A corner turned

Hello, my beloved patrons!

It’s the dying days of May and you’ve been a remarkably patient and generous lot so far but I wouldn’t want to test your limits. I definitely don’t want to be the kind of producer who bombards you constantly with progress updates but, on the other hand, there has been rather less time this month for creative work to tell you about than I would wish.

I’ve been buried alive in my own failings, to be brutally honest—I’ve spent the entire month wrangling with the Tax Department about back taxes, JobKeeper, super access and my mental health. Only in the last 36 hours have I emerged from the bureaucratic maze with anything like a creative agenda—and I’ve wasted no time since then. Over recent weeks I’ve seen the writing emerging on the wall, and a certain realisation has been simmering below the piles of paperwork: all this is forcing me to rethink my entire practice. I’m proud and excited to show you, my patrons, this preview of a major new direction.

I’ve wasted no time because I have none to waste. Now that I’m no longer spending 10-20 hours a week making beds, washing linen and hosting tourists, and now, especially, that the Commissioner has declined to excuse my late tax returns so I can access JobKeeper payments, I urgently need to make my business as an art-maker pay. It’s exciting and scary and something of a relief to be pushed to this reckoning; I’m working with business advisors, both in and outside the creative industries, to develop a new sole trader creative arts business plan. 

You, my darlings, figure in that plan. You are my base, my sounding board, my first responders. I’ll be working to swell your numbers, as well as to develop product for the wider market, which I’ll always preview with you. Your support and your feedback are incredibly precious to me as I start out on this journey, so please, if you’re reading this in your email, do click through to Patreon and leave a comment—or at least click the heart so I know you’ve read this. 

In the months ahead, I’ll be using my emergency Covid superannuation withdrawal and probably the dole (hopefully with NEIS) to cover living costs and business costs, until I build both patronage and sales. But to make sufficient sales, I need to make big changes. I need to put aside long-term research projects like the novel and the much-admired but expensive and laborious bronze sculpture work. I’m going to need to focus on an MVP—a minimum viable product. 

I found myself facing a very interesting question. What am I really selling, and how can I best package it for entry to today’s market?

Tricky problem for a polykallitect. I knew the answer had to straddle the visual and the verbal, the crafted and the mass-produced, the tactile and the conceptually dynamic, with bonus points for the political. A random conversation with an old friend (who also happens to be my most generous patron) threw up the idea that I’m selling an attitude. But how to do that? 

I considered a few ideas, then did a mind map. Are you familiar with mind mapping? I first heard of it a few months ago; weeks later I discovered I had Tony and Barry Buzan’s The Mind Map Book on my shelves. Since then I’d been using the technique to re-plot my novel; now suddenly I had to do what Monica Davidson of Creative+Business told me I should do months ago when I first heard of it: mind map my MVP.

So I did, and I’m quite pleased with it. There it is at the top of this post. 

All my initial ideas found their way onto the map but one headed straight for pride of place. “A Thousand Thoughts: Illuminated” is a box-set of cards (also available digitally, one by one, etc), each printed with a quotation from the wisdom of the ages—Voltaire, Sappho, Rumi, Socrates, the Bible, the Quran, the Kama Sutra—and a brief meditation on the themes presented and their application to life in today’s world. Besides the passages illuminating the quote, the card itself is also illuminated, in the sense that there’ll be an ornate margin and initial letter.

The Thoughts can be used in a variety of ways: as a meditation tool, a discussion resource, a motivational resource, a writing/research inspiration, even a divining medium. They can be given as a gift to that friend who loves to chew over difficult ideas, or used in the classroom to provoke animated discussion among adults and teens. They’d also make an excellent icebreaker for first (or maybe second) dates.

Of course, this is isn’t yet a fully ready MVP; it’s an initial concept, subject to various development processes; one highly likely change is that there’ll be less than a thousand cards in the full set (the mini-essays are about 300 words each; I’ll be gauging how fast I can produce them during the development stage). I just liked the bold, alliterative insouciance of that word-picture; the name will probably end up as A Hundred Great Thoughts from History: Illuminated for the Twenty-First Century, or somesuch. Whether or not I go with the full thousand, the total set may well be initially released in stages.

Would you buy them? Would you want them sent daily to your inbox, or delivered, a set of, say, 52, in a pretty box to your door?

I really want to hear your thoughts.

I’ve got a meeting with Kelly, my advisor from Creative+Business, on Monday 15 June. I’d love to be able to tell her I’ve road-tested this concept with my patrons.

I tell you what, to feed your curiosity, here’s the text of one of the Thousand Thoughts for free, because you’re my patrons and you’re awesome.

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Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased…

Adam Smith

This is a foundational principle in the thinking of Adam Smith, known as the Father of Capitalism. It’s true, inasfar as it goes: original humans built their communities’ wealth in the same way all mammals in the wild survive (as does almost all life) – by labour of various kinds, arduous or minimal. But Smith’s thinking is pre-Darwinian; he couldn’t conceive of what evolutionary biology, anthropology and archaeology have since shown us to be historical fact: societies emerging many tens of thousands of years ago – people who didn’t see people as distinct from the natural world, extended families with strict territorial responsibilities and elaborate social protocols, dominating their ecosystems over millennia by enhancing their environment and maximising their harvest with minimal, carefully managed disruption. Smith could have no concept of the “purchase” of wealth in such a society – constituted in creating a sacred art work, or in maintaining the legends about a rock formation, or in an afternoon watching the clan’s children climbing the fruiting trees, harvesting, eating, playing while the adults chatted. When labour is not laborious, or not purely laborious, it’s something more (or less) than labour. By Smith’s maxim, even grazing is labour.

The problem with this equation – this pre-Darwinian notion of an Original Transaction – is that it leaves crucial integers out of the economic sum. It commercialises labour without commercialising love, understanding, self-restraint, creativity, cooperative altruism, and all the other virtues needed and valued by original humans in their efforts to “purchase the wealth of the world” (that is, build themselves a good life). This narrowing of the equation has given commerce such a bad name that commercialising love sounds like a terrible thing to do. But imagine if, rather than labour and the means of production, our society financially rewarded love, understanding, self-restraint, creativity and cooperative altruism.

Who would be rich then?

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Remember, click the Patreon link and give me some feedback. I’m depending on you, champion.

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