NOTE: If you come here for motivation or inspiration, skip this post. Okay? Thanks.

Maybe this is the cold/flu talking but here goes anyway… I’ve been feeling okay most of the day. And, tonight I started moving things around—heavy things—looking for my sound effects mixer which wasn’t where I thought it was. So, I even looked in places where I didn’t think it would be, and I was right. And, after moving a couple heavy things, a couple of my fingers on my left hand felt a little numb. That’s probably due to the combined effects of general weakness due to the cold, light eating today and leaning on my left arm with my head in my left hand while working on the computer.

But, instead, my mind thinks of things like left side numbness being a sign of an impending stroke. I am going to have a heart attack. I better sit down for a while. Am I going to wake up in the morning? My stomach hurts.

And that, except for the stomach ache, gets you thinking about death.

Then, I think about the things I want to accomplish in my lifetime, and how many I’ve failed to achieve so far. I’m not rich. I’m not a successful author or filmmaker. I didn’t really run for President this year. I haven’t built my dream house. And so on.

Some people throw in the towel and give up on their dreams, but I just can’t see doing that. If you give up on accomplishing the things you want to do, why even go on? What would be the point? Thus, I have a certain steadfastness to hold on to those things I want to accomplish.

Of course, as time goes on, reality sets in and there are certain things that become less and less realistic or even possible to achieve.

Herein lies the rub:

“I’d say it’s been my biggest problem all my life… it’s money. It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true.”
~Walt Disney

And, you know, stuff that I am most passionate about just doesn’t pay the bills. As most people know, you’ve got to pay the bills before you can worry about much else.

I’ve run websites that I was passionate about. I put a lot of time, money and effort into them, and ended up losing money rather than making anything. Follow your passion and the money will come, they say. But, in reality, that’s not the case. And the “law of attraction” and positive thinking and having complete confidence that someway, somehow money will start flowing in just doesn’t work.

For example, I had a site once that I put years of work into. I spent many a night just working on it, trying to make it the best it could possibly be. I saw what others did, and tried to make mine better. I promoted the heck out of it. I spoke in front of groups encouraging people to sign up with it. I think I ended up spending thousands of dollars on it, and maybe I grossed a couple hundred dollars on it, which is to say I lost thousands of dollars.

So I ended up trying other ideas and websites. There are things I’m not so passionate about, but they are things that bring in money for other people, so maybe if I did websites like that, and made money, then I would have the money to do the things I want to do.

Somehow, that doesn’t work either. I have a number of domain names and websites that I don’t care a whole lot about, but I resist letting them go in the hopes that somehow they’ll earn their keep and allow me to do the things I want to do.

Just yesterday, I had another idea for putting a fresh spin on a website I started developing a year or two ago, but didn’t have a “unique selling proposition” for it. I thought about working on doing that and putting it into action.

But, now I’m thinking maybe I won’t. I’ll get burned out and bored with it quickly.

What really calls out to me is #5 on this list. I constantly have new ideas for it and have a good idea of what I want to do with it and have already, in the past, done some work on it. But, I have no idea where I’m going to make any money off of it. Thus, it gets left behind, tucked in a drawer for “someday.”

So, I don’t know. The idea of selling a chapter at a time seems appealing on the face of things but I wouldn’t want to start selling chapter by chapter until the whole book is done. I could imagine that, yes, hundreds of people will spend a dollar to buy a chapter, but, realistically, I’d probably get a mere handful. And, honestly, getting five bucks to write a book is more of a demotivator than a motivator. Oh, wow, I might earn $100 to write a 20-chapter book. Woohoo! But, I’d feel obliged to keep writing to finish it for the people that buy it, all the while taking time away from doing other things that might pay a little better.

Actually, I’d like to do all five things on that list, but, again, reality sets in and I need to pay the bills! And, generally speaking, science fiction really doesn’t. How many SciFi writers do you know have made a good living from it or even gotten rich? Now, compare that to something like accountants or lawyers or whatnot. It’s an uphill battle.

So, anyway, those are my meandering thoughts while pondering death while suffering what I hope is the last vestiges of this cold. Who knows? Maybe I’ll go back and delete this post sometime. But, right now, that’s just what’s going through my congested head.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 9th, 2008 at 12:32 am and is filed under Reflection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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