I promise there will be no album called "Quarantine Sessions"

However, since time is no longer of the essence, I have found no project to be too frivolous. I drew a haunted house. I wrote an episode of Frasier and then, an episode of Cheers. I spent an afternoon pole dancing to the new Fiona Apple album. I baked 4 cakes on Mother’s Day. One of them turned out.

It makes me realize that, as much as I’ve always found waiting tables to be a thoroughly tolerable day job, it might be time to do something I’ve never done before: try.

I know it sounds crazy. What would that even look like? And that’s a real question. A preliminary google search for how to make money as an artist yields a lot of advice which is either wildly impractical, “reduce living expenses by moving somewhere cheaper” or simply so vague as to barely count as advice (“become an influencer”).

One bit of advice I got that made a lot of sense to me was “Don’t quit your day job”. The reasoning being that finding oneself unemployed is not an environment conducive to creativity. With the stress of worrying about where money is coming from, not only will you be less likely to feel creative and productive, but you then have to sell yourself for less than you are worth, simply due to desperation. If you have money coming in, you can afford to be patient. The goal, for this particular piece of advice, is to live off of your art income for three months while you continue to work your day job. If you can put every paycheck you get from your job into a savings account without touching it and still feel comfortable living off your art, then you can quit your job with the added bonus that now, you have three months’ savings.

So 3 months’ savings is a ways off. In the last few months I have made around $300 off my art sales which is obviously quite a small fraction of what I need and those numbers aren’t climbing in any significant way. However, during quarantine I think I’ve developed good creative hygiene, as it were. I’ve never been great at time-management, but my habits and organizational skills which are slowly improving should make this 3-month goal appear on the horizon soon enough. The only thing to do is keep trying things to see what sticks and what doesn’t. The art isn’t even the hard part, which is good news since I believe marketing oneself is a learnable skill. Quarantine has taught me that this is the lifestyle I want. Now, the only question is how to achieve it.