I spent 592 hours on a writing project. At 40 hours a week, that’s 14.8 weeks of work, 74 days of solid eight-hour workdays. Weekends off. I produced a 400+ page-document. At $25/hr., I gross $14.8K per project. Another way of saying it is I work 74 days on a book and make $14,800. I need to look at some costs before I determine my annual income.
What is my overhead in taxes? I calculate with the total loss in income/state/local taxes (30%) AND sales tax (7%) for food and consumable goods and services, I net $10.3K in 14.8 weeks work, a Banana Period. There are 3.513513513513513…banana periods in a year. If I was working as an author f/t and pumped out 3.513513513513514…projects a year, that’s exactly $52,000 a year. And the publisher wants to break down the pay rate per page or word, which is horrifying. But, you need to put in exactly a few more words on the last project to satisfy the project schedule. Those extra words are reserved for drafts on the start of the 4th project. That’s approximately 46.684623813 cents per word. That is actually a pretty good rate, and I will show you why.
That’s $52K a year, again, a respectable sum for a struggling B-List author, and a paltry sum compared to that of some unrespectable pulp writers. That’s enough to pay rent and a car note.
Let’s say I sell movie rights for all three completed projects and an incomplete draft of the 4th and get a payout of 12.244387244% of box office sales, which are pegged at $1 million domestic/global cap over a one-year window. For me, it’s the ride of a lifetime. I can pimp this project to get cameos, TV ad work and voice actor spots for at least a decade.
I could also get dropped after the third adaptation for any reason, so I plug away every day, network. If I got paid for production, I would deliver. I have already thought about this and done it before.
The first movie premieres to mixed reviews. I tour, I sign books, I take interviews and participate in process of surviving celebrity and the critics. The second movie does better, the third does worst of all, so the publishers buy my 4th manuscript, end the contract, and shop it to chatbots. Game over.
My body is liquified and injected into the hive mind, regrown, and the entire process happens over and over, but a fermented juicebox unlocks genetic memories going back a few hours and I remember I used to like fish sandwiches, as is the way of my species. I just keep writing in my new skin, in my new light. I know, this contract is sort of lame, amirite?! Royalty caps are total BS. My stuff is so hot in Uruguay and Chad. I am an AI hallucinating that it is a civilization, a drag on a local power grid for a split-second.
If I wrote here, at my location, a successful author writing out of this rural area, I ballpark a loss of 37% to taxes on income and purchases in a fashion not atypical of those in my region and socioeconomic group. I hobby with art and gadgets, but I might spend much more money on travel, luxury goods, premium services if I had some movie action, so I work accordingly. I net $111,888. Plenty of stamps in the passport. I have an extra two months after a two-year sabbatical to take another run at it. I can rent a cabin in the woods and write like crazy when needed. There, I’ve laid out my own terms and simplified the pay schedule.
If all of my taxes doubled, I would still be okay to travel inside the US on modest vacations for sabbatical. I go to quiet isolated places and write, deep in a wild place. That is how I work. I would be complete. $55,944 net to create another trilogy and prequel pitch after a year and a month. I doubt a publisher would be displeased with such a workhorse. The per capita in my village is $13,404 US.
That’s why I know I’m not actually in a simulation…because I would never know if I were. That unknown is real. My daily life is that and uneventful. So I write.
I would have access to the deeper stories that people here in me shire. They, the Lilliputians, would feel an urgent need to share. Rad. Tribal elder vibes. From those pieces I gather a garment that shelters us and heralds our travails in illuminated weaving of polychromatic LED thread and garbage like that, and whatnot. I get a lot of questions here about paranormal and spiritual questions. I don’t understand that. I don’t kitbash my life with other people’s public psychomachias. I’m not down with OPPP. I lived much more blandly than people I know. There’s nothing here outside of our shared experiences, and sitting in a room with the lights off doesn’t make me scared. I see no mystery in any of it. So boring the ghosts left.
There is no proof of life beyond death. None. No ghosts, no aliens. Our awareness is limited, too. Who knows? Talking like this guarantees that I am wrong.
If people do not really understand the science and technology of their world, there will be misfortune and growing inequality. Tyrants are grown. When I talk about tech people want to run away, because tech is math and physics, data conversion. I just see an unyielding process of violence and ignorance in its wake. I can couch all of this in parapsychological parlance, pseudoscience and superstition, cop outs. Finding something real is so hard.
I want to learn what motivates people, what stresses them out, what haunts them. We can experience an awareness connected by shared experiences of meaningful events or cultural artifacts. Some call this a “higher harmonic order”, “sixth wave” of consciousness, “world mind”, “metaconsciousness”. More about a tensegrity of a system than the exact definition of any particular part of it. It’s easier to achieve if you all have the attention span of a duck. Anatomically speaking, if music were a bone, the metanarrative of our shared human conscious experience would be a skeleton. Social media would be like a tibia or something. Access to food supply would be an organ. I probe the nature of this dogsbody into which I place my broken and fragile observational powers.
Our artifacts as a topological record of an anthropomorphized spirit. A local deity, a guide for shaman. The Akashic records of innumerable psyches converge at a higher dimension and so on, somewhere up there over there out of sight, curled up in a fart and a flash of light. You connect with this vibe looking at an old beaded necklace in a museum, forgotten machines and tools. Millions of years of tool use by hominids only recently providing self-annihilating power. Talk about growth.
Our skeletons drop from the atmosphere into the ground like fruits of death. The sunset chases the dawn, everlasting. Our calcium jewels gather in the war chests of dirt and slime of our world. I become the world I experience now, but without awareness, fungii turn my remains into plant food. My dust among the stars again. Scavengers spread my bones like the dawn unclasps the sun with its peach melba fingers and whatnot.
Compared to global standards, I would be still living unimaginably well as a working B-List author with a crack at the big leagues, nothing but a quark gluon soup with bills. Existential quandaries aside, I can still enjoy an afternoon coffee somewhere without looking like a total turdball.
Clean water, sanitation, good roads and power grid, access to open markets and ports, consumer power. Days of reflection in safe supply chains, locked away in a system feeding itself. Parks, a library, museums, a couple of shops, safe houses.
Just one hospital trip away from bankruptcy. It’s a very, very strange and lethal environment, peculiar because of the pecuniary predation which hallmarks our economic system. Exclusion of wealth from talent, erosion of value, ignorance of externalities and natural resources. A race to the bottom has no winners. Cannibalism, egad!
Even in my village, we have access to services most people do without on other continents we never visit nor could even identify on a map. Going to a resort is different than living in a village and working there and buying flip-flops and motorcycle tires in the same shop as your neighbors. There is wordless knowledge.
Suffering levels all fields. Mine is from lack of community. The old parable of the grasshopper and ant can be read as one of hard work vs folly, or kindness vs avarice. The ant must support the colony. The grasshopper must sing. It’s sort of jingoistic. Ants eat grasshoppers, too. Refer to previous paragraph.
I should probably get outside and get some air or something, throw a frisbee and lighten up. This is meaningless existence for its own sake, and I should stop imposing. The meaning of existence escaping me is not trivialized by my stupidity. If I think I know, then I know I know nothing at all. I accept my small token of appreciation in my daily role as a prole in this country suffering from oligarchical zombie capitalism, with a dash of hegemonic dark money shadow feudalism. So I side hustle all the live long day.
One can return here with expat eyes but there’s no home anymore. I can smell something in the halitosis of scalded egos belching into my face from the mouth of …I’m going with…Two-Lobe Larry and his Demon Swordsmen. Well, it certainly makes me ill. How darest you, and whatnot. I forgot what I was talking about. Was I talking about hibachi?
I’m practicing for conversations I might have one day. I come from a long line of chatprep disciples.
Fifty State Banana 