I was pretty productive…

I was pretty productive at the start of last week, but it fell down a bit in the latter half of the week; lots of reading, watching tv, etc. I finished Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy, fun YA with a sort of Disney Aladdin sense of humor, but with a dark edge too. Enjoyed it. Finished Lackey's Owl trilogy, pure fluff, but satisfying. Currently re-reading Tamora Pierce's The Circle Opens quartet. When I have a lot of work to do that I don't much want to do, I tend to retreat to fluffy fantasy novels, especially YA stuff.

I'm pretty hesitant about getting back to my work in various areas. The novel scares me, but that's the subject for a whole entry or set of entries on its own. DesiLit is doing okay; I have some more stuff to do for that, but essentially, it's in reasonable shape, with a set of solid plans for 2006 that are already in motion. But I'm honestly worried about the SLF.

Much of our work is predicated on having membership funds, and it looks like people are for the most part not interested in renewing their memberships. I'm guessing that's mostly due to my being so absent in the last year, and therefore our work not having much visibility in the community. I'm going to try to fix that to some extent in the next few weeks. I'd be really sad if we had to give up on the foundation -- but at the same time, what can you do? A community arts organization is dependent on interest and support from the community. If that's not there, there's a limit to how much I can force it.

Feeling confused and frustrated about the whole thing. Just not sure how I should be dealing with this problem. It's particularly frustrating because the amount we're talking about is so small -- the entire SLF annual budget is still under $3500, and $750 of that is covered by an annual donation from Centric Advertising. In the first year, about half the rest came from memberships, and the remaining from fundraiser events that Jeremy Smith organized in S.F. Jeremy had a baby last year, so was too busy to organize more of those, and I was ditto too busy. Maybe I should just concentrate on planning some fundraisers and not worry so much about the drastic drop in memberships? I just don't know.

One big problem is that I'm good at figuring out programming and bad at figuring out finances. :-( When we're short of money, I tend to get stressed and not deal. Which is counterproductive. Sigh.

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