MORE FROM THE STARVING ARTIST FILE
At some point, at least in my way of thinking, the scales will tip in my favor. With enough promotion of my work, enough freebies for good causes, and enough effort to promote name recognition I should receive more assignments.
Well, the plan seems to be working, at least in regards to having plenty of work. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that writing for a living is a sure death but a much slower one than starvation.
I now have the material needed to write the Checker obituary for Cars & Parts magazine, a paying assignment. The monthly feature for the Kingman Daily Miner will be finished this evening. This non paying assignment is for their on line edition and as part of the agreement the by line will feature a plug for this blog as well as books written.
The website for the Route 66 Association of Kingman is nearing launch date. I have written a great deal of text and supplied a number of photos for the site and am quite excited to see what fruit will come from the work. This is another non paying assignment but it is for a very good cause and I honestly feel that it is for reasons such as this that God blessed me with certain skills and talents.
With Jim Conkle at helm the Route 66 Pulse has roared back to life. I will be supplying material, including coverage of this Saturday evenings Chillin’ on Beale Street, that pertains to the Kingman area with my first deadline being August 1. See above.
For True West magazine I pen a very small ghost town sidebar. This was to be a feature but editorial constraints imposed as a result of the current economic situation negated that.
So, I write it as a way to promote work published, the forthcoming book on ghost towns, and to help a fellow Kingmanite, Bob Bell.
Besides, I am an optimistic and curious fellow by nature. I am optimistic this will turn into a paying column and I am curious as to what doors this will open. Perhaps I just don’t have enough sense to know that being happy about this wild adventure is an incorrect response.
That is the background. Here is how the whole sordid mess played out this past weekend and what awaits in the near future.
After a morning at the office and the interview with the Kingman Daily Miner on Saturday, I worked on writing captions for Ghost Towns of the Southwest until seven. Then I watched a strange movie (Bring Out Your Dead) with my dearest friend.
Sunday morning I read my Bible, prayed for friends, answered email correspondence, dug Barney the wonder truck out of moth balls and hauled some bedroom furniture, worked on the captions, posted on the blog, and read a few more chapters from a new book about the collapse of the banking industry in Detroit during the 1930s and the rise of the New Deal. In between I had two wonderful meals with my dearest friend and basked in the cool air that swept through our home courtesy of the Jon G. Robinson memorial cooler.
Several years ago we were having a very bad run with crisis piling on crisis when the swamp cooler died. I am still mad about that as it was only 25 years old.
My friend, Jon, was having an even worse time of it as he struggled through a heaping pile of family tragedy. Still, in spite of it all, in an act of friendship that still overwhelms me he insisted on buying us a new cooler. Hence the Jon G. Robinson memorial cooler.
Monday, I wrote the rough draft for the Kingman Daily Miner feature, answered more correspondence, and worked on arrangements to attend the Adventure Expo in Chicago this coming January. Even birds and Canadians go south for the winter.
I suppose there are folks out there who question my sanity. After all I live in Arizona on purpose and gleefully await the first one hundred degree day every year.
Monday afternoon I took care of a few things at my mothers house and then met with Jim Conkle, the Route 66 Pulse, and Chris Durkin from the Route 66 Association of Kingman as well as the Kingman Downtown Merchants Association. We hashed out some pretty solid deals that will help our efforts in Kingman as well as the Route 66 Pulse.
I learned a long time ago that if you take life to seriously your time here on planet earth will be a long and bitter ride. The bottom line is have a sense of humor.
I am pleased to say that Mr. D’z was quite busy when we arrived for our meeting. As a result we were shuffled out to the far end which was the garage when this was the Kimo Cafe and Shell station.
Outside it was well over one hundred degrees. In that back room with just fans to pull the cool air from the restaurant the temperature wasn’t much better than if we were sitting under a cottonwood tree along a sand wash.
About midway through our meeting a cook came in and began rolling out dough for pizzas. It was at that point I noticed two giant pizza ovens just behind our table.
You guessed it, he began baking pizzas! Well, it was a novel concept. A sauna in an historic Route 66 eatery that serves great root beer floats and very good coffee.
Life is truly a grand adventure. The challenge is to see opportunity in failure, hope in a hopeless situation, and a way to laugh rather than become bitter.
The greatest challenge is to learn to relax and enjoy the ride. After all, none of us are getting out of this alive.