Writing on exsilium

Free Art (To Make A Living)

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0400

I have just wrapped up a bunch of changes in my writing. The most visible parts are how I’m presenting my work and how I’m attempting to find a community within that process. Those changes hinge around two fundamental beliefs. The first is that art and culture should be freely available. The second, that an artist should be able make a living from their art.

Arts and culture are the dominant social education. Art has broad exposure, appeal, and capacity. As a consequence, it is the best means we have to build, comment on, and critique culture. It is the storytelling that builds society. It tells us who we are today, who we were in the past, and where we are heading in the future. Art constrained behind financial barriers may still contribute to culture and society, but does so in an inherently asymmetric manner. It transforms art into a luxury and not a public good.

Further, we still treat digital goods like exclusive goods that can be depleted or otherwise rendered inaccsible in the same way that physical books are treated. If they were equivalent we wouldn’t need DRM or the legislation to protect the flimsy digital locks DRM affixes to digital goods. When this performance takes place against highly stratified economic classes and obscene wealth hoarding, when the cost of renting a one bedroom apartment eats up 80% of the income of a person working full time for minimum wage, we make anyone living under economic constraints a de facto member of one of two group:

The poor and unworthy that do not deserve culture.
The criminal pirates who dare step out of their station in an attempt to experience and engage in culture.

The free rider problem in digital goods does not sit on the constrained consumer, but the distrubtion middlemen who gobble up the lion’s share of the income while expending a dismal fraction of revenue to run the infrastructure. I don’t know about you but I’m very tired of “visionary tech gurus” whose primary skills are extraction with a smile and funneling the friend-of-the-lawmaker fees into political campaigns.

Art and culture should be interwoven into daily life. Not special treats and big ticket events. When every avenue is locked by a price tag we lose that. We stop being society and culture in favour of placid consumers subject to the will of publishers and distributors.

There still needs to be an avenue for artists to be able to earn a living from their works. If all art and culture are free then the only people, under a capitalist system, capable of contributing to art and culture are those who have wealth or wealthy patrons. Under that system we only get what is broadly financially viable or whatever propoganda someone with the finances/distribution means wants to cram into your consciousness. This is where the distinction between free and freely available come into play.

Under Patreon I am incentivized to treat all of my work as part of an income funnel with little granularity or nuance in how that work is presented. Materials posted to Patreon are either free or they are locked behind a tier. Individual shop items are individually priced. It is a model that inherently contradicts my combined belief that art should be freely available and support the artist. What’s missing from there is the ability for the individual to pay what they are capable of and what they believe the work to be worth. Patreon does not satisfy my requirements.

The subscription model also feel inherently broken. It creates a trap where the audience continues to pay for something they’ve been specifically promised while the artist engages in riding within that narrowly defined lane. While the artist and the audience may choose to move together, it creates a bi-directional captive relationship. The artist is no longer free to explore unencumbered and the audience needs to continually justify the ongoing expense. Any artists an individual patronizes are ongoing obligations in the form of time and money.

While I’m not against the idea of patrons providing regular support to artists over time, winnowing down the options to just a regular subscription and fixed pricing does not align with my belief that art and culture should be freely available. The best option I can find currently is to move to a pay what you want model.

Through ko-fi and itch.io, I can release work under a pay what you want model unencumbered by DRM. Whatever I want in whatever format I wish. ko-fi continues to allow a subscription model similar to Patreon. If there is an appetite for it and I can provide additional value outside of the works I create, I would be happy to set up a subscription tier based on demand.

Switching from Patreon to ko-fi and itch.io as my primary distribution channels is the beginning of making my work available to anyone who is interested, regardless of financial capacity, while enabling a means to collecting income across multiple streams. For any writing unencumbered by agreements with other parties (publication rights and the like) I will be releasing my work under the pay what you want model with free always being an option for digital files and digital first being the model that I work under when not engaged in agreements with other parties.

Third party digital services, like KDP and Ingram Spark, will be a longer term avenue. They give me a platform to price and distribute my work alongside the pay what you want models on ko-fi and itch.io. This is a long term outlook and will coincide with works at or above novella word count (> 17,500 words) where I can justify traditional pricing within those distribution channels. As above, anything where a publishing agreement is not in place, will simultaneously exist on ko-fi and itch.io under the pay what you want model.

Finally, physical prints. Again, this is where I can justify it with works that at least reach a word count of a novella. I don’t have specific plans here, but I’ve been looking at printing and binding options while lamenting the death of the mass market paperback. There are options through Amazon, local print shops, and DIY. It will largely depend on what my goals are when I get to a position of printing a physical book. That won’t come until there’s an audience for it. I’m writing as an act of expression, not as a print publishing Field of Dreams cosplay.

I don't know if my writing is any good

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:00:00 -0400

As a musician, a filmmaker, a screenwriter, and as an author, I talk to people who share the same interests and drive to create. There is always a lot of enthusiasm about creating, but often less enthusiasm about what they’ve created. I often get some variation of, “I don’t really know if my writing is any good,” or the assertive, “My writing’s not very good.”

There are two common reasons I hear this.

The first is an excuse as to why nothing they’ve done is accessible. You can’t read their work because it isn’t shared anywhere. It’s being kept private because they’re not confident about it and they’re afraid to find out whether others think it’s good or not. As long as it stays hidden there’s a distance and safety there.

The second is pre-emptive. They’ve decided they’re going to share something. Rather than risk being told their work is bad, they get out in front of it. If it doesn’t hit, they were right. It works as an apology for subjecting an audience to imperfection.

The most appropriate response when someone says their writing isn’t any good is, “Who gives a shit?”

Truly, I do not care if your writing is objectively bad. Chances are it’s probably not and even if it is, you’re not mass producing hardcover editions of it and expecting me to pay $50 for the privilege of reading it. You’re sharing something you’ve created with me. Probably because you like me as a person, want to impress someone with what you’ve written, or are hoping to get some feedback. All of which is important. What’s not important is whether you can objectively determine if your writing is any good.

When you are sharing your art with someone it does not matter whether it’s good or not. Being bad at something is the first step towards being good at something. Exposing your work to others allows them the opportunity to help you see the problems and to improve. You can study, reflect, and persist as much as you’d like. Few things help us grow like outside interference or performance.

We have this sickness where we compare ourselves to the best attributes of the brightest and most successful people we know. Except that we are now capable of being connected to absolutely anyone in the world. This means we can pick and choose the shiniest parts of the shiniest people, create an amalgamation that doesn’t exist in the real world, and use that metric that no one can ever measure up to as a cudgel to beat ourselves down.

You have to be willing to be bad at something in order to figure out how to be good.

One of my favourite video genres is backflip fails. It doesn’t matter how unhappy I am, a good backflip fail video will cheer me up every single time. They’re always the same. There’s no variation or deviation from the standard. That’s what makes them so beautiful to me.

Someone attempts a backflip.
It goes horribly awry.
They push themselves up to their feet, typically a little dazed.
They all, without exception, have the same baffled expression on their face.

That confusion tells the whole story.

They’d never performed or attempted a backflip before that moment. Despite this they were absolutely certain they were going to absolutely nail it. They went into it with all the unearned confidence they were capable of carrying and sent it. In their head, they’d already succeeded. The reality that they hadn’t was then incomprehensible to them.

“I don’t know if my writing is any good” is the opposite of this. It is accepting failure before the attempt has even been made. The writing isn’t the failure. Being bad at writing isn’t the failure. The willingness to accept failure is the failure.

There are going to be enough people in your life that will tell you that it’s unreasonable or impossible or that you’re just not talented enough. You do not need to be one of them. If it matters to you, if you care about it, then pursue it. Recognize that you’re going to be bad. You’re also going to create pieces that you think are good. Things that others also think are good. You’re going to think you’ve figured it all out. Then you’re going to make something bad again and wonder if you’ve learned anything at all.

That’s part of the process.

I’m not going tell you that if you just grind you’re going to end up being the artist you dream of being. That’s unreasonable. But I will tell you that if you care about it and you’re willing to actually tackle it you will find places you didn’t realize were possible.

All that’s waiting for you at the end of avoidance is nothing and you deserve better than that.

Weekly(ish) Short Fiction Releases

Sun, 24 May 2026 11:00:22 -0400

When I decided that I wanted to approach writing again I had some problems I needed to solve.

The first was that I didn’t want to write for film anymore. I knew that I wasn’t going to chase filmmaking or try to get scripts optioned. I was never terribly big on selling my scripts and filmmaking simply isn’t a discipline that I love enough to fight through the scrappy years to get to the good to ones.

The next problem was I had spent the last thirty years writing almost exclusively for film. In terms of creating a narrative and telling a compelling story, the knowledge I gained writing for film transfers over. The style absolutely does not.

When writing for film you can’t (realistically shouldn’t) write anything that can’t be displayed on screen. A character’s internal state needs to be made external. Sure, you can have a voice over that explains what the character is thinking or feeling, but it often doesn’t land well and tends to be frowned upon. What the character is thinking and feeling needs to be made concrete through their actions or words. It needs to bleed out into the situations and environments. If you can’t see it or hear it, it doesn’t exist.

My experience with writing prose is minimal.

The Patreon Singles Releases project consists of posting a new story to my Patreon on a loose weekly schedule (aiming for weekly, hard limit of bi-weekly). The goal for these is to write and share a self contained piece of flash fiction. It is an attempt to solve several problems at once.

Getting in the Reps

The first is simply getting in the reps. I have a strong grasp of screenplay writing and I understand my voice in that medium. I don’t have the same understanding when writing prose. By committing to writing and releasing a small, complete bit of writing every week, I’m forcing myself to write pages that I think, at minimum, are approaching a level worth sharing with others. It’s a trial by fire where I either produce or flame out entirely.

The best way that I can think to internalize the conventions and features of prose is to write it. To write a lot of it. Through that writing I will find my voice and build my style.

Building a Corpus

As a screenwriter I wrote at least two dozen feature length screenplays and well over fifty shorts. I built a lot of knowledge and habits over that time that can directly translate to writing prose. It means I can build a similar body of work in the form of short stories and novels.

There is a part of me that has always felt like there’s an endless fountain of words available. No matter how much I write, I will never be done writing. There will always been new characters to meet and stories to explore. I want to get as much of that out of me as I can before I lose the capability to do so.

What I want is work that appropriately matches that endless fountain. Not for the sake of pumping out page after page, but for harnessing the fountain to tell stories to the best of my capacity. A body of work that I am proud of. The breadth of which includes a variety of voices and perspectives. Stories that will ultimately support the larger projects down the road.

And, you know, not for nothing, but proving to myself that I can. I move my way through the world as a perpetual imposter. I have spent so much time starting things just to abandon them after a few weeks or months. The doubt would creep in and I would quit rather than face the possibility of what seemed like inevitable failure. I know that I’m capable. The only thing stopping me from proving it is time and follow through.

Finding an Audience

I know that I have some distinct sensibilities and that they are not necessarily mainstream. I’m not looking to wrap my writing around what I expect a mainstream audience would be interested in. I didn’t audience chase with screenwriting, I’m certainly not going to do it here.

What I’m looking for is the audience for my writing. I’m not some special and unique flower that is so distinct that no one could ever possibly understand my writing, let alone enjoy it. I know there are people who would be interested in my style and subject matter. By writing broadly, while sticking to my voice, I am creating more opportunities to find that audience.

Finding a Financial Platform

I don’t want to gate my writing behind Patreon tiers or purchases. If I want to find a place where I can reasonably write full time, I need a financial platform to work from. While it’s a minimal step forward, creating epubs for each of these stories creates a small incentive for members of all paid tiers. This incentive is retroactive, as all previous releases are available to paid members, and continues into the future as I write more.

It is a baseline to start from as I work to find more ways to interact with and reward a community.

I can also see a future where I make collections of these stories and market those under more traditional means.

Patreon and Ways to Contact Me

If you’re reading this and haven’t been to my Patreon yet, you can find it here: patreon.com/DavidBragg