The business side of things

I will be the first to admit that I have a serious problem.  I think of everything I do as a means to make money. 

"Hold it."  You say.
"That's great!" 

While I definitely consider it an asset to be thinking of things in terms of earning potential, especially as an individual with an eye on living off the grid, as it were, the kind of thinking I am prone to is dangerous and frustrating. 

I'm not putting the cart before the horse.  I'm putting the cart before a planet made of lava and potential and just sitting there and hoping the horse eventually evolves so that I can hitch the two together and go on my merry way. 
I'm sitting around and thinking about how nice it would be to be able to make a living solely off of burlesque and photography (and maybe with a little help from blogging about what it's like to be a burlesque-dancing, world-traveling, generally awesome photographing machine), but I have relatively little in the way of planning the actual steps I need to take to get there.  For example, I'm not even sure what I would do.  Obviously, I've got the burlesque part down. That is something for which I have already had an a-ha moment.  (No, not like Take On Me...)  But the photography part, and even the part where I put all of this together into a serendipitous perfection (that also happens to make me ridiculously wealthy somehow.), remains nebulous. 

I'm stuck in a world of pretty thoughts, because it is easier to say "Wouldn't it be nice if..." than it is to say "This is what I am going to do"... and then going and doing it.  The fact is, I know next-to-nothing about business, overhead, how much I really need to live (more than I'm making right now, certainly).  And I know relatively little about my own photography background except that I vastly prefer working in the darkroom, and that I probably could make it as a portrait photographer, if I really wanted to, though my love will always be art photography.  And the only thing I know about blogging is that, if I just start writing, eventually I'll get the hang of things, and this all won't seem so stilted and awkward. 

But I'm in a phase where I'm doing a lot of research.  I'm reading a lot of blogs.  About photography.  About business.  About blogging.  And I'm getting terrified and frustrated by the whole prospect, because I know that I want to get to that place eventually, but I'm not sure where that place even really is, or if my skills and interests will hold up to the challenges.  My personality is nothing if not capricious, and so I ebb from one thing to the next more quickly than the tides. 

And I worry.  About money, mostly.  My financial situation is precarious at best, and I have been in a blind desperate panic to better it for years.  Due to that panic, I have actually steadily decreased my standard of living for the last three years.  All I think about is what I can do to make money, but because I'm on the run, none of these things are well-thought-out, practiced, etc.  I'm just desperate to not have to do what I've been doing, and equally desperate to replenish my stores, and pay down my debts.


So, here I am.  Sitting on a rock in the midst of an infant planet.  Lava flows all around.  Just me and my cart.  Waiting for that damned horse.