The challenge of the creative life is often about money. Doing what you love and are compelled to do, paying your bills and eating. We do not get paid regularly, and we are always looking for ways to keep our lives and maintain our integrity and have enough money to live.

So far so good for Maria and me. We live the yin and yang of fulfillment. She sells everything she makes as soon as she makes it, but her work is labor intensive and she doesn’t charge much for it, and she can only make so much.

I was once earning a lot of money as a best-selling author, but since the recession, and my divorce, that has changed, almost certainly for good.

I make some money from books, a small amount now from royalties, I earn some money from the voluntary payments for my blog.  Rather than count on a single and predictable source of income, we try a number of different things, we must be as creative about money as we are about writing, photography, or art.

New technologies like our blogs have made it possible to live where we wish and make a living. Just a few years ago, this would not have been possible.

Our blogs in particular have made it possible to live where we wish and also earn enough money to live. We take them very seriously.  We do not expect to get rich, we are very happy.

And we are eating and paying our bills.

So, for Maria, a new experiment.

Something to try and figure it.

It might also work for me when a book of mine is published. Maria is trying to see if she can sell her art on YouTube as well as her blog, something she has not yet done. Today, I shot a video of her talking about the gorgeous shawls and fingerless mittens made by her friend the fiber artist Susie Fatzinger has made for our Open House this coming weekend.

We are publishing the video on each of our blogs, and on You Tube. This will mark the first time Maria has attempted to sell a fiber work – in this case, Suzie’s amazing shawls and mittens – on You Tube. Like me, she is shy about selling things, we both love making things. We have both come to love being paid for what we do.

There is a reality in the world that creative people have to face if they wish to live their lives. I always swore I would never ask for or  accept contributions for the blog, it was always meant to be free, and when I started the blog, I never imagined it wouldn’t always be free. Life is a mind-changer.

To follow your bliss, you may just have to grow up. It is not a life for Peter Pan.

Our lives here have challenged us to be creative and resourceful, and we welcome the challenge and continue with our determination to live lives we love doing work we love do. We will be as creative and adaptable as we can be. I hope we never stop trying new things.

We want to see if anyone will see the videos in this form and purchase them, as is happening all over You Tube. Fewer and fewer middlemen all the time.

The work shown at our Open Houses is exciting, and people who can’t make it here have long complained and asked if we could share the work at our farm more consistently. Our YouTube experiment might work, check it out.

So we shot a lovely video together, and I think it is a neat way to start this experiment. Maria will continue to sell her art primarily on the blog, but it’s always healthy to have as wide a marketplace as is possible. We’ll start this experiment today and share the results. Hope it works for you and for us.