the Love Songs – Eli Young Band

16. You Can’t Always Get What You Want – Glee (I said shut up)

17. Be Somebody – Kings of Leon

18 – Empire State of Mind – Jay-Z

If we’re going to be in the same place in the next few weeks, I’ll probably have a CD or two with me. If you want a copy, let me know and I’ll make it happen.

Shift?

So I want to quit my job and write for a living. And I want to do creative writing. Poetry, novels, short stories, that kind of thing. But I still have a mortgage (and soon to add another one), car payment, student loan payment (they last longer when you don’t start paying them until age 35) and various other living expenses and bills to deal with.

How do I reconcile these two truths? On the one hand, I want to focus on my writing as a profession. On the other hand, I’m very good at my job and am paid well to do it, which allows me to feed myself and support my family.

In the past, the path to wealth (or subsistence-level salary) for the creative writer has been something like this – toil in obscurity while collecting rejection slips for years until finally someone understands the true level of your genius and offers you more money than you’ve ever dreamed of to publish your first book. Alternately, teach English at a college and publish collections of poetry on the side. I’m having real trouble finding poets without other jobs, and most folks that self-identify as poets seem to be English professors.

But the world should be different today. With the advent of the internet and the ability to connect directly to readers and fans, people are trying to branch out from the normal path. Amanda Fucking Palmer has had some success with doing oddball fundraisers and outright asking for cash online to support her work, but I’m pretty sure there are still months where cash is tight for her. Kevin Kelly wrote a fascinating piece describing the phenomenon of True Fans, and the fact that most artists only need 1,000 of them to get by, and get by pretty well.

So here’s my request to you, my readers, and theoretically my fans. Email someone that you think would like my writing and give them a link to this site. I don’t want you to spam all your friends with links to me, but I’d like to see a little traffic bump, and maybe some of those friends really will like what I do. I’d prefer that you email someone who’s never heard of me, but we all know someone who likes poetry, because we’ve all got that one gay friend, right? So do me this favor, and at the end of next week, whoever has the most referrals to my site will get a signed and matted copy of the poem of their choice mailed to their house, suitable for framing.

Or tell me that’s a stupid idea and that you’d rather see me try to improve my marketing like this – then describe it. I’m a shameless whore, so I’ll try anything to move one step closer to artistic independence.

For the record – I like my job, and as long as I have to have one, this is the one I’d rather have. But I don’t know many people who wouldn’t rather be self-employed.