Three-Quarters of the Way There: An Interview with Andrew Marshall

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Andrew Marshall works as a photographer, painter, videographer, writer, and podcaster, the combination of which make up his entire income.  Much of his work focuses on outdoor exploration: his writing’s been featured in Upventur and Backpacking Light (for whom he also produces a podcast), and he’s photographed landscapes from Scotland  to Yosemite Valley.  I called him via Skype to talk about self-employment, balancing promotion with creativity, and what it’s like to leave your Day Job.

 

I. I’ve Sought Out More Hands-On Work

 

But I Also Have a Day Job: So, going back a ways, why did you choose art school?

Andrew Marshall: I wanted to make movies.  I was a film major at SCAD [Savannah College of Art and Design] and I had wanted to be a filmmaker since I saw Jurassic Park when that came out in 1994.  It took a while, but I think what I eventually realized is that I wanted a job that was exciting, and I wanted a job that would take me around the world and that felt like an adventure, and filmmaking was a way to do that. Continue reading »

Working on New Stuff Always Gets Me Excited: Miranda Reeder of Minyan/Harlevin Visual Novels

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Miranda Reeder writes and draws visual novels (kind of like graphic novels, except you play them on the computer) under the name Minyan and the label Harlevin, where she has over 1,400 followers on Itch.io.  Her VNs include Arena Circus, The Pretenders Guild, Mnemonic Devices, and Lilith Hall, and her current project with Fablesoft Studios, Twisted: A Dark Fairytale, raised over $2,300 on Kickstarter in October 2019.

I first met Miranda in Toyama, Japan, where she spent three years in the JET program teaching English.  After leaving Japan she returned to Ohio to pursue a master’s in Japanese translation at Kent State University, and over winter break we talked via Skype about staying motivated, balancing creativity with Day Job work, and sharing her passion with her family. Continue reading »

How Concert Merch Tables Taught Me About Self-Promotion

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I was sixteen when I went to my first concert.  It was a four-person jam band called Uncle Sammy whose two albums I’d been listening to nonstop on CD, and I jumped at the chance to see them live.  The show was at Milly’s bar in Manchester, New Hampshire, and my friend had to email the owner asking special permission to get in because we weren’t 21 yet.  We had to make a bunch of promises not to drink, but we did get some good nachos.

Uncle Sammy was a local band out of Massachusetts who played at bars and smaller shows around New England and at the time had put out two live albums on indie labels.  To us, though, they may as well have been a huge platinum-selling group. Continue reading »

Why Don’t You Just Self-Publish Your Novels????

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You have no idea how often I get asked this.

The question usually comes up when I’m talking about my writing, how I’ve written two novels already, how I tried for kind of a long time to get my first one published without any luck, queried a bunch of agents about my second one, and am now more actively looking at small presses as a better outlet (entry to come about this one, promise!).

Unfortunately, explaining all this makes it seem like I’m facing a long, hopeless struggle rife with setbacks and failure from which I’ll never emerge victorious.  At this point, the person I’m talking to will respond (or, more likely, interrupt) with a well-meaning question/suggestion that seems like the perfect solution to my problem:

“Have you thought about self-publishing?”

The short answer is Yes, But Not Right Now.  The long answer is more complicated… Continue reading »

I Edited (Another) Writing Anthology!

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So here’s another cool project I was involved in.

As some of you may remember, last year I spearheaded and edited an anthology of short stories, essays, and poems for the Concord branch of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project in my home state.  After we decided as a group to assemble a writing collection, I asked people for submissions, worked with the individual writers to polish their work, and assembled the manuscript, which Gary Devore finalized and reformatted for eReaders and paperback copies.

The anthology was fun and super-rewarding to work on, and the group was so happy with how it came out that we decided to do another one. Continue reading »

Here’s What I’m Working on RIGHT Now (Fall 2019 Edition)

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It helps me a lot to sit down and write about my current projects and creative goals (as opposed to just thinking about them), as well as what kind of progress I’m making toward them. This is a lot more helpful than keeping them in my head, where they swim around in the nebulous stormcloud that is my creative work life so I can’t see them with the proper perspective.

I try to be honest about my progress and setbacks on this blog because I don’t want to fall into a trap of pretending that I’m doing a kick-ass job if that’s not really the case. Pretending you’re doing better than you are is pretty unhelpful because 1) It alienates you from other people you can’t be open with, and 2) It hinders you from actually improving the way you organize your time because you’re living out a kind of fantasy where everything’s going just peachy.

Anyway, enough with the intro: here’s what I’m working on RIGHT NOW: Continue reading »

When You Do Creative Work With Your Friends, Everyone Wins

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When I was in the fifth grade my best friend and I recorded five double-sided cassette tapes worth of radio shows in my bedroom.  I had my own boom box (which was pretty much the coolest shit ever back then) with a six dollar Radio Shack microphone, and the two of us made jokes, ridiculous skits, and character impersonations we improvised on the fly.  I’ve still got them in a box somewhere as a time capsule of my earliest creative work.

Unlike the stories and comics I used to make as a kid, though, the radio shows were significant in that they were my first time making creative work with another person, as opposed to working alone.  That shit matters—a lot. Continue reading »

New Erochikan Zine Available! Plus Thoughts on Satire and Putting Out Your Own Work

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Combatting Life’s Challenges Through Learned Helplnessness: A User’s Guide is the third zine I’ve put together for the Erochikan collection, and it’s now available in my webstore.  This 18 page guide shows readers the many advantages to giving up on your aspirations and finding complacency with your current, mediocre life.  It’s illustrated with a selection of superficially appealing stock photos to help you visualize the surface-level happiness that awaits you!

For those of you not in the know, the Erochikan Zine project is something I started a few years ago for the now on-hiatus Art Swaps.  I had fun making them and people really liked them, so when I opened my webstore I printed some more copies and started selling them along with my Eikaiwa Bums chapbook, where they got even more positive responses.  (BTW, thanks to everyone who bought copies, either online, or at my reading back in August—you’re all awesome.)

The name Erochikan comes from the ero in erotic and the Japanese word chikan, a pervert who gropes women on crowded subways.  The fictitious company Continue reading »

Good Work Will Find Its Way: An Interview with Author Jonathan Face

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Jonathan Face is a computer programmer by day and the author of Catharsis, a horror novel set in a small New Hampshire town, which has over 28,000 downloads on Amazon. He’s also the author of The Remnants Part I and II, and most recently, Odd Tales, a collection of short fiction.  We grew up in the same small town of Warner, New Hampshire, and he graduated from the same high school as me a few years before I got there.  We met for the first time when I was back in the state and sat down at his parents’ dining room table to talk about minimum wage jobs, self-publishing, job security, and being open with your coworkers about your writing life. Continue reading »

New Hampshire Folks: Come Hear Me Talk About Life in Japan!

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Hey all,

No post this week since I’m back in New Hampshire enjoying some much-needed time off and doing a whole bunch of things I haven’t been able to do for the past 12 or so months.  In no particular order, here’s a quick list:

Continue reading »

Eikaiwa Bums is in a Brick and Mortar Bookstore!!!!

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The pictures don’t lie—that’s my chapbook short story, Eikaiwa Bums, on the shelf with the other authors at MainStreet BookEnds in Warner, New Hampshire.  The shelf price is a mere $3.00, with proceeds supporting both the author and a super-cool independent bookstore that’s been a staple of my hometown for over twenty years.

Here’s the coolest part—on Sunday, August 18th I’ll be at BookEnds giving an in-person reading and talking about what it’s really like to live and work in Japan.  The reading is totally FREE and will also be a good chance to catch up with me while I’m back in the States for summer break.  Watch for more updates closer to August…

It honestly feels pretty incredible to have something I wrote for sale in an actual bookstore and to have earned a place (albeit a very small one) among the writing community in my home state.  More than that, though, Continue reading »

Thoughts on Hyping Your Shit

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I think a lot about promotion, and how a lot of creative people don’t like doing it.  I hear from a lot of creative people that they want to be in a position where they can handle the actual making-stuff part and leave the selling and the hyping and the getting-the-word-out-about-the-stuff-they-made parts to someone else who’s doing it as a separate job.

For whatever reason, this attitude seems especially prevalent among other writers I meet, who find the idea of promotion distasteful.  Maybe I notice this because I also used to feel awkward about promoting my work, especially after having jobs where I had to sell shit I didn’t care about.  The selling at these jobs sucked so bad that I began to hate the entire idea of selling anything, especially if I was doing it to make money for some super-impersonal corporation somewhere.

Selling things for other people made me feel unclean because I was usually repeating a script someone else had written Continue reading »