The Creative Gene

Sometimes I wonder if a need for artistic expression runs in the family. Mine evidences for the most part through my writing, though I love crafts and art, too. My mother is an artist. My brother makes awesome art and writes songs. And my father is a singer & songwriter.

The interesting thing is that we’ve all chosen to mix the internet up in our interests. My mother has built a career out of building online communities. My brother has bent his artistic skills to designing websites. I, obviously, am in love with e-publishing. And my father just hit iTunes as an independent artist.

I like to think part of his decision to bypass traditional paths and go straight for online distribution is due to watching my enjoyment in with e-publishing. I have a lot of advantages in the epub game. I have a Computer Science degree, and a ton of experience in web and graphic design. I can make banners, websites, promo items and teaser videos, which saves us a ton of money. I know how to work websites and forums and search engines. My day job gives me a tremendous amount of flexibility when it comes to online marketing.

But none of that would have done me any good if I hadn’t started off with that crazy gene–the one that makes me willing to stay up until 3 in the morning frantically writing. If I were my own client, I’d owe myself about $50,000 for all of the time and expertise I’ve invested in our writing career–and that’s money I could have gotten if I’d decided to settle down and work a normal software engineering job.

So what is this crazy gene that makes writing worth more to me than the money I could get plying my more mundane skills? Is it actually a gene for insanity? Obviously I’m not in this business for the money…I’m not sure the day will come where I’ll make as much writing as I could programming. (Not that I don’t have those dreams…but they’re big ones.) But I love what I’m doing, even when I hate it.

And so do the rest of my family. I was pretty thrilled to be able to go on to iTunes and see my father’s music for sale. I bet he feels the same way I did last week when I saw a book that I’d written hit the virtual shelves. It’s knowing that all that time you spent behind the scenes paid off. Maybe not literally, but for me, it’s never going to be all about the money. If it were, I’d be in a cubicle somewhere, staring at thousands of lines of code instead of thousands of lines of fiction.

So since it’s a big week for all the artists in the family…if you like country or folk music, take a gander at an independent artist who dared dream big.