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!
After taking photos of pets as a hobby for years, it took Ken Drake answering the dreaded, “What do you do for work?” question with what he wished he could be doing (instead of the software engineer work he’d been looking for) to start him down the path of getting Paid to Play.
Ken’s wife Beck had similarly been in business and marketing for years, and when her husband’s sideline began gathering steam, Beck herself saw an opportunity to start bringing meaning into the work she’d already been doing.
The result is Zoo Studio, which produces fantastic images of people’s pets! These two were a request of my wife Vickie, and I was very glad to chat with them about going Venkman on one of the most joyous hobbies possible!
Cairns filmmaker Dez Green pays the bills by shooting video for local artist collectives and indigenous groups, but his passion project is a love letter to Eighties movies and TV called Dimension Man!
When we start thinking about doing play that people will pay us for, we tend to think of doing something new, something we’ve never done before or have told ourselves we’d get to some day. Is it a better idea to look at what we’re already working on for things we can get paid to do?
Sorry this is a touch late; I got a bit busy / distracted yesterday after recording. This is a slightly shorter one as the mailbag was empty, but don’t worry, there’s still plenty of me rambling on!
Linc Biggins is a longtime petrolhead, driving, riding and modifying vehicles on two wheels and four for as long as he can remember. after discovering the simple joy (and lack of expense) of commuting to work on a 50cc scooter, Linc decided to open a shop dedicated to the sit-down two-wheel market. The result, ScootaCo, is Cairns’ largest dedicated motor scooter retail and service store.
I had occasion to use ScootaCo’s services myself after the tyre inflation valves on The Foxy Lady, my 150cc scooter, gave way, and I got chatting with Linc about his business. The next step was, naturally, to interview him for the podcast!
Fifty episodes! We’ve hit the half century! Thank you very much for lending me our ears since 2012!
Well, Tropicon was a resounding success on Saturday (and also, as it was on the day of my birth, an awesome costume party), so it’s dominating today’s show. I reckon there’s something we can learn from the Tropicon experience about how we treat ourselves and the pay we (want to) get paid for.
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!
Paid to Play is going weekly! In between every fortnightly chat show, I want to bring you a separate update on how I’m going with getting Paid to Play, my takeaways from the experience and your feedback and questions!
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!
