A.R. Hellbender's Blog, page 3

4 Seasons Book Covers for today’s Bout of Books challenge

Why is being in a band so difficult?

I decided to make this post about what makes being in a band so difficult, and what important things a band has to have in order to stay together.

#1- The same goals

It’s so hard for everyone in a band to be on the same page and have the same goals. And the more people you have in a band, the more difficult that is. We had 4 different people with 3.5 different pictures we saw in our minds for what we wanted out of the band, and 2 of us were completely opposite.

#2- A place to practice

Every band needs somewhere to practice. A lot of bands pay $40-50 per person for their practice space, and if a band is just a hobby that makes no money, that can be a pretty expensive hobby. And even if a band makes money the way we did, it’s not as if a band doesn’t have a ton of other expenses already.

We got pretty lucky to have a band member’s house to use, but eventually, that wasn’t working out, so we had to rent a cheap space at another band member’s house, which was still a good deal. But even so, there were a lot of arguments about where to practice.

#3- Living close together

Bands are able to get so much more done when they live close together. Obviously, living in the same house is ideal, but not every band can have that.

We had the misfortune of having almost everyone live in a different town. So no matter where we practiced or where we met up for shows, someone got the short end of the stick. And because we lived so far from each other, we weren’t always able to load the trailer together before leaving for the show.

#4- Crew people who stick around

We were lucky to have a sound guy who stuck around for a long time. But before that, we actually went through a bunch of people. The main reason for sound guys quitting on us was that they always lived an hour away, and eventually started resenting the drive even of they didn’t mind it at first. When we had to replace sound guys on short notice, it got to be a hassle.

There are a lot of other things, too, but those are mostly the main ones.

Book MASH

I’m living in a shack in Westeros, like…everyone in Westeros does. I’m a potioner who rides a Firebolt and has a pet dragon (well, the dragon makes sense in Westeros). My best friend is Estral from Green Rider, so she can teach me how to play the lute, and I’m married to Leif from The Sin Eater’s Daughter.

My Entry for the first Bout of Books challenge!

The challenge is Fictional Workd Travel, and involves choosing between 3 and 6 books that take place in countries other than yours.

Neverwhere (England. London Below, in fact.)

Portrait in Sepia (19th century Chile)

Looking for Alibrandi (Australia)

Isla and the Happily Ever After (France)

Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (Really old Germany)

Days of Blood and Starlight (Czech Republic, and an alternate world)

Don’t play with doors. You might hurt your fingers.

Yesterday, the band’s calendar showed a show that we had never booked. It seemed to have shown up on every site that one didn’t need our login information to post a show on, so I thought that someone was messing with us, or maybe trying to get the band back together.

But then, I saw that it was on the venue’s website. I emailed the venue saying that they had a false booking on their calendar and that my band had never booked that show. I also sent a message to the band that it said we were playing with, and that band told me that they had booked the show through a promoter, but the promoter never mentioned us, nor had the band suggested us.

I then looked at my past emails with that promoter, and saw that we had indeed been offered that show last month, but I had turned it down.

The venue emailed me back today, saying “tell this booking agent not to say they are booking you.” They forwarded me an email from that promoter about that show and the bands that would play, which dated before the email I had from him offering us the show. In short, he booked the show without asking the bands he suggested if they could play it, and when we, the intended headliners, couldn’t do it, he forgot to tell them that we weren’t playing.

All in all, this may seem like an honest mistake on the promoter’s part. However, the fact that the person told the venue that we were playing before he even asked us, let alone received our reply, does not exactly demonstrate competence.

The worst part is what the other band told me. They showed me a message they got from the promoter, blaming the show’s cancelation on us. In his message to the other band, he claimed that he had just found out today that we were refusing to play the show because we wanted guaranteed pay. The truth is, however, that he had found out a month ago, upon offering us the show, that we could not do the show unless we had guaranteed pay, and yet still told the venue that we were playing.

The other band and the venue know that our word is good, but I still do not appreciate being made to look like a greedy scumbag who suddenly refused to do a show because it did not pay enough. No, I told him upfront that it did not pay enough.

This is almost the main reason why we don’t accept deals where we have to play for the door. Because the people booking shows like that do not always know what they are doing. Some of them even keep a lot of the door money for themselves, giving just some of it to the bands and saying “yup, this is all of the door money.” I’m not sure what this particular person was trying to accomplish by booking us at a show we had actually turned down, but I suppose I will never know.

Blah.

The band broke up. After over 3 years with this band, with the goal of it becoming a bigger thing in the future, I’m pretty disappointed.

I know that bands break up all the time and over 90% of bands “don’t make it,” but we were really serious and were headed in a good direction and everything. We typed our setlists, for goodness sake! Other bands even commented on how extra-pro that made us look.

I can’t sleep at night, I can barely write anything, I have been burying myself in books and busy work, I haven’t picked up an instrument in over a week, and I have a boyfriend who is heartbroken about my wanting to swear off the music business from here on out.

My plan was pretty much to sell my gear and never again play live, book shows, go to shows, etc. But then I realized that, since I already have a good amp and can play a ton of covers, I may as well TRY to find something to do, music-wise. I really don’t know how successful that will be, however.

You see, I’m pretty picky about what projects I join. There has to be something in it for me besides just “fun”, whether it’s money or some important cause or something. It can’t be just a hobby, because hobbies do nothing but take time away from the things I actually do for money. And there’s no way I’m getting a day job just so that I can be in a band. I’m 27 now, and I know I’m not going to “make it” without She’s Not Dead, no matter what kind of band I join.

My mom just called me and actually made me feel a little bit better. She told me that what is going on in other people’s heads and how they are processing things can’t be determined. So you can’t truly know how different events will change people. Not to mention the fact that people in their teens and 20s change a lot in their goals and what they want out of life, and it could be the fact that I’m the oldest one in the band that made my goals and what I wanted out of the band never change along with everyone else’s.

Girly Logos and Mopey Writers

I finished the draft of my novella a couple of weeks ago, and how much have I written since then? Nothing! I got so burnt out after writing that whole thing as quickly as I did. Working on 5 books at  once is hard work.

I did, however, make a logo for someone. Someone who, unfortunately, told me to redo it, because it was too “girly”. Even though I followed their instructions to a T. They had sent me samples of what colors to use, and the colors I chose were based on that, and yet it was too girly for them. Then, they sent me a quick sketch of what they wanted, with even more specific instructions…that were the same as what I had already done! And the sketch they drew as an example of what they wanted was also the same as what I had already done. They went through this whole thing about “the lion’s face should look more like this,” when that was exactly what I had already done. But I changed it up according to some of the stuff they said that I hadn’t done already, and sent it back.

If you’re familiar with Fiverr, you know that the default price for a service (like a logo) is $5. But the person can tip you, and the default tip that it goes to is $5, and then there’s a choice of $10 or just typing in your own amount.

The previous logo I had made on there made an extra $5 as a tip. Because that’s only right, right? If someone you hired on that site is actually making you something that takes a lot of effort, such as a logo, it is only right to tip them. The default option is even $5, not $0.

This person didn’t tip me. That means they looked at the default $5 tip option and went “nah, this logo isn’t really worth that much” and clicked “other amount” and put in 0. Not only did they not give me a tip for redoing the logo that I had already put a lot of effort into, but they actually docked me $1 to boot.

If you’re just hiring someone to post about your music on their blog or something else that doesn’t take that long, there’s no reason to tip them unless you just feel like it. But a logo pretty much warrants a tip, considering the fact that logos usually cost a lot more and take a long time to do.

I was going to post the awesome logo here, but I have no desire to give the person bad publicity.

Let’s do last year’s Booktube-a-thon challenges!

I successfully participated in Booktubeathon, reading 7 books in 7 days! For the updates I filmed during the week, follow the above video to my channel.

And since I’m still hungry for more readathons, I have decided to do last year’s challenges during the coming week. My boyfriend is leaving for a trip tomorrow and I will miss him, and I also got really burnt out of writing because I wrote a whole draft of a book really quickly. So tomorrow, I will start last year’s Booktubeathon.  The challenges are as follows:

-A book with pictures

-A book with red on the cover

-Start and finish a series

-A book someone else picks

-A book from the genre you’ve read the least this year

-A book to movie adaptation

-7 books

Stay tuned for the books I plan to read for each of the challenges.

My Booktube-a-thon video

The Booktube-a-thon reading challenge!

After a really intense couple of weeks, during which I finally finished writing another book, almost swore off the music business forever (but didn’t), and got really sleep-deprived, I’m going to just read some books.

Yeah.

Right now, it’s midnight on August 3rd, marking the beginning of Booktube-a-thon! It goes until August 9th, and the goal is to read as many books as possible in one week. Here are the challenges:

-A book with blue on the cover

-A book by an author who shares the same first letter of your last name

-Someone else’s favorite book

-The last book you acquired

-Finish a book without letting go of it

-A book you really want to read

-Seven books altogether

You can do as many of the challenges as you want to, and you don’t have to be a booktuber or book blogger to participate, either.

^My speculative list of books that I’m reading for Booktube-a-thon. But they hopefully won’t be the only ones.