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Bumfuck, Iowa
Nov. 2nd, 2006 10:28 amNot a good day yesterday. Not a particularly bad day, just profoundly not okay…
Tired of feeling like this. Tired of feeling like I've been bound in chains and submerged in a 5000-gallon tank filled with saltwater while some sinister guy in a top hat outside clicks the stopwatch.
Part of my edifying conversation with Mike and Diane two weeks ago was about business plans. "It's like driving without a map!" said Mike. "You want to get from Los Angeles to New York. Aha! you think, I know the major highways. And then you're driving along and you think, that looks like a pretty place to check out. So you head the car in that direction. And then there's this sign for a roadside attraction that sounds pretty cool, so you head the car in that direction. And the next thing you know, you've been in Bumfuck, Iowa for the past two years and Times Square is a receding dream."
Okay, he didn't actually say "Bumfuck, Iowa." Bumfuck, Iowa is a peculiar mythic landscape of my own invention. Maybe I'm in Bumfuck, Iowa right now and Angela Landsbury has just handed me a pack of cards: "Patrizia, wouldn't you like to play a nice game of solitaire?"
Who-ooo-ha-ha!
The point is I need a plan. I can accurately say that nothing I'm doing right about now is anything I actually want to be doing, with the possible exception of the Little Store – which isn't actually making any money. I think the Little Store could make money. It's a question of marketing it correctly. It's a question of coming up with a plan.
I'm a big believer in plans. I outline everything I write methodically. I have a business plan for the store, but because I'm stretched so thin I haven't updated it in a long time. I have a publicity plan for the circus but because JDK is such a poor delegator and prefers seat-of-the-pants adrenalin rushes to organized campaigns, I've never been able to implement that one either.
I need to figure out a way to get some kind of clarity, some kind of long view.
In other news, finished the design for the Cirque du Méprise sponsor website:
I like it – very clean and fresh. My web design work usually suffers from being overly baroque. The pix are a Flickr set that change every time the page is refreshed, and the logo is shaped like an ee cummings poem of a circus tent (though it could also be a Chinese pagoda, I suppose…)
Also I finished the info dump portion of the Venezuela story, managing to keep my fascinating account of oil extraction from shale to fewer than three lines! Next up: party scene in which Our Hero, the morally ambivalent, deeply cynical McDaid must (a) have enigmatic conversation with Fu Manchu, leader of the eeeevil Chinese Trade Mission, and (b) fall in love with the research scientist. That last will be hard because there's nothing particularly loveable about the research scientist unless I give her high, perky boobs like Evangeline Lilly's on Lost – which I think I watched for the very last time last night. Homoerotic fantasies about secondary characters – alas! – cannot compensate for complete lack of a plot…
Tired of feeling like this. Tired of feeling like I've been bound in chains and submerged in a 5000-gallon tank filled with saltwater while some sinister guy in a top hat outside clicks the stopwatch.
Part of my edifying conversation with Mike and Diane two weeks ago was about business plans. "It's like driving without a map!" said Mike. "You want to get from Los Angeles to New York. Aha! you think, I know the major highways. And then you're driving along and you think, that looks like a pretty place to check out. So you head the car in that direction. And then there's this sign for a roadside attraction that sounds pretty cool, so you head the car in that direction. And the next thing you know, you've been in Bumfuck, Iowa for the past two years and Times Square is a receding dream."
Okay, he didn't actually say "Bumfuck, Iowa." Bumfuck, Iowa is a peculiar mythic landscape of my own invention. Maybe I'm in Bumfuck, Iowa right now and Angela Landsbury has just handed me a pack of cards: "Patrizia, wouldn't you like to play a nice game of solitaire?"
Who-ooo-ha-ha!
The point is I need a plan. I can accurately say that nothing I'm doing right about now is anything I actually want to be doing, with the possible exception of the Little Store – which isn't actually making any money. I think the Little Store could make money. It's a question of marketing it correctly. It's a question of coming up with a plan.
I'm a big believer in plans. I outline everything I write methodically. I have a business plan for the store, but because I'm stretched so thin I haven't updated it in a long time. I have a publicity plan for the circus but because JDK is such a poor delegator and prefers seat-of-the-pants adrenalin rushes to organized campaigns, I've never been able to implement that one either.
I need to figure out a way to get some kind of clarity, some kind of long view.
In other news, finished the design for the Cirque du Méprise sponsor website:
I like it – very clean and fresh. My web design work usually suffers from being overly baroque. The pix are a Flickr set that change every time the page is refreshed, and the logo is shaped like an ee cummings poem of a circus tent (though it could also be a Chinese pagoda, I suppose…)
Also I finished the info dump portion of the Venezuela story, managing to keep my fascinating account of oil extraction from shale to fewer than three lines! Next up: party scene in which Our Hero, the morally ambivalent, deeply cynical McDaid must (a) have enigmatic conversation with Fu Manchu, leader of the eeeevil Chinese Trade Mission, and (b) fall in love with the research scientist. That last will be hard because there's nothing particularly loveable about the research scientist unless I give her high, perky boobs like Evangeline Lilly's on Lost – which I think I watched for the very last time last night. Homoerotic fantasies about secondary characters – alas! – cannot compensate for complete lack of a plot…
