J.D. Moyer

science fiction author, beatmaker, against fascism

Category: Writing Page 1 of 19

Grind vs. Inspiration

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On March 15

In Creative Work/Career, Writing

Romance writer Leigh Michaels wrote that “Waiting for inspiration is like standing at the airport waiting for a train.” I completely agree. I choose to show up, more days than not, and put in the work. There’s nothing wrong with taking breaks and resting, but it’s all too easy to let the breaks stretch into stagnant periods of inactivity.

Inspiration is real, but you have to sneak up on it. Or invite it into your life. Or make a nice nest for it. There’s no one method; you have to create your own system. What inspires you is different than what inspires me or anybody else.

Maybe there are some common factors. Setting aside the time and protecting it (which sometimes requires a little selfishness, but is just as often about reducing our own self-distracting tendencies). Something to stimulate your brain: novelty, a new location, reading a great book, socializing. Creating a comfortable work environment (but not so comfortable that you get sleepy, or so ideal that you never achieve it).

Mostly it’s about showing up and struggling with your project’s next hurdle or problem. Characters, plot, structure, theme. Melody, bassline, chord progression, syncopation, mixdown, mastering. Creative work is an endless series of puzzles to be solved.

Creative work is non-homeostatic. It’s the expenditure of energy that your brain would rather conserve. It doesn’t need to be painful, but it’s rarely easy or effortless, even a flow state. That’s why they call it work.

I admire authors that produce and publish in great quantities. Piers Anthony, who I read when I was first starting to enjoy reading. He’s 91 and still publishing a book almost every year! Leigh Michaels, who published dozens of romance novels, then switched to historical fiction and is still going strong at 71. Stephen King, ’nuff said. I don’t think I’ll ever publish that many books–I got too late a start. But I do aspire to be that productive with however many years I have left, and I hope I have at least a few capable decades in me.

On the other hand, if I push myself too hard, I can feel my mental and physical health start to suffer. Creativity becomes un-fun. I become too reliant on caffeine to wind-up and alcohol to unwind. Exercise and socializing get short shrift. If you get up at 5:30 every morning and write two-thousand words without fail, but die of a heart attack in your fifties or sixties, that’s not really winning.

So what’s the balance? Word count quotas are helpful, but I don’t beat myself up if I don’t hit them. Sure, Stephen King wrote 2000 words per day, including holidays, without fail, for decades. But he’s also struggled with serious drug addictions. Maybe those two things are related, maybe not, but there’s always a cost to pushing yourself really hard. Often it’s worth it. But not always. Every artist has to make that decision for themselves, every day.

Showing up and struggling with the next problem, more days than not, keeps me honest, and I feel that it’s good for my mental and spiritual health. The endless quixotic quest for more and more artistic success is a fun side quest, but the daily work already pays for itself.

I’m Giving You Permission to NOT Make Short Form Videos

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On December 21

In Creative Work/Career, Music Business, Writing

Short-form videos (including TikTok, YouTube shorts, etc.) are the new ultra-processed food of the attention space. Bite-sized, super-engaging, effortless to consume, short-form videos melt your brain like artificially flavored bright-orange cheese puffs melt in your mouth. Zero nutritional value, and you’re left wanting more. Might as well eat the whole bag.

The first analogy I thought of was crack cocaine, but short-form video isn’t quite that addictive, and doesn’t ruin lives. It’s just another entertainment medium. And for some, it’s potentially useful. If you’re a DIY creator (author, illustrator, musician, dancer, whatever), you can use short-form video to promote your work with great effectiveness. If you’re willing and able to consistently create consistent content (there’s a reason for the two “consistents”), there’s a good chance you can leverage a zero-dollar marketing budget into massive exposure.

But one does not simply “make short form video.” There’s an art to it, like anything. To fit expectations and get views, the content needs to be engaging (funny, surprising or shocking, generally clickbaity) and presented in narrow bandwidth of narrative formats. You don’t need much equipment beyond a smartphone to get started, but you do need at least a rudimentary understanding of lighting, focus, framing, depth of field, editing, and other film-making concepts. And of course it helps if you’re young and/or good-looking and/or affable and/or funny, and enjoy being in front of the camera.

And you’re going to need ideas. Lots of ideas. But the ideas can’t be that different from one another. For the various algorithms to pick up your content and share it widely, your short-form videos will need to appeal to a narrow demographic. They should all be produced on a similar topic with a similar style, the narrower the better. Thus the second “consistent” above.

Does all this sound like great fun, an intriguing challenge? If so, you may be a great candidate for creating and sharing short-form video content to promote your work (or whatever other reason appeals to you). The more power to you!

But to me, and I’m guessing you (since you clicked on this post), it sounds like a huge pain in the ass. It sounds like a whole lot of work with potentially zero payoff. Who has time for all that? We’d rather invest our precious free time into making good (and maybe great) art, right?

The Harsh Reality of Art as a Market Product

Any kind of creative endeavor is both difficult and rewarding. The difficult part is making anything halfway decent, something that doesn’t make you cringe when the object of your creation impacts your physical senses. You have great taste (or at least great enthusiasm) for art; that’s why you started to make your own in the first place. But when you compare your own early efforts to the masters and geniuses you admire, you quickly realize that your own work sucks. So you persist and hone your skills, for years or even decades, and eventually reach a point when you’ve created something you’re proud of. You’re on top of the world!

What now?

Friends or family might suggest that you sell your work, or at least “put it out there.” Submit it, publish it, promote it. If you follow that advice, even a little bit, then your art is now a market product. Gatekeepers will accept or reject it. Consumers will buy it, or not. Tastemakers will pay attention to your work and talk about it, or not. Your work will be judged, commented on, and reviewed, sometimes harshly. Or worse, totally ignored.

It’s valid to create just for the sake of creating. Don’t turn your hobby into a job, they say, and it’s good advice. Expressing yourself creatively is usually good for your mental health, and you can simply share your work with your family and friends, completely safe from market forces and the opinions of strangers.

It’s also valid to put your work out there, to release it in some way, and then basically just hope for the best. No marketing, no hustle. Hope that somebody influential comes across your work and promotes it for you. That can actually work! That happened to me early in my music career, and it changed my life. John Digweed found a used Jondi & Spesh vinyl record at a record store in Berkeley, started playing it out, and eventually put it on his compilation that sold hundreds of thousands of copies. That break gave us the clout to release music on dozens of respected labels, to make music for video games and advertisements, to license our music to TV shows, and to start our own record label.

But in this day and age, there are millions of both traditionally and self-published releases every day. It’s more likely than ever that your work will be ignored and buried by the onslaught of newer releases if you don’t have an effective marketing plan.

You know all this. That’s why you’ve been considering making short form videos, and are perhaps dreading the prospect.

What’s the Alternative?

I’ve been experimenting with marketing for years. Mostly in the music space, through our record label. I’ve thrown plenty of money down the drain and learned a great deal about what doesn’t work. When we do have success with a release, at times it feels random. It’s easy to get discouraged and give up on marketing efforts altogether.

But I’ve persisted in trying to learn more about the space. It’s a fascinating problem, and if we can solve it, we can potentially make a living via our art. Or at least turn our creative endeavor into a lucrative side hustle.

So in terms of marketing, what works, and what doesn’t?

There’s no easy answer. The question is too big. It’s equivalent to “What’s the best way to earn money?” It depends on your skill set, the economy, your health and energy, and so many other factors.

But generally, it’s good advice to choose a marketing medium that you don’t hate. Just like you wouldn’t (or at least shouldn’t) choose a career that you hate, even if it paid well.

One useful metric is “Do you think about it in the shower?” If short-form video ideas spring to mind when hot water is pounding on your back, then maybe you should be posting on TikTok. That definitely doesn’t happen to me. But sometimes I do think of blog posts in shower. So this blog is my main “social media” channel.

What do you obsess on? What kind of promotional medium matches your natural wellspring of ideas?

Do that.

The Three Consistencies

I’ve had releases or projects get wildly popular a few times. Sometimes it’s pure luck–like a world-famous DJ finding my track in the used bin.

But in every case this “luck” has been preceded by three factors:

  1. Consistent quality
  2. Consistent content (staying within genre/topic/niche)
  3. Consistent release schedule

Easier said than done. Personally, I feel that I’m decent at quality control, pretty bad at staying within genre/topic, and mediocre at regular releases.

But times when I’ve managed to wrangle all three have been magic. This blog, for example, when I was writing consistently about health topics, posting multiple times a week. I was getting thousand of daily views, interview requests, and even a TV appearance for one of my 30-day experiments. It was a good run. Eventually I started to feel uncomfortable writing about health topics, given my complete lack of medical credentials. So I mostly stopped posting about health, and readership quickly fell off. But the formula worked.

Back in the late nineties my music and business partner Spesh started to host a weekly electronic music happy hour at an art gallery. I thought it would probably lose money as a project, but reluctantly hopped on board when his other partner dropped out. Week after week, we hosted this small party, curating music at 111 Minna from 5-9pm every Wednesday. Within a few years we had lines around the block and were written up in European guidebooks, “what to do in San Francisco.” The party ran for nearly fifteen years and was a wild success. Part of that was that the vibe of our party matched the zeitgeist of the time, when electronic music felt cutting edge, the internet was new, and San Francisco was experiencing its first “dot-com” boom. But the other part of the success was the three consistencies.

I’d love to be able to provide an example with my fiction writing. But being only traditionally published, I’ve never had much control over my release schedule, and its never been consistent. Which is one reason why I probably need to establish a self-publishing pipeline at some point to complement traditionally published releases. While it’s always possible for a one-off or debut release to become a massive hit, when I look around the author marketplace and see who is succeeding massively, they’re all consistent in terms of quality, topic/genre, and regular releases.

But wait, weren’t we talking about marketing efforts? Well, the same principles apply. If you’re publishing a newsletter to promote your books, it should be consistently good, with a consistent format, published at consistent intervals. With that formula, it’s impossible to NOT build an audience.

It’s simple. but it’s not easy. Consistency requires effort and planning. And it doesn’t guarantee success. But triple consistency does guarantee the best chance of your work connecting with its compatible and interested audience, if that audience exists.

Next up: Why You Shouldn’t Promote to Your Family and Friends

Artistic Values for 2025

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On December 31

In Creative Work/Career, Metaprogramming, Writing

I’ve done some work on consciously prioritizing my values, and that work has served me well. I know what I stand for, and that makes decision making easier.

But when I found myself in a creative/artistic lull at several points during 2024, I realized that I hadn’t ever thought about my values specifically in regards to creativity.

Maybe, in this age of AI-generated slop, it’s more important than ever for artists and creators to drill down on the WHY of their creative process. It’s a way to push back against the capitalistic, soulless, unconscious, theft-based, royalty-dodging, exploitative, human-devaluing “values” of the AI industry.

So for what it’s worth, here’s what I’ve come up with so far. I’m going to focus on these values in 2025:

1. Daily practice/habit

I’m not as fanatic about “write every day” as Stephen King, but I do try to write most days. I know I’m generally happier on days when I write (and/or make music), and of course there’s always the possibility that something I create might be halfway decent. But if I don’t put in the work, I get neither of those benefits.

2. Exploration

One of the great benefits of the act of creating something is that there are almost limitless possibilities. Prevailing norms of genre and style provide structure, but even those boundaries are meant to be broken–or at least tested. So you can pretty much do whatever you want. I like the analogy of making art as an exploration of possible spaces. For each work there is a universe of possibility, and the artist has the privilege of poking around to see if there’s anything good in there.

3. Service

My dad challenged me to ask this question: “Who do you serve?” Does your work serve the shareholders of a corporation? The owners of a privately held company? The mission of a nonprofit? Your family? The people in your community?

As artists, if we only chase commercial success, there’s a possibility we’re following the agenda of some corporation that’s trying to sell the most lowest-common-denominator “content units.” But if we ignore all markets and only serve our own artistic sensibilities, there’s a possibility of getting lost in the black hole of our own belly button.

So maybe there’s a Goldilocks space in between, where we serve others with our artistic efforts, but we don’t try to please everybody, or make the quickest buck, or force ourselves to work in styles and genres we don’t really like.

That’s it! What are you own artistic values?

Wishing you all a Happy New Year!

Communications from my Past Self (and other reasons to write)

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On May 20

In Creative Work/Career, Metablog, Personal Updates, Writing

East Cut neighborhood in San Francisco

I’m gearing up for some changes to this site. Probably a new theme, and hopefully a better system for signing up for my newsletter.

Considering these changes has led me to consider what this blog is for. Self-expression? Self-promotion? Is it a lifestyle blog? A health blog? A creativity blog?

Sure, all of the above. But here are the reasons that resonate with me the most right now:

1. To think more clearly. For me at least, there’s no substitute for writing about a topic in order to understand it, to formulate and articulate my views. I write, therefore I think.

2. To have a record of what I was thinking and feeling at a particular time. Just today I reread a post I’d written from when I’d overcommitted to work, and was feeling overwhelmed. At the moment I feel like I don’t have quite enough freelance work, which creates some financial stress. But reading my previous post reminded me that I said some no-thank-yous to give myself more time to work on writing and music. So that’s what I should do.

3. To grow my readership. I haven’t put much energy into this, but it is important to me. Having regular readers is great for so many reasons. But it’s a responsibility, a two-way street, and if I’m not writing interesting and helpful posts then I can’t expect an audience to stick around.

And here are a couple reasons that don’t, or no longer, resonate with me:

1. To write about health topics. Bottom line, I’m not a medical professional. I have a deep interest in nutrition and human health, but there are also huge gaps in my knowledge. In another life I might have become a nutritionist or naturopath, but that’s not the path I chose. And that’s not the kind of reader I want to attract or interact with.

2. To sell something. This blog will never become a sales funnel to buy my course or eBook. I just have no interest in that. If you happen to discover one of my novels that you think you’d enjoy, and buy it, fantastic! But the primary purpose of this blog never was and never will be to make a quick buck.

Personal Updates

  • I recently returned from the Nebulas Conference in Anaheim. It was my first in-person writing conference since the beginning of the pandemic, and being around other authors was incredibly energizing. I didn’t have any particular agenda beyond learning and socializing, but I ended the weekend with a slew of new ideas and a recharged writing battery. My friend Jane was nominated for a game-writing Nebula for her work on a recent D&D book, and though GRRM won the award for Elden Ring, I felt very happy for her and her team. I also met Steve Lerner, the writer of Stray (nominated in the same category)–I look forward to playing the cyber-cat game. As for novels, I’m currently reading and enjoying Daughters of Tith by J. Patricia Anderson.
  • The quiver of complete, unpublished fiction is getting pretty full, and in the coming months I’ll be shifting my efforts to submitting more work for publication, and possibly taking another crack at the agent querying process. At the moment I’m working on revisions of Green Dawn (previously titled The Savior Virus), a near-future medical thriller/sci-fi novel.
  • There are a few social issues I’m trying to think more clearly about, so I’ll probably write about them in the near future. A few of the questions I’m considering:
    • What Should the Left Do About Men? (high male unemployment, falling educational levels, social isolation, etc.)
    • How Can Labor Disrupt the False Promises of AI-Enhanced Productivity?
    • What are the Most Effective Ways Citizenry can Reclaim Power from Fascist/Authoritarian Leaders and Groups?
  • I have two new EDM releases out:

That’s all for today, hope you are enjoying your weekend!

How I’m Protecting my Writing Time (and Sanity)

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On January 25

In Creative Work/Career, Personal Updates, Writing

In 2020 my freelance consulting work crashed. Though none of my clients went out of business, many scaled back their operations and/or new software development dramatically in response to the pandemic. This, combined with a steady downward trend in the type of consulting work I’d been doing for many years, resulted in a very slow work year with far fewer billable hours than I needed to cover my expenses.

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