Blog: By The Arts Council Denied!

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You find me today slightly DEFEATED but also almost entirely UNBOWED, for LO! A Thing What I Was Hoping To Do has been REFUSED!

The Thing What I Was Hoping To Do was an Arts Council "Developing Your Creative Practice" grant which I wanted to use to pay for MENTORSHIP and some TIME to allow me to Develop My Creative Practice in a new and exciting way, but ALAS the Arts Council said "No". Usuaully I would say that this was not entirely unexpected as I have NEVER had any success whatsoever with this sort of thing, but this time around I thought I was in with a chance, as the IDEA was dead exciting and, I thought, right up their alley.

The aforesaid IDEA was to try and bring together two different aspects of my PORTFOLIO CAREER (hem hem) into one NEW thing, those being my decades of experience of ROCKING OUT and my more recent experience of Talking About Comics. With the latter I have been very conscious of the fact that putting together a conference presentation takes AGES but then you only do it once to a room containing about 20 (delightful) people. In many ways it's like putting together a FRINGE show except a) it's a bit shorter and b) you only actually do it ONCE, rather than taking it around the country to SEVERAL rooms containing about 20 (delightful) people EACH.

"AHA!" I thought to myself, "but what if I could somehow find a way to do a presentation about comics that was a little bit longer and that I could then take around the country for the aforementioned ROOMS?" I thought this thought quite a lot, but kept running into PROBLEMS. For one thing, where are the people who would come and SEE this sort of thing? I am highly concious that my usual lovely audiences who have flocked (YES FLOCKED) to see me have come to hear Bellowed Songs With Humorous Insight and not necessarily to hear about how transmedia characters function across time and different media types. Also, people who DID want to hear someone talk about that sort of thing would not necessarily be AWARE of my previous OUVRE so wouldn't know about it to come.

Now, I know there are NETWORKS of places that put on gigs by those Science Comedians you have nowadays, and there are blogs and podcasts and even radio shows that deal with them, but I have absolutely no idea how to get INTO them, nor what sort of thing they would want to be presenting (i.e. do you do ten minute BITS, or full shows, or what?). Again, my experience is all in ROCK with a tiny sliver of FRINGE, so I wouldn't know where to start.

THUS the grant bid was to get me some time with a couple of people who DO know about That Sort Of Thing, to help me get some INSIGHT into how these other worlds work and, to paraphrase a grant application process title, Develop My Creative Practice. As I say, it seemed to me that this was PRECISELY what the scheme was set up to do, and despite ALL my experience of This Sort Of Thing I had managed to get quite HOPEFUL, so when the email came yesterday I must admit I experience THE GLUMS for a couple of hours.

However, supportive emails from some of the people who'd help me write the bid PLUS some extremely supportive THORTS from The Figures In My Spreadsheet back home cheered me up CONSIDERABLY and I'm now ready to go again with the NEXT round of bids. I'm also looking at ways I might be able to do SOME of it off my own back, but either way I will not be DAUNTED by this setback (well, not too much anyway) and you can rest assured that, at some point, the world will THRILL to tales of how random stratified sampling can be used in the digital humanites, twenty (delightful) people at a time!

posted 12/3/2024 by MJ Hibbett

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Comments:

Don't worry, even The Beatles never got an Arts Council grant. They just had to make do with fame and money instead.
posted 13/3/2024 by Money for nothing, and my snark for free

the beatles had fame, money, and TALENT. we don't.
posted 16/3/2024 by

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