MAKE IT PAY

I wrote a murder mystery entitled "My Big Fat GEEK Wedding. We performed it last night. It entails a cast of geeky characters in attendance at a wedding reception, all of whom have a particular bent away from the mainstream.

The cast includes Aloe Vera, the hippie bride; Trent Razor, the Goth groom; C.B. Guy, the Comic Book geek and uncle of the bride; Farley Forsythe, a Star Wars geek; Billy Shattered, a Star Trek geek, and Muffy Winters, a total Buffy the Vampire Slayer geek.

The evening unfolds that Trent Razor, the sarcastic bastard, tries to separate Aloe Vera from her friends and family-- caustically insulting them as well as his new bride in the process-- and ends up dead.

Hilarity ensues.

This murder mystery is an example of a philosophy I came to just lately in my life: Make It Pay.

In 1995 I dropped out of the 9-to-5 world to work at home. I started with a small web business, also some acting, and added other bits of skilled labour as time went on.

For the longest time I was just doing what I did, trying to make ends meet but mostly surviving on Mrs. M's 9-to-5 income. Then Mrs. M, too, left the rat race to pursue her career as a full-time illustrator. And we had to figure out in a serious way how to keep our income-- well, incoming, as it were.

And so I began to form the basis of my philosophy. I realized that, to keep the ball rolling, I had to do more than I was doing-- but what? I cast about for things I could do, short of getting a paper route or working part-time at the 7-11.

For fun I made a website with a bunch of cartoons on it. And I updated it, just for my own interest's sake. And then Mrs. M started to get art commissions based on that site. And then I put up those commissions as prints, and they started to sell-- I added credit-card functionality to the site and they started to REALLY sell.

Hey, I thought, I just might be on to something here. I realized that I had done something I really enjoyed doing, just for its own sake-- and I'd found a way to make it pay.

I continued the experiment: Agent Mikeintosh and I did a funny little comic together. Just a little one-page ha-ha deal. And I pitched it to a magazine in the States-- and it sold. In fact, it sold six issues of little two to four page comics in cold, hard, American cash.

This idea is catching on, said I to myself. And that's when it gelled for me: Do what you love to do anyway, then find a way to make it pay.

So I began to do just that. The GEEK Wedding script is an example; easy enough for me to write a parody of sci-fi geekiness which has been my passion for lo these many years: all the characters are splinters of my own interests.

But factored into that was that Agent CK, I knew, had tons of Star Trek gadgets and thingies from his sad, sad life as a Trekkie. And I, O Best Beloved, had an actual Jedi costume that I had had made when we were all still anticipating the opening of The Phantom Menace.

And it occurred to me that ACK and I and shelled out some few dineros for these toys-- so why shouldn't they, somehow, make money for us? Lo and behold, a Star Trek and a Star Wars character get written into a script-- for which I get royalties every time it's performed. And for which I also get paid to perform IN it.

Makin' it pay.

I've been a Jedi before, too. Pitched myself as a wandering talent for a Bridge Brand FOOD expo-- yeah, they had divided the room into "Themes" and I was in the "futuristic" section-- who better than a Jedi? I made it pay.

And I'll keep making that costume pay until I can't anymore.

Then I'll get a new fun costume made, just for fun, and find a way to make THAT pay.

I also love comics. And I've been writing web-based ones for a while; and my partners and I have agreed to see if we can make THOSE pay.

All the while, doing stuff we'd like to do ANYway.

Look around you, Agents. If you ever get tired of what you do, ask yourself what you'd rather be doing, if you could do anything you wanted.

Then ask yourself how you, too, can Make It Pay.

Posted by Agent M at October 03, 2003 11:35 AM