Has your life ever felt like this?:
“Now! Now!” cried the Queen. “Faster! Faster!” And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.
The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, “You may rest a little now.”
Alice looked round her in great surprise. “Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!”
“Of course it is,” said the Queen, “what would you have it?”
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
***
For the last four years, I’ve felt just like Alice in this excerpt from Through the Looking-Glass, especially where my singer/speaker/author business is concerned. I’ve put my all into it: spoken on podcasts and in person; published a book that became a bestseller; created an online and in-person course, The ALICE Way; Christmas caroled; put together a concert mixing song and story; taught juggling and dance and card crafting; applied for business grants; coached with “experts”; taken business courses; created and implemented social media strategies; developed my “pitch”; joined online and in-person networking groups; etc, etc. And this past quarter, especially in the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I finally achieved the mix of performing and non-performing opportunities that feels right for me. However, the balance sheet is not balancing.
Ideally, “making a profit” would mean that all these endeavors would generate enough revenue to cover business expenses AND provide me with an income that covers all the other expenses of life, but my business isn’t doing that. Not even close. To boot, the IRS requires that a business turn a profit in three out of five years in order to keep its status as a business. The business known as April plus Madison has failed to turn a profit for these past four years. I’ve been running very hard and at the end of the day, at the end of this year, I’ve kept in the same place. And I can’t run twice as fast. I have to admit that as a business, April plus Madison isn’t working out.
What now? Well, astrologically speaking, I just went through a Saturn Return, so end of 2025 is the perfect time for me to reconsider everything I’ve been taught about careers, business, and life. A business is supposed to focus on profits, and, frankly, that’s never been my focus. My focus is on the joy: joy in doing whatever I’m doing and sharing that joy with others. That joy comes through sharing uplifting and beautiful music, poetry, literature, dance, and visual art with others. And yes, I enjoy doing things well and being paid to do things that I do well, but the money is not the focus. I have never liked forcing my creative endeavors to pay my bills. It takes the joy out of it.
Time to refocus upon bringing to earth those gifts that God wants to lovingly express through me, not on building a “for profit” business. That means focusing on my (plus Madison’s) creative projects, which include:
- Performing my biography told through story, song and the occasional sonnet, The Power of Pure Imagination, only as often as feels right
- Completing the spiritual memoir that I put on the back burner in order to publish my dissertation. Its working title? Go Mad and Drink Tea
- Recording a CD of Christmas and baroque favorites, including arias by Maria Antonia. I’m singing better than ever, and this voice deserves to be heard and preserved
- Recording and publishing all of the Madisonnets. (For those who are new to my world and don’t know about my guardian angel, Madison Hatta, Sonneteer, see this previous blog post: https://aprillynnjames.com/home/blog/7613908/who-is-madison)
- Bringing The ALICE Way and Mad Tea Party event to churches, spiritual centers and other appreciative venues
Maybe I’ll crowdfund some of these projects, or maybe there’s an even better way to embark on what is ultimately a spiritual endeavor. Time will tell.
Feel free to contribute to the success of this endeavor in whatever way works for you such as:
- Attending my performances
- Downloading my (plus Madison’s) recordings on a pay-what-you-wish donation basis through my website
- Buying our Wonderland-inspired products through The Whimsical Things Shop on this site. This is the best way I’ve found thus far to make them available to the world at large (or at small)
- Spreading the word far and wide about me and Madison.
The Tenth Muse: How Maria Antonia Advanced the Pastoral Opera will continue to be available through Amazon. It could use some more reviews, which will help those not already on my list to discover it. (You can leave a review without having read the entire book, by the way. Hint, hint. Here's a link to the reviews page: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGP6S5DG#customerReviews) Also, please ask your local library purchase it through this IngramSpark link. Just imagine if every library around the world bought this book!
If you know anyone who is interested in what I (plus Madison) have to sing and say, please send them my way. And while you’re at it, send them this link: https://aprillynnjames.com/track/4407598/mh-declaims-ode-to-the-economic-downturn. It’s a recording of a Madisonnet that came through me during a similarly challenging time in 2011. Now, as back then, Madison’s whimsical wordplay helps me laugh my way through career and financial difficulties. May it do the same for you and anyone you know that needs a bit of cheer in the New Year.