"Walking on thin ice, I'm paying the price, for throwing the dice in the air.
Why must we learn it the hard way, and play the game of life with your heart?"
Yoko Ono
I'm glad it's Sunday and I finally get a morning off, because quite frankly, this week has been a battle and a half and I really have had enough. Earlier in the week I had a callback for a commercial I did the first casting for the previous week. I re-acted the scene they'd wanted from last time, but more accurately thanks to the time I'd had to practise in the interim and I thought I did pretty well. They even said "perfect" at the end. But I didn't get the job. Wrong look, I guess. They had ditched the gorgeous, model-like blondes from last week but the brunettes who were left still included some model-type figures, and as the cowboy so readily likes to remind me, I do not possess a model's physique. So I guess I just didn't fit the bill. I pity the poor guy who gets cast in the male role though. Getting the job but knowing that as a result you'll have to shave your head (even with the special monetary bonus for this very reason) must be a bitter-sweet experience.
Yesterday was 'walking on ice' day, as the previous days of snow had left the ground covered in compacted snow from people walking over it and then overnight the temperature rose to a balmy 0 degrees and it rained. And thus, with the temperatures hovering around zero and the ground already being extra-cold and covered in snow, that rain settled nicely as ice. Leaving me feeling like I'd been trapped in a re-run of 'Home Alone' as I attempted to walk down the slope out of the building to get onto the slippery path to walk to the metro. As luck would have it, the path to the metro is also on a slope and there are only sporadic areas of grass on the side to walk on as an alternative, so this was truly the challenge of the day. It wasn't super early either - we're talking 10.15am on a Saturday. Not impossible for people to have come out and poured boiling water on it and put down some salt or grit or something. But no. It was an ice rink on a slope instead.
All through the day there were areas like this that I had to negotiate to be able to get to my meetings (yes, I need the money so Saturdays are not a day off) culminating in a meeting at 3.15pm ish that took some time to find because the map I'd printed out didn't show me the lanes I could cut through and the street names were a long walk along a big wide road in one direction, or a long walk across a park in another, just to establish which road I was starting from... In the end, with much discussion on the phone to my meet-ee and many wrong turns, I managed to get to her house. But not before meeting the mother of all ice-covered outside steps that I had to walk down to be able to get to her street. I grabbed a hold of the hand rail, which made my gloves wet, and took it one step on ice at a time. It was a miracle I got there in one piece.
I proceeded to give her a fantastic range of inspiration, guidance, tips, demonstrations, technique exercises and audition strategies for an hour as a free trial singing session. I asked her if it had been useful and she said, "Yes, very useful!". But when I told her my fee for lessons going forward, she did her best impression of a maintenance guy telling me how much it's going to cost to replace a boiler and did that classic, sharp intake of breath with a sort of 'ouch' at the end and waited for me to respond. I offered a ten percent discount for paying for four sessions in advance, and then took off 160Kč to round it down to 2000Kč total. (Around £64) And she still said nothing. But as I left to go and went out of the gate she said, "I'm just going to pay you the 500Kč next week because I can't afford to pay the full amount in advance". I was dumbfounded and felt like I was trapped in a parallel universe. When does anyone ever dictate to any service provider what they, the client, are going to pay?! But feeling so downtrodden from such a long and arduous day, I said, "Ok, well, we'll need to sit down and book in the dates at least next time."
But I know now, that that was just ridiculous. I will not accept that. I cannot accept that. There are free training videos she can watch on my website, she's just had a free trial session and I offered her a great discount on four lessons. What more can I do?! I then came home, hours later than planned because of all the wrong turns before and the continued 'walking on ice' situation everywhere, and the fact that she lives miles away from me in totally the opposite direction, feeling utterly ticked off.
To cap it all, I then read an email from a friend, with details of the cost of mixing the two tracks I'm trying to get finished here. The upshot being, £250 just for the mixing. That is more than I have left in my UK account from the money donated to me from the Swedish faerie godmother. She had given me more than that, but it has gone on the costs for domain name and hosting for a couple of websites and paying the MU subs that got me the "free" legal advice I needed to negotiate a contract, as well as the recording done so far here in Prague. I have a grand total of £221 left (now that I have sensibly transferred an amount as an emergency fund to an ISA account, most of which is loaned money from my sister) and I am diligently paying off a small amount of my student loan each month, just so the amount doesn't keep growing.
Where am I going wrong? (Rhetorical question - no need to answer that one.) I can see that the list of mistakes I've made in my life in discerning how to play this attempt at a creative life is long and complex. Clearly one of the things I had wrong all along is that being self-employed was the best strategy to leave time to do music - especially as I had to do all that basic learn to play the piano, learn to write songs, learn to sing better, stuff as an adult. I'm still chasing clients who pay a pittance and take up too much extra time in needing to negotiate with and I then can't afford the help I need to get my own creative work done. And to cap it all, my Macbook battery is beginning to slowly die. As is the battery of my iPod. (I don't have an iPhone or anything flash like that.) How on earth can I afford to achieve the goals Im working towards? How the hell will I ever afford to get out of this flat if I have to invest more money than I have in the bank after donations from kind people just to get two songs mixed? How will I afford the cost of setting up my websites professionally enough to actually sell stuff on them when I have got those songs mixed?
I'm beginning to think I may be forced to try some sort of crowdfunding venture. But that's a big risk, because those generally are only successful with a wide network of people to appeal to. I'm working on building my network, believe me, but it's hard while based in the Czech Republic, and while working like crazy to earn only enough to cover food and MU subs, student loan repayment, travel, phone top-up and little else.The Guardian have been running stories lately about the impact of the financial crisis, and how ex-partners can't afford to split up and move out and run two separate households. I'm beginning to fear I am one of them.
But all is not lost. I actually have a paid article to write today. All of £12 an hour. Hurrah! That's big bucks in my line of work. (Actually, that's a lie - I generally earn just about a pound more than that per hour with meet-ees, but only just.) And the irony of that is, I'm ghostwriting for a married woman and mother of three...ha, ha! The universe really does have a loopy sense of humour, don't you think?
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