If at first you don't succeed, fail, fail again! Some of these projects never got off the ground. Others were abandoned partway through. A few were completed in spite of themselves.
Failure is not embarrassing. It's just play we haven't found a use for yet. And sometimes even if it doesn't work out, it's still worth sharing!
Delicate Syndicate Presents: Skin & Sound at NZ Fringe
This cursed project died on the operating table. Twice. Both times after nearly everything was set up and ready to go.
The first time I tried to get this project together was for my birthday in April, 2020. Then COVID-19 hit.
The second time, I thought it would be a great project to take to New Zealand Fringe. I called up the original crew and invited them to try again. I was the feet on the ground in Wellington. I booked the theatre, built the Kickstarter, applied for funding, talked to the press, and did everything I could to get everything ready, but all the King's horses...
Despite doing my level best, the project failed a second time. We did not succeed in getting enough funding to bring my collaborators to New Zealand. I was burned out from taking on too much, and my contacts were tapped out from the last crowdfunding campaign I had run not six months before for a different project.
It may have succeeded if I had chosen local talent or taken my original collaborators to a festival a little closer than New Zealand!
Writers of Strange Fiction: A Free, Month-Long Virtual Writing Convention
I really am a sucker for punishment. Panels every day for a month without even considering asking for help? Yeah, that sounds like me.
If I had been clearer about what would make this feel successful before I began, that would have helped a lot. As it stands, I invested a lot of time, money, and energy into something that honestly feels a bit anticlimactic. I didn't think about how I could use the experience to build anything after, so now I can say I did a thing, but it didn't really go anywhere beyond that month.
I also very much wish I had contracted help. I took on every aspect of the project all by myself, and even if I had gotten help from people who knew less than I did about marketing, tech, panel moderation, website building, participant engagement, etc, the quality of the product would have been so much better. I was simply spread too thin. I had no business doing all that. It's a miracle it was even completed!
Fuck the Art Market
FAM was a nonprofit I launched with my friend Terri Lloyd. We built a website with snarky articles protesting the problems we wanted to solve in the art world, and we were developing ideas for a project space and possibly a grant for underrepresented artists. Unfortunately, we had just launched when the pandemic hit, and with all the new difficulties that introduced, we dissolved the project before it ever properly gained any momentum.
Closet A-I-R
I proposed an artist residency to a low-income apartment building in downtown Los Angeles after discovering a large empty closet with a glass door in a hallway while visiting a friend who lived there. The program would bring in local artists to create installation artwork in the closet and give workshops and talks to the residents to build community and propagate culture and joy.
Despite the benefits to residents and potential tax breaks of implementing such a program, the building management felt it was too much of a liability.