Working on the Holidays

Patriotic Cat overdoes it--just like my neighbors.

As I write this, there are screams of "Chug! Chug! Chug!" moving from the house next door. It is safe to say that there is some drinking going on next door. And I also saw one of my neighbors light fireworks in the middle of the street--the fountain type--good for you keeping it away from your completely brown yard that is just one spark away from going up in smoke.

And my thoughts overhearing the loud partying in the neighborhood:

"God, was I ever so young?"
"Gee, my wife has to work tomorrow; I hope that they shut up soon."
"I wonder if it is wrong to base the next murder victim on my neighbor." (I am working on a science fiction story and someone is about to have "an accident" involving an airlock.
And "I am really glad that I am not working at some burger flipping job tonight--all these drunks would insist on coming though my drive-thur."

For the record, I do not miss working at a restaurant and dealing with customers on a holiday, especially drunk customers. And I used to deal with more than my fair share every holiday that involved alcohol.

(I am hard pressed to think of a single holiday that does not involve drinking.)

And who gets to work on the drinking holidays? Yes, that is right--the poorest Americans. One way to guarantee that you are working tonight and dealing with the drunks is to make minimum wage.

I don't miss it at all.

Does anyone read blogs on the Fourth of July?

Happy Fourth of July says a cat draped in American flags.

One of the things that I always wonder about is how many people actually read blogs on the Fourth of July. Or any other holiday for that matter.

I know that I do, but that because reading blogs is a combination hobby/profession to me. After all, I am a writer that blogs--I have to keep up if something happens on the Fourth of July.

But I am not so sure that anyone else reads holiday blogs. Well, at least on the holiday itself. I know that I get a certain amount of traffic on my other blogs from the search engines (Google mainly) hitting on past holiday entries. For instance, I will get a spike around Halloween on my various Halloween entries from past years.

Of course, I have a secondary reason for writing this entry this time around. I am currently doing the Ultimate Blog Challenge. During the UBC, one writes thirty-one blog posts in thirty-one days. On one level, it reminds me of the challenge of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and its summer camp version, Camp NaNoWriMo. During the NaNoWriMo, you are trying to write a fifty thousand word rough draft of a novel in thirty days. Compared to NaNoWriMo, the Ultimate Blog Challenge is (so far) low key...I am not sure if that is going to let...I might start running out of things to blog about.

I guess now is as good as time to ask people to wish me luck in finishing the UBC.

And come back later to see my stats:

People who read this entry during the July 4th holiday (remember it is also the UBC): ###

People who read this entry during the first month it was up: ###

All time readers of this entry: ###

Things I wrote while I was not here:

I talked about how saying that you are not going to buy a certain book matters not one iota when the writer does not consider you an actual potential customer.

I reviewed (sort of) the delightfully funny book, Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir), by Jenny Lawson.

Yes I write erotica (Safe for Work)

While this post is about the business of erotica, or at least how I got involved in it, the post is perfectly safe for work. That fact might be confusing, but the truth of the matter is that you can talk about the economics and business of erotica without any actual erotica being involved. If that disappoints you, just leave a comment in the comment section...and I will pretend to be shocked that you were disappointed that the raciest word in this post is the word "erotica" itself.

As for the rest of us--prepare to be bored by how dull the writing of erotica is.

I started writing in junior high--this is when there was junior high schools (now they are middle schools, or at least they are in my neighborhood)--and I continued to do it in high school. And no, I wasn't writing erotica in high school--thanks for asking.

It was while in high school that one of my friends decided to declare that I was going to be a writer when I grew up. I think that she got tired of me shrugging my shoulders and saying," I dunno" whenever anyone asked me what I was going to do for a living after high school.

(Honestly, I thought that I was going to be in the military for several years...I was kinda overlooking the fact that I am not exactly the ideal material to be a soldier.)

The truth be told, I never realized that it was possible to be a writer and actually do it for a living. I thought writing was something you did for entertainment purposes, and that you felt lucky to get published. (Again, no, I wasn't writing erotica yet.) And no one around me informed me otherwise.

The fact that you could get paid to write is something that I stumbled upon all on my own. After all, given how poorly the profession pays (on average), you could hardly have a booth set up on career day advising students that they too could make more money flipping burgers than they could as a writer.

(Yes, your average writer would be better off flipping burgers for a living--appalling, isn't it?!)

It was actually at a truck stop in Kansas (or was it Nebraska?) that I realized that someone had to be getting a paycheck to write stuff. I was on my way home (riding the Greyhound Bus) from being asked politely to leave the army...it might have been the fact that my father got killed in a truck accident a week before, or it may simply be that I am not good at marching and doing pushups (I be a white boy; I have no rhythm and no upper body strength). Anyway, I was looking over the magazines in the rack when I saw it.

The vital clue that someone was getting paid money to write something. Yes, it was an erotica magazine, one of those magazines filled with sexy stories...that are supposedly written by readers of the magazine. And I realized that the writing was too good to be written by amateurs--hey, I saw the writing skill of my class mates in high school, and mine wasn't much better--no, this stuff had to be written by people getting paid.

Why did I assume that money was involved? Well, you would never write this stuff and admit to it.

(Yes, I found one of the stranger types of erotica...in Kansas...at a truck stop...and no, I am not telling you what type of erotica it was. Just say imagine the worst, say Ewww! and read on.)

Or at least, I wouldn't admit to it. And still don't. I do it under a pen-name...and my pen-name is a secret...one that my wife doesn't even know. (Yes, she knows what my bread and butter writing is...but I am too ashamed to let her read any of it.)

And the moral of this story is: If you don't want people writing trash, don't let them know that they can make money doing so. Or at least, I think that is the moral; I could be wrong--and if I am, feel free to say so in the comment section.

Creative time lost at Walmart

Yesterday, me and my wife went to Wal-Mart. For a fan. Which we decided not to get...but that is another post for another time.

There was four registers open, and they were at least four customers deep. We got into a line with four people before us. And we waited in line. And waited. And waited.

We were in line for over a half hour.

At certain point, the happy little cynic that is me, looked at my wife and asked, "How much money are we saving here? Because I think that I could have made more money in the amount of time that we have spent in line."

Now, in all fairness to Wal-Mart, that last part might not be true. I am a writer and an artist--self-employed. And there is no guarantee about how much money I would make in a half hour. My wife was also working on her business yesterday--the same problem applies.

But my time is worth anywhere from zero plus to thirty-three dollars plus an hour.

(Ok, real quickly I state my potential hourly rate in a range because a lot depends upon what I am working on. There are some articles that I have written on the page-view sites that have earned me only pennies. And there are the ebooks that have only earned me a couple of dollars. There is my mid-range earners...about ten dollars a hour. And then there are the stories that beat that marker, like the story that took me ten hours to cobble together that has earned me over three hundred and thirty dollars and counting. Yes, it is the joys of ebook royalties.)

If nothing else, I could have been home napping with the cat. Sure, it would have earned no income, but it still beats standing in line at Wal-Mart.

I suspect that I was in a "penny smart, pound stupid" situation; and as you will see tomorrow, it was just the tip of the iceberg.

A few warnings about this blog

Warning: I might try to explain economics using cats or witchcraft--it has happened before.

Welcome to Madcap Economics! This new blog is a place for me to rant and rave about economics. And sometimes try to explain in simple terms what the heck is going on.

Of course for me, things like cats and witchcraft and voudoun (voodoo for the rest of you) are simple. Therefore, I am quite sure that I will sound like a lunatic on a soapbox on most days--we will call that "normal."

Now, a little about myself. I graduated last year from the University of Colorado at Denver with two bachelor degrees (one in history, and one in literary studies). While at UCD, I worked at the student newspaper of the Community College of Denver (the previous year before starting at UCD, I went to CCD and that is where I met the first editor that I worked under at the newspaper). It was during my time at Campus Connection (CCD's student newspaper) that I started to write some articles on economics and the economy.

One of the things that I discovered in college is that I am fascinated about the train wreck that is the modern economy and the economic theories that people have about it. I had started to read economic news and books before college; and now that I am out of college, I am still reading them. And yes, I did take some economic classes in college, both to fulfill requirements and as electives. In fact, for awhile I consider switching to economics.

Besides a perhaps unhealthy interest in economics, I spent ten years running a restaurant before starting my own business as a writer and publisher of ebooks. I also backseat drive my wife's pottery business, as well as illustrate series of a children books. These occupations occasionally show up in my opinions about the economy and economic theories.

And finally, I like to think of myself as a funny man. Or as one of my biggest critics says, a McComedic Troll. Therefore, yes, I do plan on inflicting my sense of humor on you. That and lots of cat pictures...because one cannot have too many cat pictures when trying to figure out economic theory.