Progress... and Making a Living

Progress update: the year of living creatively is going pretty well in some areas... and not so well in others.

I have taught myself, more or less, to paint with watercolours; have continued to make beads and the occasional piece of jewellery; I am experimenting with mixed media art, and this week I made my first handmade journal.

On the downside, I've spent too much money, as I'm still prone to falling into the trap of the magpie attitude: "Ooh, shiny/pretty: I want it!" - or something like that. This is the flip side of loving art and craft products. I have terrible lack of willpower - or is it called impulse control nowadays? So I'm focussing on minimising my expenditure.

But living more creatively has brought into question the whole area of actually "making a living". I would like to do this in a more balanced, creative, doing-more-of-what-I-love kind of way.

The question is - how? Can I manage to make an income from creative output? How about enough to give up the day job? Or at least enough to enable me to change to a different day job. My current job is not too bad - very occasionally it can even be fun. I work with some lovely people. But I also feel mired in a we-fear-change kind of culture, sometimes micro-managed, frequently dull, boring or even mind-numbingly tedious. The emphasis is on "presenteeism" and I don't feel like I'm contributing anything useful to society.

Mostly, I'd like to give it up in a heartbeat.

After some serious consideration of self-employment, and bouncing around lots of ideas, I don't know. I'd really like to, and I've been reading a great book, Making a Living Without a Job by Barbara Winter. I recommend the book - she has some great ideas, including creating "multiple profit centres". This really appeals to me, with my low boredom threshold!

But the thought of being completely self-employed, and having no security, is pretty scary. (Translation: totally terrifying!) I asked a friend about his experiences of self-employment, and he got out of it because he was spending all his time looking for work. And when you're doing that, you can't do any work. Plus everyone is looking for a bargain - they don't want to pay what it really costs. He's a web designer.

So... I don't want to end up on that kind of wheel.

Technically, I'm self-employed (part time) anyway, because as soon as you sell anything you make, HMRC reckons you as self-employed. So while I still have a fear/respect for tax returns and suchlike, it's not quite as terrifying as it used to be.

The thing is - I want it to be earning a living more creatively. So I don't want to fall into the trap of cranking out "units" or "products" to meet the market, and for it to be focussed all on PR and advertising and trends. If I'm making things, I want to spend the time it takes to get them right, and make them with love.

I suppose what I want is a way of Making a Life, not just Making a Living.

And the deep down truth is that I want to be a writer and artist/maker.

It scares the hell out of me that I might be rubbish at both - or at the very least incapable of making any money from them. And could either of these involve making a useful kind of contribution to society?

I don't know. I don't have any answers - just questions!

The short term answer seems to be to grit my teeth and attempt to relax (heh) about the day job and keep at it to keep me funded, to put money aside and use days off to explore writing and art and brainstorm ideas.

I feel too that I've been here before and perhaps I'm going round in circles. But I'm 37 years old (eek) so it's time to break out of the rut and find a creative solution. Scary, but exhilarating. I'll keep you posted.