A Halfa Post

The trouble with my productivity systems is that like a well-oiled machine, it can easy be clogged up. When life gets in the way of my work, I fall behind, and so I abandon my system, work too hard, burn out, and then decide to develop a new system.

The good thing about blogging is that I don’t force myself to do it, so it never feels like work!

The obvious side-effect of that is 2 months without a post.

So it’s 2013. We’re barely into February, and already that looks normal to me.

What’s my ’13 looking like? I do a thing called “Big 4, Little 4” each year, in which I jot down the four main things I want to focus on, and four more “fun” projects, or smaller items that I want to accomplish. I do it (most) every month as well, and it’s always interesting to look back and see how my goals change over the course of the year.

One of my big 4, since I met her, has always been my life comrade “SJ”. She’s something that I want to put time and effort into, always, because relationships are hard. Impossible, if you don’t put the time in.

The panel show that I host and produce, We Should Know Better, is obviously on the list, as is my job: writing/self-publishing erotica.

(the fourth one is private, for now.)

Little 4: Going to the gym, a two-man sketch show I’m (slowly but steadily) putting together, working on the various TV shows that I’m always working on, and something else that I can’t remember at the moment.

 

Why I don’t secret.

There’s a big discussion in the erotica forum that I frequent (to follow trends, get opinions on covers, and be inspired by how well other people are doing) about keeping your choice of career a secret.

I’ve never been much for secrets. I had to keep a secret from SJ for about 3 months (more on that later) and it was horrible. I almost spilled the beans a number of times, and any time she was talking to someone who knew, I was on edge.

Never again, says I. It’s not fun, and I’m not good at it.

Pretty much as soon as I started making money from erotica, I started telling people. I didn’t broadcast it, or introduce myself to people by saying “me Peter, me write smut”, but if someone I knew asked what I was doing for money, I’d tell them.

A few people in my line of work just tell everyone in that they write romance; I do that on occasion, but mostly people I won’t interact with regularly – other extras on set, bored wait-staff, or my dentist.

Since I’ve told my family (who were all cool with it; all of them but my Dad asked if they could read a story or two) I’ve “come out” about smut-writing everywhere but Facebook. I didn’t want the wider world to know before my family did, simply because that would be a pretty crap way for (say) my sister to learn about it.

(Facebook is an interesting bag – I feel like I’m forcing it into people’s faces if I post about it on there. My extended family read my Facebook closely, and as most of them are religious, I suspect that they don’t really want to know about it.)

(If I ever start making serious dollars, I’ll post about it there, but until then I’m happy to keep it under wraps.)

I’m a big fan of Kevin Smith – I think he’s a great writer and an even better speaker. I’m actually a bigger fan of Kevin Smith the man than I am of his films – I’ve seen all his stuff except for Red State, and while I love Clerks, Clerks II and Dogma, the rest I can pretty much take or leave.

One thing that he heavily promotes is “owning your shit” (I can’t remember if that’s his exact words or not.) – the logic is that if you own your weaknesses (being fat or having a small dick or whatever) then no one can “dig it up” and try to use it against you.

I write porn. For years, it was just for fun – in the last few months, I’ve started making money from it. (about a year ago, I started writing for commission, but that was only ever spare change, and I’ve only recently begun trying to make a living from it.)

My best-sellers are what’s called “PI”, or Pseudo-Incest: step-fathers, step-siblings, adopted cousins etc. Consensual, fully-grown adult incest, I should specify. They sell well and I’m good at writing them – I have absolutely no attraction toward my own family, but I’ve always enjoyed the fiction of it – so that’s where most of my writing energy goes. They make up something like 70% of my income, with two books alone being about 25% of that.

I also have no shame about my body (except perhaps that I’m a little chubbier than I’d like) and so I’ve done a little bit of online porn. Nothing hardcore (though I don’t honestly have any objections to doing that either) – there are a few alternative erotica sites that pay you to do stuff like masturbate on-camera. I’ve done two videos so far, and they’ll be released in the next month or two.

But as well as all that, I’m also a kids’ puppeteer. For a while, I wondered if I should keep all the above under wraps (or even decide not to do it at all) – if I were to create the next Sesame Street, would it all come tumbling down when a video of me jerking off surfaced, or if people found the story “Backseat Fisting” amongst my catalogue?

If it does, so be it. Morally, I have no issue with the people behind “Play School” also being porn stars. I realise that I’m particularly liberal when it comes to these things, but as far as I know, there’s no connection between being filmed having sex and being dangerous to kids. If others disagree, that’s their problem, and if it means that they won’t buy my products (or the network refuses to air my shows, etc) then so be it. I’m not the kind of person who lives their life by the standards of others, and I don’t want to be.

You only get one chance at life, and it doesn’t make sense to me to make decisions based on what other people might think. If this attitude of mine results in bad things happening to me, then I’ll learn that lesson at the time.

Until then, I’m going to live my life as well as I know how to. And right now, that means writing chapter four of my latest commission (in which the adopted daughter seduces her mother to get her step-father’s attention) and then go home and redraft the story of the wizard who helps his owl work out how to best be an owl.

If it all goes up in flames, I’ll have this to hold on to: while it was happening, I had fun.

Have an interesting life.

 

Kiandacorp

A while ago, I started a blog called Kiandacorp. I called it a “Let’s Write”, and the intention was to talk about the process of developing and writing a sitcom.

I put four posts together, uploaded the first one, and then the world never heard of it again.

Unlike many projects that I start and never return to, Kiandacorp has never left my mind. I’ve been thinking about the show for years, and the blog for month, and I’m reasonably confident that I will return to (and finish it) before the year is up.

I was slowed down by ambition (like many of the projects I start and never return to). The second post was a brief recap of the other TV pilots I’ve written and filmed over the years, and I wrote about my regret that they weren’t online for easy linking.

I’m a big believer in not having regrets, and it occurred to me that this was something wholly in my power to fix. And so I’ve been slowly (incredibly slowly) putting together my old TV pilots and getting them ready to upload. One week I’d find some footage, another week I’d get an old computer or hard-drive up and running, and so on…

…right up until yesterday, when I dedicated the whole day to editing. I now have a copy of The Map Shop, the second TV pilot I ever shot (the first is Robbie and Peter, which has been online for a few years now) and it’s actually quite watchable.

It’s not great, but I’ve cut out all of the bits that didn’t work (including a plethora of needlessly offensive jokes, a romantic subplot that made no sense, and more than half an hour of scenes inexplicably featuring a wizard) – I’m not going to upload it until I’ve let it it sit for a while, maybe shown a few friends to see if there’s anything obvious I can change to improve it.

As well as the obvious “having it out there”, I’m really glad that all the people who put so much effort into it (not least of which the actors, who took a week off work to get involved in my silly little sitcom, and my cousin Gav who didn’t take the week off, but worked and studied full-time while helping me out with it.)

I’ve filmed 5 TV pilots so far – Robbie and Peter and Help! are both online already, The Map Shop will be joining them in the next week or so, NAP-Time (my first kids’ puppet show) shouldn’t be far behind  – I was watching some of the footage with Sarah Jane last night, and it’s beautifully shot – I’m particularly looking forward to this one going up.

The big one, however, is Frank. Shot with a proper crew, from a script I’m still happy with, this show had all of my friends on-board helping (and lost me a few of them) and it’s gone through two rounds of editing and had an premiere.

Once NAP-Time is up, I’ll have run out of excuses not to put a final cut of Frank together, and once that’s done I’ll no longer have any  reasons not to start pitching it, and truly try to get my start in television. I find it truly daunting.

For someone as ambitious as I am, I sure can be afraid of success sometimes.

But once all the pilots are up, two things are going to happen: I’m going to start pitching, meeting industry contacts and making a heap of two-sheets…and the Kiandacorp blog will start again.

There’s something a little bit fucked up about my brain that the second of those two is what kicked all this into gear. I guess creativity inspires me, whereas terrifying new processes…terrify me.

Wish me luck!

Ambition

I don’t think that I’ve ever been accused of being lazy.

I’m not (just) writing that to brag, I was genuinely thinking about it over the weekend, and I don’t recall it ever coming up as a descriptor. I’m ambitious, and I’m completely aware that nothing worth happening happens (especially not lofty dreams such as mine) without a lot of work going into it.

I’m also a big believer in doing things that I want to do. It’s my favourite part of being an “adult” – if I decide that I want to have biscuits for breakfast, I can. If I want to spend the weekend sleeping in, that’s entirely my choice to make. And if I decide that “batteries” are the best possible use of my money, then by golly no one and nothing is going to stop me spending my money on batteries.

(it’s 9:30am on Monday morning, and after struggling to wake up after a weekend of sleeping in, I’m now sitting at my computer next to a pile of breakfast-biscuit-crumbs and…batteries.)

Combine these two facts about myself, and things have a tendency to get a little hectic. I do things that I want to do, and work extremely hard on them. I decided a while ago that I wanted to make a panel show, and so We Should Know Better has been going for almost 6 months now – it’s getting better each month, largely because of the huge amount of effort that the team and I pour into it.

Similarly, the impro troupe that I run had two shows on at the Melbourne Fringe Festival this year, because someone in the group suggested it and so we put the effort in, and ran two shows (that I thought were actually quite successful.)

And for several years now, I’ve had the idea of running a comedy gala/variety night, with the intention of raising money for charity.

On my birthday.

This year, I found the motivation, said “hashtag you only live once” and assembled a team to get it off the ground. It’s on the 8th of November, it’s called Chocolate Coated Evening, and like all good events of this magnitude, putting it together is a lot of work.

Inevitably, work on all three of these YOLOs needed to be worked on at once – the impro shows were on at the same time as the gala needed assembling, and We Should Know Better needs to be put together afresh each and every month.

I like blogging for a lot of reasons; there are a lot of bloggers I really admire, I think it’s a nice outlet for putting thoughts out there, and it’s a nice warm-up “each” morning.

Another thing I enjoy about it is that I think you can chart how hectic my life is by how frequently blog-posts appear. I’m hoping to get a post up every day this week, simply because the storm has passed and this is my week of catching up on all the things that don’t get done when life becomes unbearably hectic. (also topping the list: going to the gym, and doing washing.)

I sometimes question my lifestyle, as a part of that “question everything” philosophy that I’m so fond of, but I always reach the same conclusion: being productive, sometimes insanely so, is genuinely what makes me happy. If I’m feeling burned out, I can move things around and take a break, but that typically only happens after something that consumes my entire life for more than a month.

Part of the reason that I am the way I am is a simple fear of death: I want to leave my mark, and productivity contributes to mark-leaving much more than sitting around and masturbating is ever likely to. There’s so much that I want to do in my brief time on this planet, and I like to spend my time doing it.

A lot of it is because I have no idea what I’d be doing if I wasn’t working on things. I sometimes wonder what other people do with their time (and then realise how patronising that sounds) – but I only know a few people who seem to output as much as I do (and not coincidentally, they’re some of my closest friends/collaborators.)

And I think part of it, in what seems like a contradiction to my friends, is because I believe in having no regrets. If I want to do something, I do it, and if doing it turns out to have been a bad idea then I learn a lesson from the experience and take solace in the fact that I used the best available information to me when I chose to do it.

That’s why I moved in with my girlfriend after only knowing her for a few months. (best decision I ever made.) That’s why I told one of my closest friends something she neither wanted nor needed to know about her ex (we’re no longer friends, and boy did I learn a lesson from that one – but not the lesson you’d think…)

As an atheist, I firmly believe that you only get one chance to stand on planet earth, and that it will be over all too soon. I plan to spend the years I have left working hard on things that I love, and spending time with the amazing people I know.

More often than not, those two are the same thing.

I like working hard, I want to work hard, and I don’t know what I’d be doing if I wasn’t working hard. I spend my time working hard, because I have no evidence to suggest that it’s a bad idea. If I eventually learn that I “should” have been spending my time doing other things, I won’t regret it – when I learn that lesson, I’ll adjust my behaviour accordingly.

So far I haven’t learned that lesson, and it doesn’t look like I’m going to any time soon. Two-and-a-half breakdowns and over a dozen failed projects later, I’m still going.

I’m going to follow my dream if it kills me, because the alternative involves dying anyway.

I Want To Be A Producer

In the words of Mel Brooks' disappointingly not-as-good-as-I-thought-it-was-when-I-was-a-teenager musical, “I want to be a producer.”

As a kid, I always wanted to be an actor. (except for a few months when, as anyone with a decent teacher does, I wanted to be a teacher.) My friend Brent, in the last year of high school, said something that has always really stuck with me – “I always thought if you were going to make it, you'd make it as a writer.”

Maybe I'd just never even considered it as an option before then, but as soon as Brent suggested it, my brain started ticking, and I realised that I really enjoyed – loved, even – writing.

And, more importantly, that I was good at it.

(like all writers, I look back on my old stuff and cringe, but there's definite potential in most of it, and I was spending my time the two things you need to do to improve – writing and living a lot of life)

Now, seven years on, I've shifted my thinking again. I love writing, and I love being in front of the camera, but I think my real skill (and passion) lies in producing. I enjoy almost nothing more than helping to shape things, whether it's working with a collaborator on my own ideas, or being brought in to help knead someone else's brain-child into being.

I can think of nothing I'd enjoy more than spending the rest of my life as a producer, working on half a dozen projects at once, helping other people rewrite scripts, or pick actors, or tweak games for quiz shows, or just plain ole doing whatever needs to be done to get a project happening, get it working, and make it great.

“Unfortunately” isn't the word for it, because it's a necessary fact that I agree with, but…unfortunately, you need to have some success of your own before anyone will bring you in to produce their work. No one's going to listen to someone with a string of failures behind them, and I think I'm not sure I'd want to work with them if they did. So right now, I'm working on getting something working, trying to get make something that will get a name for myself out there.

I'm working on a dozen projects at once because I love it, and because there's nothing else I'd rather be doing. I'm trying to make them great because that's how you learn what works and what doesn't. And I focus on trying making them successful because I want to position myself as someone with a history of making successful works.

It's always seemed strange to me, that the only path to no longer being the person who prints the posters and buys the props is to first be the person who prints the posters and buys the props, but that's how the world works. We do the little things so that we can stop being the person who has to do the little things.

Me? I write because I don't necessarily want to be the person writing. I start projects that I think will work because I don't necessarily want to be the person starting the projects.

I want to be the person who helps other people get their projects off the ground. To do that, I have to first work on getting my projects off the ground. It's the only way to accomplish my dream of helping other people accomplish their dreams.