Come up with a crazy business idea.
The two which put food on my table are crazy. Both are guaranteed to require inordinate amounts of effort and skill. The returns are pitiful the acclaim zero.
The first is a jazz player. How on earth I got into playing jazz is beyond me, it just happened.
I play a saxophone worth more than a family saloon, with a PA system worth a kings ransom and drive a car held together with tape. I’m paid peanuts and nobody understands what I play. It’s a personal thing I guess.
The second thing is even crazier. I write books. This takes even more time than playing jazz for even less return, if that was possible.
I spend hours every day writing and rewriting part of a story, and researching my subject. My dinner goes cold if I get an idea and I’ve managed to scupper several happy relationships because of it.
Am I cursed? Am I an artist? Yes—it’s about passion and feeling, not money. I can’t hold a decent conversation or socialise properly, but I can play music and write my feelings on paper. We’re all different thank goodness. Imagine a world with no music, or buying a new hi-fi with no instruction manual, or worse, no magazines in the doctor’s waiting room.
So give us artists a bit of thought, we who struggle to pick up the scraps thrown by the latest pop craze bimbo or bodice-ripper novel. We do it for the love of the art and if we’re lucky, a bit of acclaim. Oh yes, and a tin of baked beans now and then.
Lovely post! Who thought putting magazines in a doctor’s waiting room was a good idea?