6 things you can do FOR FREE to support an independent musician.

Times were tough for indie-artists BEFORE pandemic. We were already struggling, knowing that live performances was the only consistent way to earn actual money. Then pandemic hit, and there went our only source of income. Perhaps you, too, have lost your entire source of income since the pandemic (and if you haven't, then what is stopping you from joining Patreon? It's $10/year, friends!), and in that case, here are some TOTALLY free things you can do to support an indie musician.

1. Follow them on Spotify. Seriously, just clicking that "follow" button is a MASSIVE help. (Could you do that for me, please, like right now?? I've only got 225 followers as of this posting. Please help those numbers grow!)

2. Subscribe to their YouTube channels. YouTube has stopped paying artists for views, unless you have 1000 subscribers and thousands of hours of views. If you hit "subscribe," that gets artists closer to getting paid for their music, and it doesn't cost you anything.

3. "Like" them on Facebook. 

4. Follow them on Twitter. 

5. Follow them on Instagram.

These social metrics aren't terribly important in and of themselves, but they add up. Brand collaboration is a potential source of income to an artists, but they can't get paid by brands until they have a certain number of followers. The same goes with spotify and other streaming platforms: you have to have X number of followers before the algorithm starts adding you to playlists or suggestions.

6. Leave their YouTube channel or Spotify albums playing in the background of your device. If it's on mute it doesn't count, but you could really help an artist by just streaming their albums all day long on that random old iphone that you let your kid play with. Put it in a closet, but stream, stream, stream. 

7. Shop their Amazon Storefront. If you shop on Amazon (and yes ... I understand how problematic Amazon is, but also, having been disabled during a pandemic, Amazon made my life liveable, so I consider the ability to boycott a massive privilege), then please just click on a musician's Amazon affiliate link if they have one. Amazon will give a few pennies from each purchase to the musician, and we never know it was you who shopped or what you purchased. You don't even have to buy from the recommended products -- just use the musician's link to get to Amazon and they will earn click-revenue.

Hello, I've been blogging for FIFTEEN YEARS. Would y'all consider dropping me a tip? Thank you. All my Tip Jars and more are here.

I have been bad about blogging, mainly because of the brainfog that accompanied all of the anesthesia I've been put under.

Something that has bothered me is how, even pre-pandemic, there is just no support system for a cancer patient. It is literally survival of the fittest, and that is wildly unfair.

"Unfair" is not a useful word in general, but it is a useful word to a cancer patient who needs to scream into the wind. 

If you are a new cancer patient, someone who has found my blog through a google search or instagram post, then welcome. And I'm so sorry you are here, in need of support and information.

I've been seeing a Behavioral Oncologist (BO) for almost four years now. I was first eligible to see the Behavioral Oncologist because I was primary caregiver to my mother, who was being treated for pancreatic cancer. I had accompanied her to the therapy appointments, and quickly realized I would benefit from seeing the Behavioral Oncologist on my own. I saw the therapist regularly through my mom's treatment, and then during my dad's treatment, and still after their deaths.

If you are a cancer patient (or caregiver), PLEASE, right now, get out a pen or open a note on your phone and write down the words: BEHAVIORAL ONCOLOGIST. I keep writing the words over and over because I cannot emphasize enough how important they are to your well-being.

They are the only person in your whole cancer team who has the time and energy to care about your whole-being. They have prescribing powers and psychiatry background. They care about your sleep, and if you're not sleeping, there is no way you can heal. They care about your mental health. They have access to your scans, so they can see exactly where you are in your treatment, how close to death you are, or how close to being cancer-free. They are big-picture APRNs, typically, and they have literally saved my life.

The Behavioral Oncology department that I've been seeing, however, seems to have changed its general care. I think they are probably being overwhelmed by new cancer patients, and they no longer have the time to offer talk therapy in the same way they did when my mom was sick. 

I've recognized that I need more support than the Behavioral team has time to offer, so I have sought out support through other resources: a cancer coach.

It sounds silly, but it's so far been really interesting, and I'm going to be blogging about the experience. 

I've only had one meeting with her, but it was full of information and light. She asked about the big picture and offered insight into whole-body wellness. So much information is out there that it's nice to have someone who's been through it to talk you through priorities.

The first priority for me has been getting adequate sleep because if you have good sleep, your body is better-capable of healing. IF you have good sleep, you make better nutrition choices. If you have good sleep, you have energy to meal plan and exercise.

I've been taking high-concentrate CBD and an anti-depressant that has drowsiness as a side effect (taken at night), and that has significantly increased my sleep quality. When I take the anti-depressant alone, my watch tells me my sleep quality is 70%. With the CBD added, my sleep quality increases to 80-84%. If I take THC, my sleep quality his 89%, but Kentucky, unfortunately, still doesn't' have a medical marijuana law, so THC is limited to when I am out of town.

I'll have another appointment with The Cancer Coach next week, and I'm going to be focusing on nutrition. Will share recipes and meal planning tips, as meal planning has always been my kryptonite.

Does anyone have a recipe they love? An anti-inflammatory recipe that would be fit for a vegetarian cancer patient? 

It's been over a year, and we are all itching for live music. 

I, a professional musician, am desperate for an audience -- live eyeballs I can connect with and not just busking on Facebook. I'm also still not comfortable accepting gigs indoors at events that are slowly coming back in America (while the rest of the world is still very much locked down). But there is a certain situation that I'd be happy to play, and also happy to host: The House Concert: Pandemic-edition.

Our backyard has been oh-so-pleasant!

Remember socialization? I don't! This weekend I had a backyard Passover dinner with a handful of friends who are fully vaccinated, and we practiced talking -- outside and distanced. I was terrible at interacting. They were like swans to water, in my eyes, but when they got home, each of them texted to apologize for their inability to socialize properly. I think we are all feeling somewhat feral at this point.

Pin this to pinterest!

In all my talks with other breast cancer patients, not one has been sent home directly after surgery, like I have, everysingletime -- excepting, of course, those who have been diagnosed in the pandemic year. Today I want to talk about GOING HOME DIRECTLY AFTER SURGERY.

It's because of COVID-19 precautions that so many dangerous surgeries have become outpatient. In October 2000, my mother was in the hospital for 5 days after her mastectomy. Nurses emptied her drains (plastic balloons that hang off your sides and fill up with blood and lymph fluid and must be emptied every four hours), and they monitored her vitals. They managed her pain. The doctor stopped by to discuss treatment, care, the future. She felt cared for.

How am I? Okay. The longer days are cheering me up, but my surgeries have affected my executive function (i.e. my ability to get anything done). 

A few updates: I had breast cancer. It has come to my attention that not everyone knew this. Sorry!

I've got 2-3 more surgeries to go before my breast reconstruction is complete. These multiple surgeries were because my plastic surgeon didn't listen to me when I told him there was an infection. He said it was "fine," and then I went another week before I saw him again. The next week he filled my expander, and then I said, "I swear it's infected, could you please check?" He finally aspirated some fluid, and then sent me immediately to the OR for an emergency surgery to clear out a big abscess and cut off a bunch of dying skin and remove the tissue expander and sew me up flat. 

I'm trying to let it go, but I'm pretty angry that I didn't have a chance to, like, try antibiotics first. 

I'm also frustrated that it's added seven months to my treatment plan, and I just want to get back to being a great parent and artist.

All that anesthesia is giving me brainfog. 

Reading is impossible; thank goodness for audiobooks. I can't even read an easy romance (Hello, Bridgerton books!) without doing that thing where your brain realizes it's read an entire page without any content digestion. (I swear it's not just me reading the sex scenes on repeat.) I had about a month in January where my brain was finally starting to feel good again -- hence, when I got really into art/watercolors/drawing, but bam! that fourth surgery did me in. I feel like I have jello in my head again.

I got my first COVID vaccine last week, which has changed my mental health completely. I don't plan on playing gigs in bars or anything, but I did actually set foot in a store yesterday (Paul's Fruit Market!) for the first time in a year. Life will never be the same as it was March 1 of last year, but I do see a future where I might have adventures again.

I had some bloodwork taken today. I have oncology appointment next week. I have pre-op for my mid-March surgery on Friday. Basically, it's typically cancer-life: a bunch of waiting around and then five doctors' appointments in a week. 

In this-is-getting-old-news, I'm stressed about finances again, mainly because I still can't work like I want to. Our health insurance has changed, so we have to meet a third out-of-pocket within a year. Then this weekend we had a huge sewage backup in our basement -- a repair that will require taking out yet another mortgage. I'm growing pretty tired of spending five figures on things that I don't get to ... enjoy?, and I would really like to take out a mortgage and take the whole family to Egypt or something. Maybe I need to just spend some money on something frivolous to balance it out. 

My big priority this year, though, is to get my health back on track. I went from averaging 15,000 steps a day to being unable to walk up a flight of stairs without my fitness wrist band asking if I'm okay. Just last week I got the okay to start strengthening exercises -- but not with weights: with water bottles. I'm not to lift over 2 pounds yet. 

Still, I can see the light, if I can just get motivated enough to reach for it.

As far as art goes, I'm going to:

• PLAN ANOTHER TOUR! I'm going to tour my house again. And I'm going to livestream it to YouTube & Facebook. 
  
  
• Finish a music video already!!! It's for the same song I've been trying to release for six months, but I keep running into problems with the music video. I don't even want to be in the video at this point, but you also cannot release a song in 2021 unless there's a video for it. Well, you can, but you might as well be writing a note on a post-it and throwing it into a lake because the algorithm just doesn't work for you unless you've got a video. Ugh, can someone help me? Joe M, can I hire you? Are you reading this? Valerie, can you do some ballet to a song and let Joe film it? I don't know how to project manage my own stuff. Argh. 
  
  
• Release new music: one song a month, maybe? I'm sitting on mixed and mastered songs, but I don't have a plan to release it all because I just don't understand the proper steps anymore. 
  
  
• Do a few more home portraits. I got backed up with doing these for friends, and, while I do love doing them, I realized I need to start charging for them. If you'd like me to draw your house, lemme know.

Watercolor Iris. From a Let'sMakeArt tutorial.

Surgery is no joke, friends. I was feeling better this morning, and I've stopped taking the pain pills. (The pain is the same with or without them.) Because everyone was driving me crazy, which happens when I don't get a sufficient amount of alone time, I decided to go for a drive and deliver some art I promised to people. I made five art deliveries around the city and took photos of four homes for house-portrait-commissions. I had two more to go, but they were a bit farther afield than my energy could manage. 

Driving around for an hour was depleting, apparently, and I'm now in bed, clutching my mastectomy pillow and with the electric mattress pad cranked on high. Being a sloth comes with guilt: guilt that I'm not playing with my kids, mostly, but also guilt that David is, yet again, doing 100% of the household chores. I've done a good job of collecting dishes by my bed, but I'm not strong enough to carry them downstairs. Last week I dropped a bunch of oats all over the floor. Dishes aren't as easy clean-up.

I forget that surgery, to your body, is basically the equivalent of being attacked by a saber-toothed tiger, biologically-speaking. My cells have no idea that the surgery was planned. They instead are totally stressing out and having to rebuild tissue and also recuperate from the strange medicines. I'm meant to be lying in my cave, having my hunter-gatherer family bring me water and nuts and perhaps some mammoth-flesh if it's a good week. 

Instead I'm sipping decaf Earl Grey and eating Dutch Caramel Apple Pie that a wonderful friend delivered yesterday. It's better than a cave, I think.

My body is exhausted, but my brain is on overload. I have so many projects I want to do. I want to get a real re-start on my memoir (which I'm having to re-write in light of my own cancer diagnosis. It was originally a memoir about being The Sandwich Generation, taking care of two parents with cancer while trying to find fun and joy in the little things. Still working on a tagline, friends, but are you a literary agent? I have one interested, but then again that was a year ago...). I want to finish this instrumental album. I want to finish a music video for "18 Months Later" -- my new single that isn't out yet, but you can hear it here if you are a Patron even at the lowest tier - $10/year! I want to make new paintings. I want to write a romance novel. I want to be the best homeschool mom on the planet. I want to draw with my new markers that you all bought me because you are SIMPLY THE BEST. I want to record new music.

More than anything I want to perform for people. I miss a crowd so much. I miss the back and forth, the heckling, the laughs, the response, just everything. 

Back to art though. I'm running a special for Patrons who are at the $20/month level, where I will draw a house portrait for you to thank you for your support. I do have a listing just up on my website where people are ready to straight-up buy a portrait rather than joining Patreon... but really I'd prefer you join Patreon where my music community is:) On Patreon you can also just pay for a year at one time with a discount of 15% and that turns out is $204/annually, which is the cost of a home portrait anyway, so support an artist and get a cool perk!

Okay, enough about Patreon. I've gotta shut up about that already. Anyone reading this is likely already a member there, and I love you eternally. 

Thank you all for the love, for the art supplies, for the books for my boys, and for the pies. My family is so very grateful.

Ways to Support:

Shop my Amazon Storefront.
Join Patreon.
Subscribe to my YouTube. It's free.

HOWDY! It's nearing midnight, day of surgery. I was floored by the number of people who've been reading my blog lately -- and the number of people who care about me. You'd think I'd grasp that, but clearly I need many years of therapy to understand that I have a really great community.

This is probably the most important thing in cancer treatment: finding your village.

Tomorrow begins the first of my three surgeries to repair the post-mastectomy issues. I can't quite see the end of the tunnel yet, but I'm relieved to be making some progress. 

At some point in the last two weeks I started drawing again. It started because I wanted to do my own art therapy to try to control a new essential tremor I've developed since surgery. Weirdly, I can't control it very well when I'm playing piano, but when I'm drawing or painting, I'm able to slow it down a bit. 

My plan was to have date nights based around a watercolor project subscription box I ordered myself for Christmas. You know - like one of those paint & drink wine places, except at home because who is going out during a deadly pandemic? David and I did one of the watercolor tutorials together sometime after New Year's, and I was hooked. David, less so. 

Yes, we are still homeschooling. And not Zoom meetings at home with a teacher, but 100% homeschooling, where I am the teacher and we study what we want. I'm loosely following a curriculum I bought, but I am loving the freedom to stray when needed. 

I'm fortunate my boys can read, as it makes things a lot easier. I don't have to teach reading (though I supposed I already did that by accident?), and we can get piles of books from the library and study all the precambrian creatures we want. Then we can use modeling clay or pipe cleaners to make our own prehistoric animals, and then I can assign Graham to use those animals to make a stop-motion animation. Then he likes to write up something and post it to his instagram, so I feel like we're covering a lot of life skills in one subject. 

Here's a list of the resources we are using for homeschool. (It's an Amazon Affiliate link.)

We are reading 'official school books' (Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass/Phantom Tollbooth/Midsummer Night's Dream so far), but he always has some dragon fantasy book going on his own. Wee Angus just finished My Father's Dragon and we are doing some Winnie the Pooh and more Frog and Toad stuff next. 

As for math, they love doing it independently -- with apps that adjust to their current level, mainly Prodigy. 

Art is an easy find in my house. We've done some watercolor penguins this week, after I started making my own penguins from a Let's Make Art tutorial subscription box thingie I got myself for Christmas. Music lessons are on Wednesdays.

I'm kind of tortured about what to do about next school year. I don't see live music returning by the fall and then it's flu season again. I'm pretty sure I'm out of a job for another year at least. I'm hoping that the increase in vaccines means that museums and other fun field trip destinations will be open and maybe I could try a year of homeschooling where we aren't locked in our house. (My big dream has always been to just be a traveling homeschool family!) 

Quick cancer/surgery updates:

I have three more surgeries. The first one is February 4, and this will be to swap out the tissue expander for an implant. I'll have to heal from that one, let the flat side continue to heal, and then we can talk about putting in a tissue expander on the flat side. 

I'm still really upset with my first plastic surgeon, who did a weird kind of surgery and used a weird kind of tissue expander (one that was prone to infections, apparently). Mostly I'm annoyed that he put the tissue expander over the muscle. The new surgeon suggested that under the muscle was preferable both for surgery success and for looking more natural. So he is going to go under the muscle on my February 4 surgery, which means I'll have a pretty painful recovery, as those muscles have not been stretched at all and they are about to get a big ol' implant underneath them. #ouch

Ways to Support:
Patreon is the ultimate way to show your support. Less than $1/month if you pay annually! And you get exclusive access to more blogs and art.
Follow me on social media (so many links on this page!!).
Stream my music please!! Even if you just have it on in the background, it's so very helpful to indie artists who are beat down by the spotify algorithm.
Other updates/tip jars are here.

I have been at a loss as what to write for ages now. It's not writers' block; I've been able to make some progress on my books and songs. I just feel like my blog is boring, that no one cares how I'm doing, or that even if they do care, I've got nothing new to report. 

That's probably the biggest issue here: I'm in limbo. I've nothing new to report. I know you care. You wouldn't be reading if you didn't. But I'm still half-healed, with three more surgeries before I'm whole again.

I've decided to go ahead with breast reconstruction, a deeply personal decision that I still wrestle with. I feel like I should be brave enough to "Go Flat!" It's a movement heard around the world, and it's one that I support.