As you may know from my vague and sporadic tweets and all my allusions to stress, last week was a tough one.

Dad and me. The inclination to make stupid faces when a camera's in view is genetic. I was able to fend off the urge here, but I think I compensate well by being bedecked so ridiculously in crochet.

See, the day before we left town for Greg’s grandfather’s funeral, we got a call from my parents after one of my dad’s routine pancreas screenings. He gets those about four times a year. The short story is this: About 10% of pancreatic cancer cases are hereditary, and my family’s one of those affected. My father’s mother, brother and sister all died before the age of 70. After my uncle Bruce died several years ago, we discovered the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research, and it has given my family something to rally around instead of feeling like walking cancer time bombs.

One of the main reasons pancreatic cancer is so deadly (95% of patients don’t survive five years) is that the cancer is asymptomatic until it’s too late. And if there isn’t a familial link, there’s no reason to do the invasive, expensive screenings to test for it before symptoms arise.

So the bitter irony of the story I’m about to tell you is that the only reason my father gets routine screenings is that so many of his loved ones died young.

Mom, Dad and Greg at Webs for my book launch in 2007. I loved that they all came, all the way to Massachusetts.

Dad, and some of my older first cousins, participate in a study of hereditary pancreatic cancer that’s funded in part by the Lustgarten Foundation. At his last screening, about ten days ago, his local doctor in Albany, NY, found a mass in the tail of his pancreas. They sent the results to the leader of the study at Johns Hopkins, and she said she wanted to see Dad as soon as possible. Six days later he flew down to Baltimore for more tests. It was the day after Greg and I returned from the funeral.

That one full day waiting at home was one of the most stressful, trying days of my life. There was nothing to do. No emergency flight home to arrange. No doctors to call. Just me and my overactive imagination, doing dances around each other.

I did my best to hold myself together. I didn’t pace too much. I spent lots of time on the phone with friends and family.

It was only come evening that Star Trek made me cry. Greg and I decided to distract ourselves with television. We’ve been watching The Next Generation. Surely great sci-fi would do the trick.

Irony, however, seems to be the theme of the month. Season 3, Episode 5: The Bonding. The entire damn episode is about a boy whose mother died on an away mission, leaving him an orphan. Wesley Crusher, teen phenom with some astonishing ’80s coifs, played by Wil Wheaton, was brought in to talk to the boy about his own father’s death a few years earlier.

Seriously, people. Give me a break.

I lost my shit.

Actually,  don’t let my overdeveloped tendency toward melodrama fool you. It felt pretty good to lose my shit. I love fiction for its ability to help us work through the confusing and overwhelming plane of reality. As Wesley talked about his anger and his grief, I sobbed and thought about how much I love my dad. I acknowledged how terrified I was that the tests would show a metastatic tumour. That the prognosis would be grim. Grim prognoses are what we’re used to when pancreases are involved.

Poor Wesley Crusher was like the Dawn Summers of the late ’80s – decried as a dreadful whiner and as just plain annoying – but after the moment we shared the other night, I’ll forever be his champion.

Did I mention I'm a geek because I grew up in the presence of my father's love of sci-fi?

I got a call much earlier than I expected the day of the tests. It was my brother, who told me it seemed to be good news. Excellent news. Preliminary findings didn’t indicate cancer at all. No dire prognosis. No emergency flying.

My dad still needs surgery. At a minimum, he needs to have the tail of his pancreas removed, and along with it his spleen. He’d like to take the whole damn organ out, which is something people with a family history like ours can do. If he’s able to work that out with his doctors, he’d live the rest of his life like a diabetic, dependent on insulin and also digestive enzymes to survive. But he wouldn’t feel like a time bomb anymore. He’d know he wouldn’t again experience the same terrifying shock he did this month.

And all this six weeks or so before the annual fundraiser. The fundraiser that takes on new meaning for me this year because I credit the study, and the foundation whose money helps fund it, for catching my father’s tumour before it could morph into a deadly beast.

The boy on Star Trek was twelve. I may be thirty-four, but I’m certain I’m too young to lose a parent. My parents have a lot of life left to live.

So this year for the fundraiser I’m again asking you for money. Even the tiniest donation can go a long way, but I know times are tough and you have your own causes to support. So I’m also asking you to go shopping, which as we all know is different. Some very special crafters have volunteered to donate some or all proceeds from some of their products to the Lustgarten Foundation as part of my campaign. They rock, and you probably want their stuff anyway. If you’re a maker, please consider donating some proportion of the proceeds of something you sell. This way you can jack up your prices, and help to spread the word about this very important research. If you’d like to participate, please fill out the form in the middle of that page, or drop me an email.

Ah look, a not-ridiculous candid shot. This was at Dad's 60th birthday party four years ago, which, as you might be able to pick out from the banner behind him, he coupled with a fundraiser.

Right now the research supported by these funds is important to me and my family in ways I hope you can understand from this post, but as the research advances I hope it will produce answers that will be important to absolutely everyone.

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This weekend was all about digging in at home for some quiet time as we try to exorcise the stress of the last few weeks. I slept in, finished a book I’ve been reading for ages, started a crochet project, and spent the entirety of Saturday afternoon making earrings.

We had a clock we couldn’t fix, see, and instead of just throwing it out we busted it open and dug around for parts. I loved the hands most of all, so grabbed a couple other parts along with them and started fiddling around.

They looked too sparse with only the clock parts, so I started adding chains, and then some not-so-well-conceived spacers between them, and finally a bead. The spacers are just small spirals of wire, and they aren’t perfectly useful because I made them too small and the jump rings attaching some of the clock parts can move over them. Still, they do manage to keep things somewhat spread out on the big rings.

I originally made ear wires for them (see below), but they just didn’t look right, so I switched to a simple post (see above).

These upcycling projects are making me see all sorts of disposable items in a new way. We throw away less, and I love the things I make more. WIN.

Also, have I mentioned recently how much I’m loving making earrings? I mean, these may have taken me a couple of hours to figure out, but I still have such a yarn-focused mindset that I delight in having a finished project in such a small amount of time.

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This post was originally published on the now-retired Make & Meaning blog on January 16th, 2010.

So I’ve been getting these press releases from the Craft and Hobby Association. They’ve been arriving with increasing frequency and a directly proportional increase in my feeling of annoyance.

Why, oh why, are the events these press releases promote so utterly banal?

I mean, ordinarily, I do expect press releases to promote banal things. Call me jaded.

But I’m working on not expecting banality from businesses in the creative space. Businesses that sell products or services intended to inspire others to create should not put out a press release touting banal promotional efforts. They should put their well-exercised imaginations to the task of creating outstanding promotions, no?

I mean, why try to sell the same-old way if you’re a business founded on doing things creatively? Surely there are promotions that expect more of consumers than their desire to emulate the once-famous or to be the biggest or fastest at something. Surely crafty folks might be turned on by new ideas, twists on old conventions, or some plain-old friendly humour, right?

(Really, a business selling paper clips could come up with some pretty freaking creative ways to promote such a simple product, so do feel free to apply my gripe with very broad strokes.)

One of the recent CHA press releases had “WORLD’S LARGEST CROP ATTEMPT” in the subject line (all the subject lines are in all-caps, because apparently that seems like a good way not to make someone immediately delete the shouting in their inbox). Even though I’ve since discovered that this apparently refers to a scrapbooking event, every time I re-read the headline I think it’s about agriculture.

Press-release mechanics aside, is the best way to promote scrapbooking really to try for the world’s largest crop? Can’t we do better than to default to trying to make the biggest of something? I don’t scrapbook, but I’ll tell you what I might have felt compelled to pass on to my readers had I found mention of it in my inbox (the purpose of a press release is, after all, to have the recipient pass on its contents):

• Some group event involving memorializing a common thing like embarrassing or confounding notes other people wrote in a high-school yearbook
• A gallery of artists’ scrapbooks. (Notice I didn’t say “celebrities’ scrapbooks”, but that I rather prefer to see some outstanding and likely inspiring examples of scrapbooks from wildly creative people.)
• Some kind of group effort to create something from the individual contributions of scrapbookers and paper crafters. Something like a wall mural for a kid’s wing at the hospital. Something very decidedly not piecemeal-looking and ugly.

If I think my readers will relate to something in a press release, I pass it on. Well, in theory. I’ve never actually done it, though, and all the press releases I get as a blogger are from crafts businesses or organizations (not just CHA; I’m only using it as an example because of the recent spate of releases I’ve received).

We enjoy an industry that exists because of creativity. Let’s apply that creativity to our industry, hey?

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Photo credits: Muffet (top, bottom); both CC-A licensed

Unfortunately, all comments were lost when Make & Meaning was taken down. Don’t hesitate to repeat yourself here, or to join in on the new conversation!

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We didn’t have our act together to participate in our block-wide yard sale today, but we had a lovely morning walking around catching up with our neighbours. I honestly can’t think of a more delightful way to start the weekend. Especially a weekend devoted to moving passed the stress and angst of the last couple of weeks.

I bought this chair from my neighbour for a buck. We’ll spiff up the wood a bit, and though I love the worn green paint, Greg only agreed to accept the chair if we paint the legs yellow to match the new upcycled table. I’ll miss the well-used look of it, but I agree with him that it’ll look great in yellow, too.

Other scores: a clay dish made by our 13-year-old neighbour who’s into pottery, a handful of books from a new neighbour I want to invite over so we can talk more about books, a big carrier thing for the car roof-rack from our neighbour whom Greg could have talked with about tools for hours, and unopened Mulder and Scully figurines from around the time of the first X-Files movie from our next-door neighbour we’ve known for eight years without knowing she’s a big geek just like us.

Sometimes we fret that we live on the other side of town from all our friends. But it’s days like today that make us so happy to be here.

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I’ve become the keeper of my partner’s grandmother’s sewing box. Mimi died several years ago, and I never really knew her. I feel like I can kind of get to know her now, though. A little bit, through the stuff in her sewing box.

In it are a few pairs of scissors, countless sewing needles and safety pins (many with dry-cleaning tags still attached), more iron-on patches than I’ll ever use (but I can already think of some applications), and lots of thread. Lots and lots of thread.

In addition to around ten plastic spools, there are a couple dozen wooden spools of thread. I don’t know much more than that they’re old – some stamped with a cost of 19¢.

Do you know anything about the history of thread? I’d love to learn more about when she may have purchased some of these. Leave a comment, or make a note on the photos on Flickr. I’d very much appreciate any help you can give!

And don’t worry, I’ll use the thread. Though some of the spools have certainly remained nearly unused for decades, I get the impression from the rest of the contents of the box that Mimi was practical about mending.

I could be totally wrong. But that’s okay. It would be a shame for items of such practical beauty to sit unused.

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I was reading this article about EduPunk in The Tyee yesterday, and it got me thinking. (Ironically, something else I thought was that I wanted more thoughtful meat, and more concrete history and policy in that article.)

For every formal job I’ve ever had, I’ve been either over- or inappropriately credentialed. I have a bachelor’s degree in linguistics and a master’s in educational studies that, despite snobby academic eye-rolling by “real scientists”, may as well be in developmental psychology.

In the last eleven years I’ve been hired as the coordinator of a community centre’s after-school program, a travel-camp counselor, a substitute teacher, a magazine editor and the community dude at a web start-up.

(That’s not very much formal hiring; most of the time I work by cobbling together contracts or by writing books.)

To be clear, I’ve never not been hired on account of being over-credentialed. It’s just that my credentials were never very relevant to the work I sought.

Note that I’m not saying I’ve been overqualified. I reject the notion that credentials equal qualification. Book learnin’ ain’t the same as actually doing. This is why the EduPunk article got me thinking about this.

Except in the case of professions like doctors and lawyers that undeniably require a tremendous amount of study and apprenticing, I think a default reliance on professional credentials is dumb. Of course some fields involve a tremendous amount of learning and mastery, and some people learn best in a school setting or enjoy taking classes. That’s all well and good. My point is just this: When you’re hiring a web designer and your two final candidates have five years’ worth of portfolio for you to judge, do you care which one has an MFA?

No, you don’t. You judge their work on its own. It doesn’t matter if their skill and craft developed in a classroom or in an office or in a lean-to.

To most people school is just school, to some it’s the bee’s knees, but to others school is a place where learning simply can’t happen. I, for example and despite being in school till I was twenty-two, learned very little in the classroom. I’m just really good at being a student. Even when I was bored to tears, which was much of the time, my overdeveloped sense of achievement kept me focused on earning high marks. I’m uncomfortable failing, see, and so on paper I’m the perfect student. In reality, I spent most of my time in the vast majority of my classes completely zoned out. If not for that overdeveloped and totally insane need to get A’s, I would certainly have gone mad and would have dreamed of dropping out. In the few classes that really engaged me, I devoured the material and my imagination took me to countless new places I would have dedicated years of study to. But I only had a semester, and that was that.

So, oh my gods am I glad to see a DIY movement taking hold in education. What’s unclear from The Tyee article, though, is that there’s expertise available to those DIYers. But that’s not what’s got me writing right now.

See, despite my dismissal of credentials as relevant, in my freelance work I’ve been keenly aware of the legitimacy my credentials bring – the illusion of legitimacy, that is. At the first hint of doubt on someone’s face as we discuss my ability to learn the job I’m applying to do, I mention something or other about grad school. It’s amazing what people assume you’re capable of when you’ve already managed to jump through the hoops and navigate the politics and bullshit of academia. Or maybe we’re mostly just programmed to equate respect to initials – M.A., B.A., etc. Even when the degree you have is in a branch of study wholly unrelated to the job.

But here’s the thing, dear creators. Take a look to your left and another to your right and you’re likely to find a high school drop-out who’s written a best-selling book. You’re likely to find someone in their thirties who’s been successfully self-employed for twenty years.

Every day you read blog posts giving you invaluable advice on how to run your business, inspiring you to create, teaching you new skills – all written by people who not only don’t have an MBA or an MFA or an education degree, but who don’t have a GED either.

You might be inclined now to wonder who those folks are. To maybe not take them as seriously as you had. But why? Do you take my posts about creativity any more seriously knowing that I did research with babies for two years and get all nerdy excited about creolization?

No, you don’t. And you shouldn’t.

You value the words of these creators, you value their work and their generosity of knowledge because you’ve benefited from them. Because their work and their personalities have proven themselves. Hell, some of them may even be publishing anonymously. So you don’t even know their name, yet you learn from them, become inspired by them, consider their advice.

Our creative world is all the richer for the varied backgrounds of the people we keep company with and learn from. I felt stress and pain through much of my formal studies because I’m interested in too many things and couldn’t choose. But I lived in a very small world back then, and I didn’t know the option of dropping out was even available to me. I believed drop-outs were destined for poverty, addiction, crime and tearing up their families. I was a very naïve and easily intimidated kid. So I can only try to express to you in words how much I admire and learn from the people who are so much like me, who have such varied interests, who read such fascinating and entertaining books, who make me think hard about so many things, and who did have the presence of mind and the fortitude of spirit to be true to themselves when they were young. Who sought the kind of learning they needed.

Of course I don’t regret my education. I may be totally cynical about the ivory tower, but I know I was not only lucky to have the opportunity to go to university, but to have it be an expectation placed upon me from a young age. But I also grew up being told that I needed a university degree to make something of myself. And now I know that’s just not true.

It’s proven again and again by the brilliant, creative, successful people I have the utter pleasure of working with every day.

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Last summer we opened up the wall between our living room and what’s now kind of like a sub-living-room, or a den. Our 90-year-old Craftsmen bungalow feels much more airy and open now, and I’ve enjoyed the excuse to redecorate these two front rooms (and no, I don’t mean to imply that we’ve actually done anything with the “new” room yet).

The living room is the room you enter when you come into the house through the front door, and I’ve always wanted to put a small table near the entrance so we’d have a convenient place to keep our keys and change. I knew exactly how I wanted it all to look: I wanted to hang the owl plate Greg’s great-aunt made in the ’70s, below that I wanted to put a very meta key-shaped key holder, and beneath that I wanted a table. A high-ish table that wouldn’t block the heating vent it would sit in front of. We hung the plate and the key holder months ago. Poor keyless key holder sat for ages in wait of a table.

One day I stumbled upon a photo of a table a British student made, and I fell in love with the concept. I sent the photo to Greg, and we decided we’d eventually make something like it.

Side table by Frank Flavell

Now, there’s barely a sliver at the centre of the Venn diagram representing my taste and Greg’s. So we decided this project would marry his love of wood and rustic decor with my love of clean lines and modern styling – but not exactly like the model in the photo, which he found boring and I found lacking personality (yes, that’s similar to boring, but it’s not the same to me). It was the utility and simplicity of the box and the cleverness of its legs we liked.

Saturday we went down to Greg’s workshop and started figuring out what we wanted to do. He’d suggested we create a lip around the outside of the tabletop to prevent things from rolling off it, and as we were discussing ways to do that, I saw the old doors we’ve been saving. “Hey, why don’t we use the routed panels from one of the doors to make the table top? Voilà, a lip around the edges!” And so we did. The centre panel of the door just happened to be the perfect width for our table, including the border around the edges.

After we stripped decades’ of paint off the door, Greg carefully cut a routed piece from another section of it to fill in the side of the table top that was left open after he cut it from the door. Then he glued it into place and left it in the vice for a while.

He created the sides of the box by piecing together two panels from the sides of the door, with one solid piece serving as the bottom. The back of the box is made from part of the thinner centre panel of the door. He used a scrap spare two-by-four cut down to match the thickness of the door to make the legs.

We used a clear varnish on the box and four coats of eco-friendly yellow paint on the legs (it’s from Benjamin Moore and the colour is, appropriately given the first nice weather we’ve had all season, Sunshine). Greg put some felt on the back of the box so it won’t scratch the wall, and he also attached it to the wall in a way that makes it easy to remove, just in case the dog (or, ahem, an ungraceful human) bumps into it. And thus rustic meets modern, and we’re both very happy!

Behold, my wee vignette!

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This is Amanda with Iris the Gourmet Monster, by Rebeca Danger. Knit in Shepherd Bulky yarn in Unicorn Parade, held double on size 15US needles. (I swiped the photo from frecklegirl on Flickr.)

UPDATE: Due to my travel plans on Friday, the contest will close at noon, but a winner will not be drawn until later in the day. Any comments that come in after 12pm Pacific Time on Friday will be disqualified (but they’ll still make me happy).

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You read that right, my little creative geniuses.

Let my friend the bulleted list outline the awesome for you:

1. Lorna’s Laces has just introduced a new colourway for their yarns.
2. They’ve named it UNICORN PARADE. (If you didn’t know, the people at Lorna’s Laces seriously know what’s cool. Amanda sent me a text with a pic of the new colourway ages ago. Because she loves me.)
3. Amanda told me how they came up with the name: “We had come up with the color for Unicorn Parade a bit on a whim. Trying to brighten things up and find a great new little kids color*. We settled on the color combo and then over lunch one day decided it was time to name colors. Robot Overlord and Turtle Rodeo were obvious for their colors but we were stumped on the kids color. Then the obvious emerged. I mean seriously, have you seen anything ever look more like a Unicorn Parade? (Obviously without the glitter.)” Obviously.
4. Because they love listening to yarnies’ feedback, Lorna’s Laces has started producing its much loved Shepherd Sock yarn in beefy 100g hanks (435 yards each!). That’s a whole pair of socks or a small shawl or a herd of amigurumi unicorns all from one hank.

Which leads us to your sparkly opportunity to win a 100g hank of Shepherd Sock yarn in the Unicorn Parade colourway.

All you have to do is leave a comment on this post naming one creature, character or non-fiction person who should join the unicorn on parade. Multiple entries are welcome (each in a separate comment, please).

This will be a short contest, kids. Friday is my birthday, and it will make me happy to choose a winner on my birthday. So.

At 12-noon on Friday, July 9th, I will pick a comment at random (the comment must name a parade companion; if the chosen comment doesn’t, I’ll draw again).

For the rest of my birthday, I will be delighted imagining the unicorn parade we will have created all together. Thank you, in advance.

Good luck!

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* Yes, Amanda totally implied I have a thing for little kids colours. To that I stick out my tongue and make a farting noise.

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Kirsty Hall shared a link to a must-read article by a software developer who tells the story of his recent experience hiring an artist who also happened to be a champion and evangelist of his product. He hired the artist to help with customer support, and together they crafted a job description and schedule that would allow the artist to make art when he needed or wanted to, and to work when he wanted to. Support response times decreased almost immediately. A few months later, when the artist was offered a much higher-paying full-time job, he turned it down because his art is too important to him to give up.

Go read the post.

I thought I’d tell you a little about my relatively recent full-time work experience. I’ve been mum about it, but not for any particular reason. Mostly – and I’m skipping to the punchline here – because at the end of the story I discovered I really love to work on my own juggling several collaborations. And I need to work in a creative field. But here’s how I got there.

Last summer, my friend Zak asked if I’d like to meet his business partner, Martin. I knew they were creating a start-up with the goal of changing the world of legal information (ba ba BAH) forever. I was intrigued. I love game-changing. I love paradigm shift. I love it when people get so moved by their own passion that they dedicate themselves full-time to getting it out.

And I fell in love with LexPublica. I was still on my year-long hiatus back then, and I essentially told them any time I had was theirs until I had to find a job. In the back of my mind, I thought, “Hey, maybe this would be the job.” So I turned up the charm. And they asked me to join them full time. I was elated. At the time, I thought working outside the creative world would allow me to get back in touch with my creativity while still using my skills for good.

Now. I usually shy away from full-time work. I often joke that I’m unemployable. I learn too fast, get bored too fast, and then get frustrated that I can’t get my work done. After a while, I’m no good at following the rules, because I end up only seeing how the rules hinder productivity and innovation. Mine is a mind best suited to short-term projects. It’s taken me a very long time to discover and accept this.

So I’ll tell you why I was not only open to joining this team, but eager. It’s because it was the first time, ever, that I didn’t feel I had to lie about myself to get a job. Zak knew me pretty well. When he and Martin asked me to come on board, here’s the gist of what they told me:

• We want you because you learn fast and you’re an excellent brainstormer. We’re a start-up – we need a lot of that.
• We want you because you’re good at starting projects. We want you to start projects with and for us. And then we want you to hand them off to other people so you can start starting new projects.
• We want you to communicate.

And then we talked a lot about our respective work needs. I require an alarming lack of structure. I love deadlines, but beyond that, back off. I get twitchy if I feel like I’m asked to do something that bristles my principles. I need privacy. I bore easily. I move fast. All of these things were discussed as assets, not liabilities. Zak and Martin had, on their own, discussed at length their own work needs and quirks. We all have them. There was no mold to fit, here.

For three or four months, I was very happy. I went to an office in an interesting part of town every day. I got to experience the world of start-ups, and being one of very few women in the world of venture-capital financing (oh, the feminist rants I spewed). I was part of a team I respected and valued, and I felt respected and valued.

Then I started to get a little twitchy. It’s very possible I simply joined the team too early – there wasn’t quite enough of the right kind of work for me, and though I did the other kind of work as best I could, eventually I stopped enjoying it. And so one day I talked to Zak and Martin about it. And they said, “Let’s go to lunch! We need to talk about this!” And talk we did. Mostly, they listened. I didn’t feel like a freak when I told them how I was feeling; I didn’t feel like I was failing to fit a mold. I just told them what was up. And they looked me in the eye and tried their damndest to make it better.

It was better for a while. But really, what happened was that without my realizing it, I was coming to the point of discovering that web start-ups and the law are not a good match for me. That really stressed me out for a while. I did not want to let Zak and Martin down. I’d never felt so good at a full-time job. I’d never felt so valued. And I didn’t want them to think I didn’t value them or the work or their project or their passions.

But also, we were a start-up, kids. We had no money. And we all needed to make some. So I started thinking about how I could make money on the side, and so I started thinking about work I could look for in the field I know best – crafts. And then I started getting excited about my crafts world again. Very excited. Excited enough that in the hours of my work day when I couldn’t find much to do, I’d read and write about crafts. And feel guilty.

And I mentioned the stress, right? I got that tell-tale stomach ache again.

And so in February, I talked to Zak and Martin again. I told them I needed to flip things around – I needed to focus on finding paid contract work, and help them out on the side as a volunteer again. I believe in their project. I want to help it succeed. I’m just not suited to doing it full-time.

Their response? “Ok. Yeah, we saw that coming.”

No bridges burned. No friendships strained. And I think I’m finally ready to apply the lesson I actually learned a few years ago: no more full-time work for me.

I joke that I’m unemployable. But it’s pretty much true.

So that’s the tale that led to my new Hire Me page, and to my enthusiasm for participating in things like the Summit of Awesome, Mighty Ugly, and a new project that’s in the kinda maybe stage but that’s got me giddy. And I’ve taken on a fabulous client who’s an author and needs a hand with her social media strategy.

Oh, and the blog redesign. One day I was like, “Kim, for someone who wears black every day, why is your blog brown and fussy?” If my goal is for this site to represent me in my quest for work, well, then it should freaking represent.

The end (not really)

PS Zak, Martin and their team have just released their shiny new web app into the beta-testing world. It’s called Contractually, and it’s here to help companies (small ones! creative ones!) manage their legal affairs. All those contracts. Such a pain. This app makes it easier. Just sayin’.

summit of awesomeness by -leethal- on Flickr. This is the least black outfit I've worn in recent memory. Maybe I should have made the new blog design orange and blue and green and yellow?

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Money’s been at the front of my brain lately. I need to make more, and stat. I’m in one of those dry spells that always come ’round at some point or another in creative business. I’m not panicking; I know well enough that eventually it rains. Still. I’ve called all my feelers back from their holiday and sent them all out. I’ve got both eyes peeled. An ear to the ground. But I know better than to sit around letting my cliches do all the work.

A few weeks ago I added a button to the bottom my blog posts. Did you notice? If you did, I bet you didn’t know what it’s for. Go peek down there.

Flattr is a social micro-payment system. It’s like Facebook’s “like” button, but with cash. It’s simple, clever, and I think it has tremendous potential to help make blogging a sustainable endeavour.

Here’s how it works, a little more specifically:

1. You create an account on Flattr. To do so, you enter the basic info and you also open an account. There’s no using Flattr without also using money. The project was started by Swedes, so the currency they use is the Euro. In this day and age, I don’t much care what currency I use. Perhaps in the future they’ll add support for other currencies so those of us not in Europe won’t have to get dinged by exchange rates and fees. Do note that the Euro is worth more than the U.S. and Canadian dollar right now, so the minimum deposit may be slightly more than you think.
   1. Everybody must make a deposit – there are no moochers in Flattr. In order to have your work Flattred, and therefore to make money, you also have to give Flattrs. Nice.
2. The deposit you make sits in your Flattr funds account, which you manage through a dashboard. You choose an amount to automatically add to your funds each month (the minimum is €2 per month, which isn’t very much at all).
3. Each time you Flattr someone’s work by clicking the button on their site, you’re committing to pay them some of your funds at the end of the month.
4. At the end of the month, the money in your funds account is distributed evenly to all the people whose work you Flattred. So, say you have €2 of funds. If you Flattr two things in a month, each of those accounts will receive €1 from you.
5. At the end of the month, you receive money into your revenue account from the people who Flattred your work. You can withdraw that revenue whenever you like.

I’m in love with this idea, but there are a couple of caveats.

Flattr is only as useful as the size of the population that uses it is big. For a month, I was the only person in my community who used it. I received no Flattrs that month. This month, though, some more people in my community are beginning to use it. I’ve got four Flattrs right now. That’s not very much, but it’s more cents and maybe even dollars than I was making by blogging last month. Until it really catches on, we early users of Flattr are essentially investing in the project with no promise of return. The good part about that, though, is that it’s a very small investment and I’m confident I’ll make my few Euros back. If I don’t, it’s not enough money to significantly affect my bank account.

As we all know, blogging is work – it’s just not work that directly pays us very much. Even if you run ads on your site, you’re probably not making much money from them. Flattr allows people to support your work whenever they’re compelled to. One of my four Flattrs is on my general Books page. I take that as one person deciding to support me because they enjoy my books (hell, the way royalties work, I could potentially make more from some of my books simply from people Flattring that page). One Flattr is on my recent post about homophobia. I know a lot of people were moved by that post, and I was moved by their responses. Two are on my post about going to Portland for the Summit of Awesome. Maybe those two people were just excited and wanted to pay a little bit for my drive down there.

When I read posts and articles that move me or inspire me or make me think, I would absolutely, without hesitation allot that writer some of my Flattr funds. The sweet part about Flattr is that that’s all it takes – you feel compelled to pay someone, you click a button. CAKE. And it’s just as easy to implement on your site. There are WordPress plugins, and they provide a list of links to instructions for how to use Flattr on Blogger, Tumblr, and more.

Flattr’s currently in closed Beta. I didn’t wait painfully long for my invite, and they’re now occasionally giving members invites to distribute. So if you’re interested in using it, I encourage you to go over there and sign up for a beta invite, and pay attention to current users to see if they get any invites to give away.

Here’s a list of bloggers in my community who are using Flattr. If you’re using it, let me know and I’ll add you to the list:

• Diane at Craftypod
• Lee at Leethal.net (Lee wrote a great post about Flattr.)
• Kristin at Craft Leftovers
• Artist Kirsty Hall

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.