You know you're doing a piss-poor job at marketing yourself when you update your website for the first time -- three years after building it. I'm "you," in case it wasn't obvious. Today is my first real updating of the site -- adding in Sonic Prime, adding Will and me to Massive Chaos, adding POPSKL (the podcast group of which I'm a member). Oh, and we finally have copies of Hunter Black Volume Two available for sale! (We have a very limited number of copies -- Will and I are planning a Kickstarter to print more as we speak.)
To be honest, even this little bit of administrative work wouldn't have gotten done if I hadn't committed to updating this blog every week. It gets even worse...I only updated the site to put off writing this blog post.
This is all part of my evolution as a working writer. I have been passively rejecting all the extra shit that comes with being a freelancer -- the social media, the networking, the endless self-promotion. I come from a generation that sees tooting your own horn as...I don't know, unseemly. I promote other people for two reasons: because they're people I like doing work I enjoy, and in the hope that they will return the favor. (To be honest, they rarely do...but nothing I do or enjoy is contingent on expectations, so...it's cool.)
I'm a little better at the networking side of things, by and large, if only because I genuinely like so many people in creative fields. I had coffee with Eisner-winning writer David Walker the other day, not because he might hire me to write some Bitter Root one day (and you should definitely read Bitter Root if you haven't already), but because we have mutual friends who shoved us together and now we can easily spend two hours just shooting the shit. I did it because he's my friend now. Hell, if one of the irons that I have in a fire heats up, I might be looking to hire him.
Ugh. Can I just tell you how much of a nightmare it'll be for Will and me to run another Kickstarter? I mean, it should be easier than it was last time, but still. Of course, this time, we want to have certain things set up and ready to go beforehand -- and that takes time and energy.
Okay, five paragraphs of whining seems like enough for one day. Hopefully, these greased the gears of my mind enough to get some work done!