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Choosing myself: A creative odyssey in 2015

01.17.2015 by Chris Wilcox //

In the new economy, you’re supposed to pick yourself instead of waiting around to be chosen. The times practically demand it: Graduating into the recession, not even Target, Walmart, Safeway, Home Depot, or 7-Eleven would choose me. Enter temp land.

But this isn’t a sad story. Being chopped back to your essence has a way of showing you what’s most essential about yourself.

This might sound crazy, but my dream job and reason for being is just a more developed version of the thing I’m doing right here and now. I actually believe that. It’s not a matter of ‘finding myself’ or figuring out why I’m here. I think I know as much of that as is currently knowable. It’s a matter of practicing and building courage and scaling up.

I’ve always called myself a writer. Now I’m actually writing.

The plan for 2015 is to keep publishing here at least 2 times per month. I’m writing toward an eventual essay collection and possibly one or two other things that I am, as yet, too scared to name.

Which brings me, circuitously, to the point of this post:

If you’d like to help me on my way by treating this blog like a column you subscribe to, there’s a way for you to do that. I’ve set up a creator page on Patreon.

For those who are unaware, Patreon is a crowdfunding site like Kickstarter. Here’s a Bloomberg article about it. The difference with Patreon is that it’s built around the idea of recurring monthly donations for ongoing creative work rather than one-time donations for one big ‘thing’ like a movie or album. Pledges can be as small as $1 per month.

One perk that might be of interest is monthly audio downloads of songs posted on the site. For anyone who has seen the first couple lyrics and wondered where I get off calling them ‘songs’ and not just poems, these worktapes of my sad attempts at singing in tune might (or might not) help clarify. Understand that my objective is not to perform the songs myself, but rather to move the best of them as quickly as possible from finished lyrics in my head to quality demo recordings by people who know what the hell they’re doing musically. So I don’t anticipate making the raw worktapes generally available.

(Finances tight? I hear ya. If nothing else, maybe knowing that this is the direction I’m heading will encourage you to share any posts you find especially striking with your own networks. There’s plenty of value in helping me get my stuff in front of more readers too.)

Okay, that’s it. No hard sells.

Back to regularly scheduled programming with the next post.

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