The antidote to the "don't give up your day job" blues: Chats with career crazies and freelance fun-makers on how to turn what you love doing into income!
It’s been an interesting couple of weeks, with the ending of a Patreon patronage and an upswing in voice gigs on Fiverr – but perhaps the most interesting thing is my starting a personal Paid to Play Challenge!
After telling folks that the best thing you can do is embrace your inner craziness, geekiness and oddness, it’s time I did it myself – I’m taking the book I’ve been writing in my head for the last few weeks about the computer game Heroes of the Storm and turning it into an actual book over the next sixty days!
Nei Ruffino has been working freelance in the comic book industry as a colourist and overall artist for almost a decade. While she’s done work for all the major labels, Nei is probably best known for her work on Zenescope Entertainment’s Grimm Fairy Tales series and her colours for Danger Girl penciller J. Scott Campbell.
Nei is a big believer in not just paying it forward, but the independent scene. She’s been live streaming Photoshop tutorial videos and recently launched a Patreon crowdfunding page to support both her tutorials and her personal projects, including the one shot comic, Azure.
It was a pleasure to chat with Nei about how she got her break in the comics industry, the daily realities of creating art (including deadline pressure and repetitive strain injury) and the comic book convention scene. I’m glad that I could fulfil Mal Semmens (of KerSplatt! Comics and Collectables)‘ request to get Nei on the show!
My wife Vickie requested that I chat with Joy Harjo right in the early days of the podcast. Joy is one of the people Vickie truly admires; a poet whose works are just as often abstract free prose as they are traditionally-formed poetry. Joy and her work have both been acclaimed for years, her first published collection hit the shelves in 1980.
Joy doesn’t define herself as a poet, though, nor a musician. She always grew up knowing that she would become an artist, and her quest to express the things beyond us all have led her not just to poetry and the saxophone, but to script writing, a memoir and travel around the world. Her work often addresses the disconnectedness and damage in all of us in these supposedly civilised times, and she draws much from her experiences as the blood of the Mvskoke native American nation, a people outside their country whilst still within their own country.
I chatted with Joy about her career as a poet and musician, the ups and downs of the Internet and the danger of others pigeonholing your work.
ALSO: Stay tuned after our chat for a quick update on… going weekly!
If Joanna Penn wasn’t an entrepreneur when the novelist bug bit, she was certainly on her way there, with a web log and podcast about self-publishing and a regular speaking gig. Then a chance encounter with NaNoWriMo, an annual writing challenge, resulted in over fifty thousand words of her first novel, the occult action thriller Pentecost.
Joanna levered her existing knowledge of the publishing industry to make Pentecost (now known as Stone of Fire), its sequels in the Arkane series and her second book series, London Psychic, into independent publishing success stories. After having listened to her podacst for years, it was a privilege to chat with Joanna about how she makes sure to keep her noveling, blogging, podcasting and speaking plates all spinning, how Australia helped her discover the Amazon Kindle and just what it means to keep showing up for your dream every day, even when you’re already what most would consider a success.
After having authors and bloggers on the podcast, it’s fun to have someone who’s not only a full-time freelance writer on the show, but also someone who’s dedicated to helping others achieve similar goals – so much so that she not only blogs about making it as a freelance writer, she also runs a paid-membership web site that offers courses and tips on every aspect of the business of freelance writing.
Carol worked at a newspaper and as a movie script transcriber before going freelance and managed to blow away her own expectations of success when she started the Freelance Writers Den. On top of all that, she’s a wife and mother of three! Talk about doing it all…
Please listen to this interview, wherein I completely miss the opportunity to quiz Carol about her early work as a song writer (Brill Building Fail!) but find out plenty about what it takes to make it in freelancing.
It’s easy sometimes to feel that you have so much on your plate that you’ll never get anything done. North Queenslander Saffron Bryant is one of those people who puts the lie to that belief. Saffron turns twenty-two in December, and in the last couple of years, she not only completed a degree in biomedicine, but she also wrote and self-published the first in a series of fantasy novels, The Fallen Star.
If that wasn’t enough to show people that there are no excuses, Saffron completed those two massive projects whilst undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumour.
On top of all that, Saffron is going back for more of, thankfully, two of the above three things, working to complete an honours degree in biomedicine and the second novel in the Lost Child Saga. I just had to have a chat with her about how she got and still gets it all done.
(I might be far too late on this, but: Welcome, all you fine Cordelia Calls It Quits readers! I hope you enjoy your stay! If you want to know where anything is, please ask!)
UPDATE: As of 2014, Kelly is now fully self-employed!
Changing your career, no matter what you’re aiming for or leaving, is a scary endeavour. Embrace your skills and talent all you like, there are still a heap unknowns that you have to face and a lot of habits and familiar things that make staying where you are a more tempting option.
Freelance blogger Kelly Gurnett has made breaking free of those habits and letting go of the familiar things the purpose of her blog, Cordelia Calls It Quits. In each post, Kelly, in the guise of her alter-ego Cordelia, examines an aspect of her life that she either has changed or is in the process of changing. It’s a phenomenal way of keeping yourself honest; her Quits List numbers twenty-seven, with the most recent having gone up in the last couple of weeks, and she reviews her progress against that list on a regular basis.
By any measure, Kelly has been successful; she’s turned her full-time job into a two-day-a-week job and is blogging on several large life-change web sites. Naturally, this put her on my first List of People I Want As Guests, which made it a double pleasure to interview her about how she got to where she is now – especially juggling the day job with the dream job – and the places she still wants to go!
Episode Ten! Ten episodes! Ten interviews! Double Digits!
(ahem)
It can be easy at times to dismiss regional cities as Hicksvilles with little going for them culturally. Yet Cairns, with its international airport and major tourism draws like rainforests and the Great Barrier Reef a stone’s throw away, does a damn good job of not just attracting, but also breeding artistic talent.
Jesse Kuch falls within both categories. He exercises his musical creativity as a DJ, a gig that regularly takes him across and outside the country. And as the entertainment editor for the local daily newspaper and the manager of an independent dance music record label, he has a vested interest in keeping his finger on the pulse of the local entertainment scene.
For my fourth location recording, I decided to pack my Behringer Podcastudio up and take it into work, where I interviewed Jesse in the media room. The general quality is improved on my last three location recordings (where I relied on my netbook’s built-in microphone) but there are also a few more pops and other distortions as I learn my way around using the kit on location.
Still, these don’t get in the way of a great interview with a fellow whose enthusiasm for music is almost boundless!
After interviewing my web host, I realised that it was both pretty scary and heaps of fun – so naturally, I wanted to do it again! This episode, therefore, is the first of the newly-rechristened Paid to Play Podcast, where I talk with folks who are making money out of having fun.
Raymond Masters.
I’m quite proud to have as my first guest someone who’s getting paid to play the way I want to be – by writing superhero action novels. Raymond Masters has already completed and self-published Forging Truth (you can buy it both in paperback and as a Kindle e-book on Amazon) and is currently touring blogs across the globe to spread the word about both it and his next novel, Corrupting Truth. He has a Kickstarter campaign underway to fund his promotion of both books.
In this podcast, we get to to have a good geek-out, talking comic books, science fiction and TV in between finding out just how Ray gets paid to play.
