I often check the website for Titan: Dawn, the video game I recorded voices for, to see if they’ve released a demo yet. I also check the websites, Facebook, and IMDB pages for the two features I shot this year – Cloudy with a Chance of Sunshine and Reclaiming Friendship Park – to see if there are any announcements or new images/footage.
And then there’s my own website, which attempts to tie it all together in one place and verify that yes, one person is doing all these different things.
Basically, I’m littered all over the web; little footprints of interesting activities; little chunks of entertainment. They don’t feel very connected, which certainly makes sense, given that they’re spread across so many different media and divided between writing and acting, to boot.
One of my ongoing struggles with the nature of what I do is my essential ambivalence about ever becoming famous. Basically, I see the downsides a lot more than I see the upsides. But if, as I have seen written in many places, this is the era of the personal brand, where there are no more artists, just “creative entrepreneurs”, then all the gravity pulls in the direction of growing my public profile specifically as a business strategy. If I am the only common element to all these endeavors, then I am the only one positioned to unify them; but only if my name means enough that people might follow it from Earbud to Goodreads, for example.
I’m about to try an experiment with that – my new Earbud episode is a dramatic reading of a short story from Stages of Sleep. I hoped the release dates would coincide, but the book has been delayed and delayed because of issues with the cover art, so know it’s going to lag behind by a couple of months. Still, it’s a conscious effort to say – hey, do you like this? Maybe you’ll like this OTHER thing I do over here. Not so coincidentally, it uses the free Earbud episodes as a promotional on-ramp to the book, which will cost money. I am my own recommendation algorithm. That’s kind of a barfy sentence to type, I have to admit.