by john | Dec 30, 2009 | Real Life
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.
by john | Dec 29, 2009 | Real Life
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!
by john | Dec 28, 2009 | Real Life
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!
by john | Dec 24, 2009 | Music
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.
by john | Dec 23, 2009 | Writing
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.
by john | Dec 23, 2009 | Poems, Poetry, Writing
So I’m trying to write something, anything, every day, and damn if it isn’t hard to get back on that horse. So tonight I locked myself in my hotel room at the lovely Marriott Century Center in Atlanta and cranked out a couple of first drafts. And these are truly hot-off-the-presses drafts, finished just a few minutes ago. So give me a little feedback on them, and then in a little while I’ll probably yank them off here to maintain their “unpublished” status for submissions and tweak them a little bit.
Yeah, I’m travelling right before Christmas, but I get Thursday and Friday off, so it’s okay I guess. I’ll probably blow out of here a little early tomorrow and head north so as not to get trapped in Atlanta’s hellish traffic. I think I’ll download Episode 4 of the Gambling Tales Podcast to listen to on the road. If you haven’t heard it yet, get your ass over to the website or to iTunes and check it out. I think Special K and I are really starting to hit our stride, and we’re working on getting some more great guests for upcoming shows. This episode features poker author, online card room manager and all-around prince of a human being, Lee Jones.
In the meantime, here are a couple of new pieces I’m working on. And if you’re in Charlotte on January 23, I’ll be hosting another Writer’s Showcase at Story Slam on Central Avenue. I haven’t locked in the lineup yet, but it’ll definitely be me and Steve Stoekel of the Spongetones fame. I’ll let you know more details as they become available.
EDIT: Can’t get both of them to post right so I’ll toss the next one up in a separate post. I would enjoy feedback on both.
EDIT: All unpublished poems have been taken down until I get through submitting them to various magazines so they’ll maintain their unpublished status.
by john | Dec 22, 2009 | Real Life
So…I’m trying to buy a house. I have a house, and I have no plans to move, and yes, I am trying to buy another house. My father’s house. The house I grew up in. My father has been having money troubles for the past several years, and hasn’t dug himself out even after declaring bankruptcy last year. He’s currently facing foreclosure because he can’t make his mortgage payments, and even after going through all the loan modification channels at Chase, they actually had the gall to come back with an offer of a interest-only mortgage that actually had a higher interest rate than the note he was trying to get modified! Now if he can’t make the payments on a 9.25% mortgage, why would a company even offer a 9.5% mortgage?
So I’ve started the process to try and buy my dad’s house. It’s not the perfect answer for me, not right now, but with a couple of tweaks to our household spending we can make the nut. Dad leased a portion of the land to the county five years ago to build an emergency communications tower on, and that provides him with $600/month in payments. If I can get a note between and 5-6%, which should be doable, I’ll only have to come up with about $400/month to bridge the gap between what the tower provides and what the mortgage will be each month. And it’s hard to turn down an opportunity to buy a 2200 sq. ft. house on 9 acres for $170K. The tower deal makes the mortgage reachable, and the payment from the county increases incrementally over time, so there will come a time about halfway through the life of the mortgage that the property will actually generate more revenue each month than it costs. So long-term it makes sense. And it lets my dad keep the house he built when he married my mother, so that’s pretty important to me, too. So there might be a few less trips to Vegas in my immediate future, but I’ve got a few things floating out there that make this only a stretch for the first few months of the year, after which I think we’ll be in pretty good shape.
by john | Dec 18, 2009 | Poetry, Writing
You like that? I got all artsy and French in the title. Good, huh? You can just see me sitting in a cafe wearing a beret smoking cloves, right? Ew. Don’t visualize. And fuck the French, cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
Okay, got that outta my system anyway. So last night was the second night of the All Arts Market at the Neighborhood Theatre, and it was significantly better than Day 1. Not only did I get my spot moved from the absolute ass-end of the frigid hallway into a room with other people, there were people buying things, too. I sold one book all night on Wednesday, and by the end of the night last night I’d sold eight books and bartered four more with other artisans. I traded books with Martique, another local writer and artist, and traded a book to my neighbor Desta (website coming live soon) for a great photo of a patina blue hippo, and swapped a book for some hand-painted bookmarks by another chick who was in the same room selling stuff. Of course then I promptly lost most of the business cards from the people who I traded stuff with, because I was woefully unprepared for self-promotion at this event.
You’d think I’d be better than that, after years of promoting my theatre company, Barbizon and myself as a poker writer, but I didn’t even have a tablecloth (that was bartered for another book) much less business cards. I did at least have pens and books, and some cash to make change for folks, so I wasn’t a complete waste of space. But if I’m going to sell books at these arts shows, I’m gonna need to step up my game a little. I enjoyed it, I like talking to people about poetry and about writing, but I’m also thinking that maybe the format of RTF isn’t exactly right for sales. Because it’s a collection of stories and poetry it makes it harder to get people to wrap their heads around the book. When I opened a copy to a couple of poems and encouraged people to read a poem or two, they got a handle on things, but when I just left it laying there closed people were less willing to pick up a copy and leaf through. I guess they didn’t wanna crack the spine and make it unsellable or whatever. So I’ll get a tablecloth and some business cards, and the next book I publish will be either all poetry or all stories (or Choices, it’s not dead I promise).
I also met a woman from the local storyteller’s guild, which meets every month at a Barnes & Noble, so I’ll check them out. I owe her that much – she bought a book. Still time to get your orders in for Christmas – click the button on the sidebar to order! (I’m re-learning the art of shameless self-promotion)
by john | Dec 17, 2009 | Poetry, Writing
So this whole self-publishing thing is a bit of a grind. To date I’ve made back about 1/3 of what I spent in publishing the book, which isn’t terrible for a first-time endeavor, and it’s not like it cost me very much cash to begin with. Last night I went to the All Arts Market in the arts district here in town, set up a table and sat there for four hours. To sell one book. That was a little brutal. But I knew when I printed 100 copies that most of them were going to go to friends and family for Christmas (so if you’re related to me and reading this, at least have the grace to feign surprise). It’s not like anybody makes any real money writng and publishing poetry, but it should at least be able to be a break-even proposition. I plan to approach local colleges about doing appearances and readings there, so that’s another avenue to sell a few copies.
It’s not really about the money, it’s more about changing the way people view poetry. One of the greatest compliments I got this past weekend was from DrChako, who told me that he’d never really cared for poetry, but that my stuff made a connection with him. That’s what it’s about for me, making connections and telling good stories. Maybe I do it with fewer words and a different format than most writers, but it’s the same thing – storytelling. So I want to push the boundaries of what poetry is supposed to be, because I don’t think very many people have it right. I dunno, maybe I’m way off base and everybody is writing accessible, clear-minded stuff nowadays, but I don’t think so. I think there’s a lot of purposefully obscure drivel out there that drives people away from the form, and somebody needs to show people that there can be other accessible poetry that isn’t slam poetry. It’s not to take away from the slam poets, but it’s not what I do, and it’s not the only game out there.
So that’s all I want to do – change an entire societal view on poetry and poets. We’re not ALL effete beret-wearing omnisexuals who smoke cloves and drink lattes. At least not every day:).
And I’m trying to make a concerted effort to write a little here every day. That will likely blow up in a matter of days, but for now, we’ll keep it rolling.
by john | Dec 16, 2009 | Poetry, Writing
Well, on the bright side, it wasn’t THAT phone call that woke me up this morning. Those of you with aging parents knows the one I mean. Those of you with kids in their teens know it, too. When my dad showed up on the caller ID, I knew something had happened to my mom. Dad knows better than to call me at 7AM, after all. I was right. Mom had fallen and they were loading her onto an ambulance. She didn’t seem to have broken anything this time, just a nasty gash on her head, but it was a spectacular way to start my day, a day that had promised to be truly lovely (insert sarcastic tone here) from the end of yesterday.
I like my job, really I do. It pays me well, it’s pretty enjoyable, and I like the folks I work for and with. But some days just outright suck, and yesterday was one of them. A client with more stroke than sense wants to get a studio built in three weeks, and because they’re connected to enough important people, I can’t just laugh at them like I usually would. I have to employ tact and restraint, words not typically associated with yours truly. And I want to get the order. I’d like to close out the year with another one in the “W” column, even though it’s a job that I’d usually throw under the bus because of the stupid timeline. So I’ve got that to look forward to for the rest of the week.
One interesting note – I’ll be at the Arts Market at the Neighborhood Theatre for the next two nights peddling my book. They only wanted $15 for a table for two nights, so I decided to take a shot. Hopefully I can sell more than two books and show a profit! I’m trying to figure out this whole self-publishing/self-promotional author thing, but I’m starting to pick up a few things. For example, I’ve stopped posting new poetry here because a lot of magazines and contests won’t accept submissions that have been previously published anywhere, including blogs. And since magazines and contests are kinda key to getting someone ELSE to pay for publishing my next book, that’s pretty important. I’ll still put stuff up here from time to time, and you can always come out to one of my readings to check out what I’ve been working on. But in the meantime I’ve gotta go get a demo console set up for a customer, so I’ll check back in later.
