Kris Overstreet: the Year in Review
Jan. 1st, 2007 12:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redneckgaijinGoing back through my LJ posts to remember just how my year was.
First, the "First Sentence of Each Month" meme:
1: WLP Message Board:
4 people approved for adult access
2: http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/02/01/walmart.contraception.ap/index.html
3: I only wish I could do things like this in ways that produce money.
4: And here it is. Probably this is all I'm going to post in the open, but I thought you might like to see what I can turn out in a non-sexual vein.
5: Report on Shiokazecon in a while, not just now; still recovering from the weekend.
6: Excuse me, Mr. Scripp and Mr. Howard?
7: Some of you who watch me here are in favor of the war in Iraq- a couple of you as enthusiastically in favor of it as I am vehemently against it.
8: Today I spent a few minutes trying to find where I'd filed my father's last statement.
9: I'm tired and have a ton of things to do- catch up on Internet stuff, update online store, put away con stock and Bootle 15 comics, inventory remaining shirts and put in replacement order for Archon, etc. etc. etc., so this report is going to be brief.
10: Note: please, PLEASE circulate this. If your representative or Senator is on this list, print it out, bold their names, and print it and distribute it at political events where you live.
11: Got in a playtest each of Sakura and Eternal Battle GZ.
12: More evidence, were it needed, that there really are fundies utterly opposed to science.
Now for a more coherent review:
First and foremost, this year I finally got the urge to run for political office out of my system. My campaign for State Legislature faced numerous handicaps, not least being the fact that, well, I write porn. I attempted to defuse the issue by owning up to it at the front of the campaign, but that didn't work- the two newspapers who interviewed me for my candidacy in October focused on that issue almost to the exclusion of all else. In fact, considering I had almost zero support from my party, it might have backlashed against me. Of the $5,000 I'd hoped to raise, I only raised a bit under $1500- over $800 from a single person whose donation came in too late to do more than run some radio ads after early voting had already begun. Despite all this, I got 24% of the vote- doing better than any other Libertarian candidate for the state legislature in Texas, better than all but a couple of Libertarian legislature candidates in the whole USA, but still 52% less than my opponent. Only after the campaign did I sit down and discover that my Republican incumbent spent over $40,000 to win re-election against a Libertarian... curious, isn't it? I only hope someone else will run against him in 2008, because he is oh so very vulnerable...
In business news, I began 2006 by returning to flea marketing- my father's trade for the last five years of his life. That experiment lasted three weeks, cut short when my grandmother got unexpectedly sick- sick enough to warrant a doctor visit the very next day, almost sick enough to warrant hospitalization. That made me aware that employment would not be feasible while I'm here: my entire purpose in living out here in the woods is to be caretaker of my grandmother. By February I liquidated out of the flea market experiment, taking about a $300 loss on the experiment.
Added to all this were ongoing problems with Bootleg #14. Made late first by financial problems, then by technical problems, then by communications goofs, it finally got shipped at the very end of February... with thirteen pages mis-sized in an editorial blunder of major proportions. Although the misprints couldn't be fixed, the other problems were solved, more or less, thanks to blunders and miscommunications by Diamond, where timing issues somehow fell through the cracks enough for the late shipment to be ignored and payment to be sent early. Still, by the end of March, with one of the worst AggieCons I've ever been to, things looked pretty bleak for WLP.
Desperate for cash, I began applying for credit card processing in April. The first three attempts, from April through the end of May, left me with $200 out of pocket and three rejections. Most annoying, the first rejection came after an initial acceptance... and after I'd already accepted a $25 credit card purchase at a convention! Despite this, things seemed to stabilize a bit, and the biggest convention of the year was coming in June, with A-Kon always good for a financial shot in the arm.
And of course, in Dallas, on the Thursday before the show, with two other people riding with me, my car's transmission blows out. This proved to be a major handicap to my political campaign- I had to pass over appearances because of it- but it's been an even bigger handicap to WLP. I've had to borrow vehicles for convention appearances since, and I can't expand my con circuit until I get it fixed. The process, after seven months, is still very much incomplete. The car hung over my head all A-Kon weekend, even though it turned out to be the best I've had since before I quit doing the dealer's room there.
The rest of June, July and August continued to be financially precarious. Not only did money have to be gathered for Bootleg #15, but a healthy reserve had to be squirreled away for repairing the Exploder. Throughout this period I managed to tread water, but not to make much ground... until two things happened at the same time. AnimeFEST, over the Labor Day weekend, did almost as well as A-Kon did, and a new attempt at a WLP online store resulted in a massive revival of WLP's mail order system. Throughout September and early October WLP's bottom line was, after many bad years, finally firming up, although financial worries still hung over the company. When, in mid-October, I finally found an outfit willing to guarantee me approval for credit card processing- ironically, through the same bank WLP had its first merchant account with- that proved the icing on the proverbial cake. By November WLP stood on solid, if not yet firm, financial footing.
In fact, WLP's finances became firm enough to begin new experiments in product lines. New color artwork was commissioned from various artists to produce color art prints and merchandise. An ad was taken out on a popular webcomic for WLP's T-shirt line- which didn't bring in money while it ran, but possibly brought in sales long after the fact from people who wouldn't buy anything else WLP makes. In the new year WLP will likely add hats to its line- we'll see how that, and all the rest of it, works.
WLP's gaming projects have been, in a word, slow. I'd originally decided to push on Huckster! to be WLP's first game release, but an attempt to commission Phil Foglio for the cover art ended with a check never cashed and no response to emails. Furthermore, playtesting at conventions throughout the year showed that both Huckster! and Eternal Battle GZ are nowhere near ready to go as games; they clunk and clunk badly, and Huckster's the worse of the two. In a few days I'll sit down, build WIP secret pages for Henshin! and Sakura!, and ask various WLP-friendly artists if they're willing to work on spec to get those games out. Both games work well, and Sakura promises to be a major hit if playtester response is to be trusted.
In personal matters, I decided to take the NaNoWriMo challenge- but not actually during NaNoWriMo, so it didn't count. In April I wrote over 50,000 words of what will eventually become about a 100,000 word sci-fi novel. It's languished there since then, though: I need to go through and make some edits and plot out the timeline properly before I can get what remains to be written properly organized. I proved I could do it, though, and to me that's the most important thing. Towards the end of the year I began a political blog, Liberty Yes, Anarchy No, which requires almost as much effort as the NaNoWriMo challenge did. I'll resume that blog tomorrow, but we'll have to watch and see if it lasts.
Other odds and ends: in April one of our house cats attacked a coral snake but managed to escape getting bitten. In September, on the day I picked up a new pistol and wanted to test-fire it, an oil well within 100 yards of the house had a tank burst, terrifying the neighborhood. In October I "discovered" that no person in America has my name, which means I don't exist... yeah, RIGHT. In November a bald eagle swooped in front of the car I was driving- within twenty miles, as the eagle flies, of my own home. In December my grandmother's husband Vernon died three weeks short of his ninetieth birthday- which, in practical terms, cuts my grandmother's Social Security income in half, which means 2007 could very well be tight, tight indeed.
List of the famous dead who affected me enough to post to LJ: Don Knotts, Milton Friedman, Gerald Ford, and Saddam Hussein.
And finally, my TopTen Eleven Favorite Posts from my LJ for 2006:
11:Overstreet's Ten Commandments of Web Comics, first draft.
10:Filk: "Local Media Con"
9:Filk: "I Hated Firefly"
8:A hypothetical that expresses my misgivings about anarcho-capitalism.
7:Filk: Milkmaid Rhapsody.
6:Poetry Time, a quick poem-filk on one of my favorite subjects.
5:Original song, "New Worlds", written on Challenger Day.
4:Pluto, you're fired.
3:Competing with food.
2:An exerpt from the novel project.
1:Without the photos, you'd never believe what happened to me at AnimeFEST. (A certain young lady let me have a sample of the real thing at OniCon, which I'd certainly have enjoyed more had I known it was coming. }:-{D )
Happy New Year; I'll spend it by myself as usual, seeing in 2007 before going to bed and hoping for the best.
First, the "First Sentence of Each Month" meme:
1: WLP Message Board:
4 people approved for adult access
2: http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/02/01/walmart.contraception.ap/index.html
3: I only wish I could do things like this in ways that produce money.
4: And here it is. Probably this is all I'm going to post in the open, but I thought you might like to see what I can turn out in a non-sexual vein.
5: Report on Shiokazecon in a while, not just now; still recovering from the weekend.
6: Excuse me, Mr. Scripp and Mr. Howard?
7: Some of you who watch me here are in favor of the war in Iraq- a couple of you as enthusiastically in favor of it as I am vehemently against it.
8: Today I spent a few minutes trying to find where I'd filed my father's last statement.
9: I'm tired and have a ton of things to do- catch up on Internet stuff, update online store, put away con stock and Bootle 15 comics, inventory remaining shirts and put in replacement order for Archon, etc. etc. etc., so this report is going to be brief.
10: Note: please, PLEASE circulate this. If your representative or Senator is on this list, print it out, bold their names, and print it and distribute it at political events where you live.
11: Got in a playtest each of Sakura and Eternal Battle GZ.
12: More evidence, were it needed, that there really are fundies utterly opposed to science.
Now for a more coherent review:
First and foremost, this year I finally got the urge to run for political office out of my system. My campaign for State Legislature faced numerous handicaps, not least being the fact that, well, I write porn. I attempted to defuse the issue by owning up to it at the front of the campaign, but that didn't work- the two newspapers who interviewed me for my candidacy in October focused on that issue almost to the exclusion of all else. In fact, considering I had almost zero support from my party, it might have backlashed against me. Of the $5,000 I'd hoped to raise, I only raised a bit under $1500- over $800 from a single person whose donation came in too late to do more than run some radio ads after early voting had already begun. Despite all this, I got 24% of the vote- doing better than any other Libertarian candidate for the state legislature in Texas, better than all but a couple of Libertarian legislature candidates in the whole USA, but still 52% less than my opponent. Only after the campaign did I sit down and discover that my Republican incumbent spent over $40,000 to win re-election against a Libertarian... curious, isn't it? I only hope someone else will run against him in 2008, because he is oh so very vulnerable...
In business news, I began 2006 by returning to flea marketing- my father's trade for the last five years of his life. That experiment lasted three weeks, cut short when my grandmother got unexpectedly sick- sick enough to warrant a doctor visit the very next day, almost sick enough to warrant hospitalization. That made me aware that employment would not be feasible while I'm here: my entire purpose in living out here in the woods is to be caretaker of my grandmother. By February I liquidated out of the flea market experiment, taking about a $300 loss on the experiment.
Added to all this were ongoing problems with Bootleg #14. Made late first by financial problems, then by technical problems, then by communications goofs, it finally got shipped at the very end of February... with thirteen pages mis-sized in an editorial blunder of major proportions. Although the misprints couldn't be fixed, the other problems were solved, more or less, thanks to blunders and miscommunications by Diamond, where timing issues somehow fell through the cracks enough for the late shipment to be ignored and payment to be sent early. Still, by the end of March, with one of the worst AggieCons I've ever been to, things looked pretty bleak for WLP.
Desperate for cash, I began applying for credit card processing in April. The first three attempts, from April through the end of May, left me with $200 out of pocket and three rejections. Most annoying, the first rejection came after an initial acceptance... and after I'd already accepted a $25 credit card purchase at a convention! Despite this, things seemed to stabilize a bit, and the biggest convention of the year was coming in June, with A-Kon always good for a financial shot in the arm.
And of course, in Dallas, on the Thursday before the show, with two other people riding with me, my car's transmission blows out. This proved to be a major handicap to my political campaign- I had to pass over appearances because of it- but it's been an even bigger handicap to WLP. I've had to borrow vehicles for convention appearances since, and I can't expand my con circuit until I get it fixed. The process, after seven months, is still very much incomplete. The car hung over my head all A-Kon weekend, even though it turned out to be the best I've had since before I quit doing the dealer's room there.
The rest of June, July and August continued to be financially precarious. Not only did money have to be gathered for Bootleg #15, but a healthy reserve had to be squirreled away for repairing the Exploder. Throughout this period I managed to tread water, but not to make much ground... until two things happened at the same time. AnimeFEST, over the Labor Day weekend, did almost as well as A-Kon did, and a new attempt at a WLP online store resulted in a massive revival of WLP's mail order system. Throughout September and early October WLP's bottom line was, after many bad years, finally firming up, although financial worries still hung over the company. When, in mid-October, I finally found an outfit willing to guarantee me approval for credit card processing- ironically, through the same bank WLP had its first merchant account with- that proved the icing on the proverbial cake. By November WLP stood on solid, if not yet firm, financial footing.
In fact, WLP's finances became firm enough to begin new experiments in product lines. New color artwork was commissioned from various artists to produce color art prints and merchandise. An ad was taken out on a popular webcomic for WLP's T-shirt line- which didn't bring in money while it ran, but possibly brought in sales long after the fact from people who wouldn't buy anything else WLP makes. In the new year WLP will likely add hats to its line- we'll see how that, and all the rest of it, works.
WLP's gaming projects have been, in a word, slow. I'd originally decided to push on Huckster! to be WLP's first game release, but an attempt to commission Phil Foglio for the cover art ended with a check never cashed and no response to emails. Furthermore, playtesting at conventions throughout the year showed that both Huckster! and Eternal Battle GZ are nowhere near ready to go as games; they clunk and clunk badly, and Huckster's the worse of the two. In a few days I'll sit down, build WIP secret pages for Henshin! and Sakura!, and ask various WLP-friendly artists if they're willing to work on spec to get those games out. Both games work well, and Sakura promises to be a major hit if playtester response is to be trusted.
In personal matters, I decided to take the NaNoWriMo challenge- but not actually during NaNoWriMo, so it didn't count. In April I wrote over 50,000 words of what will eventually become about a 100,000 word sci-fi novel. It's languished there since then, though: I need to go through and make some edits and plot out the timeline properly before I can get what remains to be written properly organized. I proved I could do it, though, and to me that's the most important thing. Towards the end of the year I began a political blog, Liberty Yes, Anarchy No, which requires almost as much effort as the NaNoWriMo challenge did. I'll resume that blog tomorrow, but we'll have to watch and see if it lasts.
Other odds and ends: in April one of our house cats attacked a coral snake but managed to escape getting bitten. In September, on the day I picked up a new pistol and wanted to test-fire it, an oil well within 100 yards of the house had a tank burst, terrifying the neighborhood. In October I "discovered" that no person in America has my name, which means I don't exist... yeah, RIGHT. In November a bald eagle swooped in front of the car I was driving- within twenty miles, as the eagle flies, of my own home. In December my grandmother's husband Vernon died three weeks short of his ninetieth birthday- which, in practical terms, cuts my grandmother's Social Security income in half, which means 2007 could very well be tight, tight indeed.
List of the famous dead who affected me enough to post to LJ: Don Knotts, Milton Friedman, Gerald Ford, and Saddam Hussein.
And finally, my Top
11:Overstreet's Ten Commandments of Web Comics, first draft.
10:Filk: "Local Media Con"
9:Filk: "I Hated Firefly"
8:A hypothetical that expresses my misgivings about anarcho-capitalism.
7:Filk: Milkmaid Rhapsody.
6:Poetry Time, a quick poem-filk on one of my favorite subjects.
5:Original song, "New Worlds", written on Challenger Day.
4:Pluto, you're fired.
3:Competing with food.
2:An exerpt from the novel project.
1:Without the photos, you'd never believe what happened to me at AnimeFEST. (A certain young lady let me have a sample of the real thing at OniCon, which I'd certainly have enjoyed more had I known it was coming. }:-{D )
Happy New Year; I'll spend it by myself as usual, seeing in 2007 before going to bed and hoping for the best.
