Grantblings

2015 Recap

Well, that was a year.

Deep in my gut, I feel, it wasn’t a very good year at all.  Lots of stress.  Lot and lots of work for little or no money.  Lots of promises of work that never panned out.  Last year, I noted that 2015 may have been the last year I try to ‘make it’ in the entertainment industry.  I feel that now more than ever.  I have been perusing jobs in other cities: a news reporter spot in a tiny town in Oregon, researching the steps to become a National Park Ranger.  Anyway, I’m looking into everything.

I figured instead of focusing on the negative, I’d take a look back at 2015 and the things that really meant a lot to me in 2015:

• Unfriend (The Facebook Song) was the #2 most requested song for the year on Dr. Demento
• Produced 26 episodes of Uncle Interloper content and completed a series of ads for the Feed A Puppy App that featured Uncle Interloper and Pasquale
• Produced 30 pieces of video for the Country Bear Collector Show.
• Spent my 41st birthday in the best way imaginable, by myself, at Disneyland with a dinner at the Big Thunder Barbecue.
• Completed my goal for 2015 of producing and releasing a piece of audio every Saturday for a whole year with the GrantCast, which included publishing the audio version of my novella Agents of the Vault.
• Continued to improve in my ringside and backstage interviewing skills with Championship Wrestling from Hollywood.
• Filmed and edited two seasons of The Ultimate Nerd-ament for Stan Lee’s YouTube Channel. (Released three seasons total).
• Performed a Throwing Toasters 20th Anniversary show.
• Performed in 2 of the 4 Puppet Up Shows in Culver City, CA earlier in the year.  The other two shows I was hired on to produce a series of promotional videos for the show.
• Conceived and recorded the first two episodes of a new podcast, Elf Centered.
• Doing my ‘Mr. Grant’ family act, I performed 5 library shows and a regular series of shows at Flappers Comedy Club as part of their two milk minimum show.
• Was a Instructor’s Aide for the Henson Diversity Workshop and got to work closely with Kevin Clash for several weeks. (This was a highlight.)

A fine list of accomplishments indeed.  As great as they are, none of the above brought in any amount of money that can be considered a livable wage.  I’m sure if you worked it all out, I made less than a minimum wage employee would have this year.  Hence the reason I need to find something else.  This just isn’t cutting it.

So here comes 2016.  Only thing to do is slam into it and keep going on, but there’s got to be a shift this year.  This year something has to pan out.  Some sort of stable work using my creative abilities or I’m going to have to shift and look elsewhere.

I often feel that everything I’m currently creating (the videos, music, podcasts), I can create from anywhere.  There’s nothing that’s keeping me here in Los Angeles, so perhaps a change of venue might be a good thing.  I can keep creating but far from the Hollywood machine and the pressure it puts on creatives.

I can never not be creative.  But the dream of trying to be creative and having any large amount of people take notice, is not going to pan out.  That’s not negative self talk, that’s just the facts.  It is time to move on.  So, I will begin looking at where to move.

Here’s to a better 2016.  It’ll have to be, won’t it?  I don’t see any other choice.