Murdering My Own Craft

I’ve decided to kill a part of myself. Put less dramatically, I am going to close my Etsy shop at the end of this year.

“Pour quoi?” you ask. Or rather, you would ask if you spoke French and cared about my professional decision making.* Why discuss this on a blog ostensibly about writing? Why close the Etsy shop? Because it is a failure. Mmm-hmm. I said it. Failure.

A few years ago, I had many grand dreams of my future indie lifestyle, including getting paid for producing handmade items I liked to make, while also selling my self-published writing, and working as an editor with clients I like. I wanted to be smart and crafty on my own terms, a maven of multiple revenue streams all bubbling up from my own creative well. I now recognize that this dream needs revision.

First off, I needed to understand that by focusing on too many things, I was setting myself up to fail at all of them. In 2012, while I continued to work as a freelance editor at Grenadine Ink, I also started a publishing concern, Hammer & Birch. I self-published threedifferentworks, with all the steps that entails. Along the way, I began and/or finished drafts of several (ok, dozens) more stories. And there’s the blog you’re reading now. All of these creations demand some type of attention from me.

However, this year I also rebooted Bad Penny Press, my dormant Etsy shop. For that endeavor, I scrounged for vintage bookplates and paperbacks. I screen printed T-shirts and onesies. I photographed and posted everything on the shop. I advertised in various ways.

All that takes time. It takes attention. It takes effort.

And I realized that the payoff for the time, attention, and effort that I was putting into the craft side of stuff just wasn’t worth it. That isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy making these things. But to devote attention to all the attendant details in the hopes of generating income to make it remunerative...that just wasn’t happening.

Since my Etsy shop was never intended to be more than a sideline income, I didn’t expect much. But for many reasons (my lack of salesmanship, the crowding of Etsy, the niche nature of my products**, the general l’air du temps) I did not sell enough even to cover the relatively small amount of time and money I had invested. The crafty stuff turned out to satisfy neither my creative impulse nor my bank account.

I think my Die-Curious T-shirt is pretty hilarious. But I know that in terms of making me happy, getting a story in a journal or self-pubbing a novel is always going to trump a T-shirt sale (or a hundred T-shirt sales). Thus, I was never going to be competitive with Etsy sellers who looked at their shops as their primary career or vocation. They were putting a lot of attention into the presentation, marketing, and selling of their widgets. I was not, because my attention was fractured.

Recognizing that crafting was a distraction was key. Every moment that I was thinking about the Etsy shop, or a T-shirt idea, or how I had a stack of bookplates in my closet, was a moment I wasn’t writing or editing. Slowly, everything connected to the Etsy endeavor became distracting, from the details of maintaining the shop, to my own frustrations when a product turned out imperfectly, to the mere presence of the supplies in my teeny-tiny house. These things became needles stabbing my brain.

I do not write well when needles stab my brain.

Eventually, I recognized that I only have so much time and attention to give in my life, and I’d be better off nixing the extra crap to focus on what I really care about. In my case, that’s words. It’s writing and editing. It’s getting my own work out there and helping others get their work out there.

So, if I know all that, why did it take me so long to kill the crafting side of my life? Simply put, it was not so much a fear of failure as a fear of admitting failure. It sucks to admit that any investment you make (whether money, time, love, etc.) turns out to be not worth what you hoped. It sucks to see that money (or time or love) swirling down the drain. It sucks to watch something fail.

But you know what sucks worse? Watching it over and over again. Watching it while knowing that you could be doing something more valuable right now, instead of wasting your time watching something fail.

We all hate losing. We hate failing. But when we allow current failures to get in the way of newer, more personally interesting chances to fail...that’s when we are truly stupid.

So, joyfully, I announce the closing of a stupid chapter in my life, concurrent with the closing of the Etsy shop. To mark the occasion (and to reduce the inventory) everything is now cheaper. The reduced prices will be in effect until Dec 31. On New Year’s Day 2013, I’m going to close the shop and set all remaining products on fire. Yes, real fire.

That means that I’ll be warmer for about five minutes (my stock is pretty minimal). But it really means that my mind will be clear of the brain-needle that the crafting has become. I won’t have to think about making or selling that stuff ever again, and that means more brain-space for writing new stories, editing more words, and failing at new things within a narrower scope.

Be advised. 2013 will be the Year of Attention.

*The set of peeps who are both French and care about my professional decision making is very small. Possibly null. Certainly irrelevant.

**Also, something should have gone red-alert when I noticed that I was selling ebooks on one site, but actual bookplates for actual book-books on another.