ROLEY

Author: Kris Roley

  • I’m Not That Fancy

    So, here’s a little bit of a switch. As some of you may be aware, I’ve been a Squarespace customer for almost a decade. I like them, and their customer service has been excellent. However, over the course of the pandemic I’ve been thinking about what it is I actually *need* for a site, and that feeling has intensified over the last few weeks. I’ve also been giving thought to the anxiety I give myself trying to make my multimedia talents a thing, and I just don’t need to do that. I need to have fun doing this stuff, and this hasn’t been fun for a while.

    So I’m scaling back. I have made the switch back to a WordPress site, and the first decision I had to make was to whether or not to go look for a fancy theme or not. I don’t need some magazine theme or a portfolio theme, and I don’t need something that has my face plastered all over it like my last Squarespace site did. I need the content to be front and center; more steak than sizzle. This theme does that. It also serves as a platform for me to relearn some of the WordPress development things that I lost over the past ten years or so.

    This new experiment—and let’s be clear, this is me playing mad scientist for the first time in a dozen years or so— is meant to do one thing: force me to look at a blank background until I get annoyed enough to fill it with something. I make no promises, but if you’ve been with me for a while, you know this. Of course, you know where the door is if you’ve had enough.

    I haven’t.

     

  • Lesner Bridge, July 9th, 2022

    Cloudy Day at Lesner. I happen to think those are great days for taking a camera around. Enjoy.

  • Rt 12, Pea Island Road, Dec 15th 2021

    About This Photo:

    iPhone 12 4.2mm f/1.6 1/6135

    The drive to Rodanthe, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, is my favorite drive, and this road is the most barren and beautiful stretch of it. If you’ve ever heard of this road, it’s likely because it’s been flooded out after a hurricane.

    On the left side about fifty yards beyond the dunes, is The Atlantic Ocean. On the right, between 25 and fifty yards beyond the light poles, is the Ablemarle Sound. This is a narrow and salty piece of land, and it’s one of my happy places.

  • The Sole Inhabitant, Dec 15th 2021

    About This Photo:

    iPhone 12 4.2mm f /1.6 1/7813

    As we walked back from the beach, this gentleman was walking towards it to do just what I had done, take pictures. I’m just about at the road, when I turn back and see this shot. It just looked so…I don’t know. Stark may not be the right word, but a lone figure in that cutaway was irresistible.

  • Footbridge, Corolla NC, Dec 15th 2021

    About This Photo:

    iPhone 12 1.55mm f/2.4 1/978

    This is the historic footbridge at Whalehead Resort in Corolla, NC. This is on the northern end of the Outer Banks, and it’s as simple as taking a left at the first major light once you cross the bridge. In almost 40 years of going down to OBX, I’d never taken that left.

    This is a gem I didn’t expect to find. Amazing.

  • Bodie Island Light, OBX, Dec 15th 2021

    About This Photo:

    iPhone 12, 4.2mm f/1.6 1/7299

    Bodie Island Light is at the Northern End of Rt 12. While most people think of Hatteras Light when they think of OBX, I find Bodie Island more photogenic. Especially on an overcast day like this. Just beautiful.

  • A Manifesto for Doing It Right In The Next Year

    I suppose it’s incredibly passé for writers — especially on Medium — to write some kind of year looking forward post, so here I am with mine. You’re welcome.

    It occurs to me that I should frame this particular year looking forward in the style of this new theme, for a lack of a better way to put it. So, I intend to put to bed the last couple of years of doing it wrong, and chart a path forward into doing it right. The simple fact of the matter is if we want a world that’s doing it right, then it starts with the self.

    I think I heard that in a song once.

    The following items, in no particular order, are the things I wish to change, start, or carry with me into the new year.

    The Personal

    Everything starts with kindness

    If you assume that this is the third part of a trilogy starting with my article “We’re Doing It Wrong”, then you may remember that I started talking about this in the second part. I think the bare minimum we can do as a society is treat people with kindness. Everyone, no matter what they look like, where they come from, or who they love, is deserving of respect and kindness.

    That includes ourselves. Believe me, I know how hard that can be.

    Recently, I was in a corporate training class. Several times within this class the facilitator implored us to ‘give ourselves some grace’. Now I won’t lie to you; when I first heard this line in the context of corporate training, it was an immediate eye roll. I’m a little hard-boiled when it comes to hearing things that sound like motivational corpspeak. In the weeks since, I have found that line working its way into my psyche.

    I don’t know how or when it happened, but I find I’m not beating myself up as much. I also know that I’m not the only one that beats themselves up over the tiniest of things, so when I recognize that in others, I make sure they know I’m a safe person to talk to. That’s a connection with another human that didn’t exist before, and it reminds me of a quote by Paul Williams in his book Das Energi, “Each man is an island. Each island is an extension of the same damn planet.”

    Kindness within begets kindness elsewhere. Start with you and watch it spread.

    Declaring iFreedom

    Prior to the invention of the iPhone, I carried a utility belt of devices. What I wanted was The Hitchhiker’s Guide, and I pretty much got my wish. The iPhone has combined them all into one, and I should have been more careful what I wished for. My phone rarely stays in my pocket, and it’s always in view. Now, I have a goal to regain ownership of this tool I possess, instead of it owning me.

    I’ve never had any notifications or sounds on my phone. It’s always silent. So is my watch. That will continue. What I need to stop is having my phone in my hand, playing with it. It’s a huge time suck, and the longer I’m doom scrolling through Twitter and TikTok, it just demolishes any hope of getting work done.

    One thing I know for sure: removing all the time sucks from my phone is a sure way for me to end up reinstalling them very quickly. So, I’m going to do something a little counterintuitive. I’m going to use my phone to keep me from using my phone. I’m not entirely sure how that’s going to work yet. There may be something new in iOS called Focus that may set this up for me, but at the bare minimum I’m going to set alarms on my phone for when I need to bury it in a deep dark hole.

    Part of declaring iFreedom means getting rid of all the distractions, and so I’m going to create a workspace free of them. Working in a single full-screen writing app on my Mac, for example. I also plan to start wearing noise-cancelling headphones, and most importantly, reinstalling a door to my office that I can close.

    A simple morning routine that even I can’t break

    I used to get up at 5am, but lately I have fallen into the habit of hitting my snooze button and sleeping away my morning time. It’s really unfortunate, because that time between 5am and 8am is the only real quiet alone time I get during a day. I need it, and yet I also need to sleep for more than 5 hours in a night. I can survive on six, but I really need more than that.

    So, with the understanding that your morning really starts the night before, I’ve been picking what I’m going to wear the night before. I generally sit in a hot tub for about 30 minutes before bed and listen to my Daily Calm. I make sure my room isn’t warm. I tend to turn the fans on blast while I’m in the tub.

    In the morning, I hit the water before I hit the caffeine. This is the point where some of the high-falutin’ guru types tell you to practice gratitude or journal. My brain isn’t wired that way, and I’m not going to force it to do something that will end up frustrating me early in the day. So, I’m just quiet. I read, and I’m quiet. Did I mention the part about being quiet? As I’m writing this part, it’s 9 at night, and I’m surrounded by a screaming bird, melodramatic adult children, and a cat that thinks I should be somewhere else and wants to tell me so very loudly.

    I like my quiet mornings. A lot.

    Stop watching and listening to infotainment media

    I am an information junkie. I’m the guy that watches C-Span, school board and city council meetings for fun. However, two years of a pandemic on top of four years of horrible 24-hour news cycles filled with as much batshit crazy as humanly possible has pretty much destroyed my desire to know what’s going on in the world. I have an acute case of news fatigue, or I would if what I found myself watching was actually news. It’s not. It’s the empty calorie infotainment of cable news, where they spend 2 minutes on the actual news, and 8 minutes with a panel of people that tell you whatever it is they think you want to hear.

    Like a lot of you, Desert Storm was the gateway drug for watching cable news for hours, because you never knew what was going to happen next. All the ensuing Breaking News events over the years kept our eyeballs firmly on the screen. This is a habit I need to break. I have one guilty pleasure that I had intended to keep, which was watching Rachel Maddow. However, as it appears she’s stepping back from a full-time stint doing her show and pulling a ‘Carson’, it’s probably the kick in the butt I need to break this habit.

    I’m cutting out all the infotainment and news out of my life. If it’s important enough I’m going to hear about it. I’m also cutting all the political content out of my podcasts and reading habits for the foreseeable future. The year ahead is going to be chock full of those nuts from here until November, I’m sure I’ll hear enough about that as well.

    The bottom line is that I’ve found this has a detrimental effect on my motivation to create, and I’ve had about enough of that.

    The Practical

    De-weaponizing my Socials

    Just like watching too much news as a detrimental effect on my creativity, the same goes for my social media feeds. I’m going to spend a lot of time curating my feeds to put creative content front and center in there instead of the loud and angry squeaky wheels that seem to dominate my timelines.

    Far be it from me to urge anyone to do anything I’m doing, but in this case I’d like to make an exception. Instead of doomscrolling through Twitter finding reasons to be angry and depressed, why not eject those accounts and replace them with people and things that actually interest and inspire you? Does curating your accounts to purge the negativity take time? YES. Is it worth that time? I think it is.

    Create a Workflow

    As far as I know, I don’t suffer from ADD or ADHD. What I do suffer from is the ability to get lost in the muck of a project very easily. As I reflected on that fact, it occurred to me that I’ve never constructed proper workflows for any of the projects I work on with any regularity. I’m sure that constructing some proper systems and workflows will aid me in turning out more consistent content, like writing articles for Medium. But honestly, who wants to see that?

    Create first, consume later

    In a way, this goes and in hand with breaking my phone addiction. As I mentioned in that section, if I grab the phone first thing in the morning, it’s over. So, along with that is blocking out a period of creative time early in the day to create first. I believe I’m going to start with a block of 30 minutes after my morning quiet time where the phone is not in my line of sight to work on the project of the day. Social media time may be used as a treat for making good progress.

    If I can hold to 30 minutes for a prolonged period of time, I intend to raise that in 15 minute increments until I reach a point where my flow gets broken. I find that after a certain period of time I reach a point of diminishing returns, so the hope is that I can raise my attention level to something more acceptable.

    Practice Consistency

    The hard truth is that inconsistency is the result of much I’ve written above. If I want my content to gain wider acceptance, consistency is key. I’m hoping that blocking out this time will lead to more consistent output. However, in the spirit of practicing consistent output, my intention is to determine some reasonable interval I can commit to, and sticking to it until I feel comfortable increasing my output level.

    Finding that interval is going to be really important because if there’s one thing I can tell you about me, it’s that I bite off WAY more than I can chew regularly. I know myself enough to know that once I miss on overdoing it, I lose momentum. So it seems to me that starting small and slow is the way to go.

    There is a downside to going small and slow, and that’s not being able to grow as fast as I’d like. The only way you make up for that is creating the kind of content that makes people want to wait. I hope I’m able to do that.

    The Professional

    Becoming more comfortable with promoting my stuff

    I’m going to fill most of the readers my age with heart-stopping anxiety in one sentence. Ready?

    Hi. I made you a mixtape.

    Honestly, I think I’d rather gargle ground glass than ever do that again. But let’s be honest; the fun in the mixtape is in the making of it, right? It’s when you go to hand it to another person that the it all goes wobbly. I think it’s the same for promoting what I do. I can’t be the only person who thinks like this. I can create my art all day long, but when it comes to holding it up to the world, I feel very much like a nervous teen. I also get the horrible feeling that I’m a slimy little spammer when I post my stuff on social media.

    I know where this comes from. At least, I think I do. It’s some weird hybrid of not feeling like I’m good enough to waste your time, and feeling like a salesman. It’s something I need to get over, because the only reason anyone would think I’m a spammy salesman is if they’re seeing my feed in their face ALL. THE. TIME. No one does that. So I should be able to post something I’ve done at least once a day without feeling crummy.

    Also, I am good enough. That’s someone else’s voice talking in my head, and while it’s hard to get him to leave every once in a while, it’s just trying to stop me from doing something I enjoy.

    Learn how to pitch and attract clients

    With the exception of one person, every paying client I’ve ever had was a friend or family member insisting on paying me for my work, with me insisting they didn’t have to pay me BECAUSE they were a friend or a family member. If I spent half that time learning how to pitch and attract clients or commissions, I’d probably be much farther ahead.

    I have to be honest, this is the one that really stumps me. I haven’t a clue on where to begin. It’s not for a lack of looking for training, I can assure you of that. Unless I’ve been staring a class on how to do this right in the face and don’t know it, I don’t know how or where to begin this. So, the first step as far as I’m concerned is finding some training on the subject, and preferrably one that explains it like I’m five. I need the Freelancer’s version of USA Today: bright colors, big fonts, small words.

    Gain my first recurring freelance clients

    Of course, I plan to make use of that training to gain my first clients in the areas of writing, audio and video production and editing, and photography. With that said, I believe I’m best served focusing on one thing right now, and I believe that’s going to be writing.

    Writing is a lot like learning to play piano; it’s the gateway to a lot of other instruments. Anything I write, I can repurpose. If I can repurpose it, I can spread it around. If more people can see or hear it, then it should build a base of support around my work, provided I can follow through with a few of the other goals I’ve set for myself.

    I know, I said ‘should’. Humor me.

    Make my first thousand dollars in freelancing by the end of 2022

    This is where the rubber meets the road. The ultimate success of consistent creation and promotion, and learning how to pitch and attract clients will be in my ability to create revenue from it. I may have set this goal a bit high, but I think I want to challenge myself here.

    I want to generate one thousand dollars from my content in 2022. I think that’s a substantial enough amount where I can say to myself that it worked. If it worked to one thousand, then it will work beyond that.

    Final Thoughts

    To recap, I want to practice kindness. I want to break my addiction to technology, infotainment, and negative social media. I want to spend my mornings in quiet solitude, and block out time to create art before I consume other media. I want to create reliable workflows so I can create consistent content. I want to break the mental barrier I have about promoting my work, and attract new clients so I can realize my goal of making this work a source of income.

    I believe that this is my way of doing it right in 2022, and I want to succeed.

    So, let’s do it right.

  • Rudee Inlet Benchwarmer, Nov 20th, 2021

    About This Photo:

    Canon T5i, 24mm f/4.5 1/2500

    As I passed this guy, he was saying to someone in the phone “A life lived for others is the only life worth living.”

    Einstein on the Beach, ladies and gentlemen.

  • A Mid-Life Creative Mindset

    So, you’ve decided to jump and follow that tiny voice in your head that told you it’s time to leave a job you hated and try to make a living out of something you love. If you’re anything like me, you may have started from a place of excitement with a side dish of abject terror. Let’s admit something to ourselves: We’ve spent twenty or thirty years following a schedule, procedures, and rules someone else made.

    Now we’re in control, and if you’re anything like me, your brain had a little bit of a short circuit. So it’s likely you may have gone in one of two directions. First, you may have gone full bore into everything all at once because you were a little apprehensive about the immediate future, or you took a week off to process everything and then went full bore into everything all at once.

    Or, you’re me, who has a slight problem with executive dysfunction from time to time and got frozen by the prospects of starting. Of course, I started. Otherwise, you wouldn’t see anything here, but I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I wasn’t overwhelmed by the size of the task before me. It took me a little while to wrap my brain entirely around the fact that I wasn’t working for ‘the man’ anymore and that my income was going to ultimately depend on what I could pitch, create, and deliver. Even though I prepared for it on a few levels, I was not anticipating having a short circuit over it. I did, but I’m ok now.

    I’m ok now because I had to get myself into the right mindset for what’s to come. That’s not an easy task for someone of my age and previous mindset. First, I crave certainty because my upbringing and the jobs I’ve worked for years relied on certainty. There was a particular order and logic to my being raised as a Navy Brat by a Navy Chief, and most of the jobs I’ve worked were full of If = Then logic, quality and performance numbers, and KPIs. That’s all gone now, and I was looking for something to replace it in the vacuum left behind. So I had to ‘detox’ for lack of a better term, and start looking at the concept of creativity in a way that my mid-life brain could handle and begin to move forward.

    Don’t Be That Guy

    The first thing I had to do to create that new vision for my mid-life creative future was to get rid of the voice in my head that kept trying to tell me I would fail. I mentioned this in a previous article. For me, weeding that garden was not an easy task. I couldn’t just tell that voice to go away; I had to look at the life behind that voice and realize why he was telling me that. I also had to compare the end of that life to how I envision the end of mine.

    It sounds like a grim view to take, but it was the only way it would work for me. Somewhere along the way, I picked up an idea from someone to start at the end — your ideal eulogy — and work your way backward. I have some experience writing eulogies and rewriting them several times because I thought better of telling too much truth to the living. Still, every point I edited out stayed with me, and I use those points to remind me that I am not that guy. I will never be that guy, and I deserve to be my own person who can succeed in life doing what he loves, not what others force him to do.

    Four Principles

    Of course, there’s more to cultivating a proper mindset than just digging in the dirt and freeing yourself from your past inner voices. You have to create a foundation for your future. As a person who wants to be a Creative for the 2nd half of our lives, we need to live a different lifestyle than our parents did and separate from the life we lived before. I think that our future starts with the following four principles.

    Curiosity

    Since it’s trendy to do so these days, I will make a Ted Lasso Reference. The darts scene references the Walt Whitman quote, “Be curious, not judgmental.” At my age, I remember that my father would just come home and sit in a recliner for the remainder of the evening and not do anything. He had no hobbies and no interests.

    It’s possible that the day job just took all the energy out of him, but I believe that’s because he had nothing to look forward to at the end of the day. I love coming home and spending time with the family, and then once everything for the evening is taken care of, I can get to writing, or podcasting, or just noodling around with the guitar.

    When I’m not actively creating, I’m learning. Whether it’s classes on Creative Live, YouTube Tutorials, or something heavier on LinkedIn Learning, I’m doing my best to work on my craft when I don’t have the energy to sit down and make something of my own. That’s the promise and the investment I make in myself as often as possible. To learn how to make better art and then do the best work I can.

    At our age, we must maintain our energy level throughout the day and cultivate and maintain that level of curiosity — of play — that we ad when we were younger. It’s easy to become ‘set in our ways, but I think that’s the act of surrender. We still have more in the tank than we think, and I challenge you to find that reserve and make your art whatever it is.

    Boldness

    If you’re a one-person army dedicated to creating and promoting, then there’s one thing you already know: No one is coming to help you. Because so many of us have been a part of some organization and working with teammates for decades, it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that there’s another person somewhere to give us direction. But, unfortunately, there isn’t, and the sooner you accept that, the better it will be.

    However, because there’s no one else to give you direction, that also means that there’s no one around that says no to your ideas. Let that sink in for a second, and then think of all the things you’ve always wanted to do but were afraid someone wouldn’t let you do it. For example, I made a list of all the projects I’ve always wanted to work on over the years but never had the time or the belief in myself that I could do them.

    After I finished my latest project, I felt a little lost about where to go next. Then I remembered I made that list and found it. As a result, I’m writing the first work of science fiction that I’ve done in about 30 years. Unlike my previous attempts, this one comes from a place of relative happiness instead of the pretty dark place I was in my teens and twenties. With any luck, it will turn out better than anything I’ve written, but the result isn’t the point. The point is to be bold enough to try something well out of your comfort zone. I’m better for having tried.

    Discipline

    The self-proclaimed gurus often amuse me with names like the barefoot creative, the hammock writer, or the four-hour photographer. They make it seem so easy. But, of course, we know being a full-time creative is not easy. It can be overwhelming. It’s incredibly overwhelming for a person who’s lived on a schedule for most of their lives. Clocking in and out and being prepared to account for every moment they’re unproductive. The freedom from not having to account for every second of your day is lovely, but it can very quickly lead to a lack of direction and motivation if you’re not careful.

    Stopping to watch the baseball game one day can lead to hours in front of the idiot box. Checking your notifications on Twitter leads to mindless doom scrolling, and TikTok is an endless rabbit hole if you don’t put a stop to it. Wiser people than I have said this, and it’s true: If you’re consuming, you’re not creating. The day ends, and you wonder where the time went.

    Additionally, I have a problem with planners and journals. I like the idea, but my brain doesn’t want to stick with them. Instead, I go in with a basic idea of what I’d like to do on a given day or week, and I check those off the list I make in Apple Notes. I don’t overthink it, but I know I need discipline to accomplish my goals. Since July, I’ve been trying to keep a Bullet Journal again, and I’m having some success. I forget to add in my daily thoughts on some days, but I’m trying to remember that it’s not the daily that’s so important to me. What’s important to me is the whole record. I want some way to document this new journey to look back on it later and see how far I’ve come along. That seems important, and for that reason, I’m sticking to it.

    Patience

    If it was easy and I knew I’d be successful overnight, I wouldn’t have waited so long to do it. Making this choice was scary, and part of the reason was that I didn’t know if I could do it or how long it would take to make any money from it. The truth is, if you’re doing this to chase money, you will fail. I want to pursue the thing that brought me here, and it wasn’t a dead president. It was a need to be something more than a tech support agent and a need to do something I found meaningful.

    If you commit to something like this, you can’t just duck and run when it gets complicated, when you get stuck in the ‘messy middle,’ as one of my friends calls it. You have to have a certain amount of faith that the art you’re making is worth it. You have to have the patience to stick it out through the difficulties like rewriting an article for the fourth time because it’s not working, relighting that shot because it just doesn’t look right, or re-editing that podcast because something about the sound isn’t working for you.

    This enterprise takes a lot of time and work, and you must be in it for the long haul. Three months in, I seem to be making headway, but it’s only been three months. So let’s see where we are at six months and then a year. Maybe I’ll fail. That’s fine. I’ll have failed because I tried, and if I fail, it won’t be because I panicked. A year is what I’ve given myself, and my patience can last that long, especially if I know I’m working hard to change that year to Year One.

    Final Thoughts

    We had the curiosity to wonder if this would work. We had the boldness to jump. We can cultivate the discipline to make progress every day, and we have the patience to see it through to the end. That’s our mantra. Those four pillars are the foundation we need to build our lives. May it continue, and may we succeed in what we’re trying to do.

  • Seagull, 88th St VB, Sept 20 2021

    About This Photo

    Canon T5i 135mm f/5.6 1/250

    “It’s all quite simple,” Scrappy said. “The problem is you haven’t yet identified the obstacle you’re facing.”

    Scrappy took a second to preen an errant feather before continuing. “You think that the problem is your situation, but you know the truth. You put yourself in this situation. You believe that your problem is the people who put you here. You put yourself here. So I want you to listen. The only person stopping you from solving your problem is you. I don’t whine when my brothers in the flock won’t let me eat with them. I find food on my own. I don’t complain when my brothers fly so fast that they leave me behind. I get there on my own. I do what I have to do to survive. Sure, they’re not happy about it. They’d like me to go away because I’m tiny and should have been gone a long time ago.

    Scrappy shifted his position and looked out over the water. “Now I’m sitting here talking to you when I should be down there looking for breakfast. So I’m going to leave you with this: The only person in your way is you, and deep down, you know what you have to do. You have to fix it. Or you don’t, and that means whatever that means for a human. I couldn’t possibly know. I’m just a rat with wings, right? So you think about it, and if you decide to do something, all you need to do is follow me. Better yet, follow yourself. I’m going to be far away from here this time tomorrow, and it’s time you learned how to survive on your own.

    Then, Scrappy flapped his wings a few times and flew away, leaving me to my future.