After starting season 5 of the podcast, the one question that everybody seems to be asking me is: What's the deal with the train car?
The funny thing about documenting my life in a cartoon every single day is I was actually able to go back and pinpoint where the whole thing started and the things that lead up to it.
I'll explain how I plan to use this train car to help turn my podcast into an actual creative art business.
In spring 2018 on season 2 of the podcast, I had been talking to artists that owned their own businesses around Madison on the show. After meeting them and seeing how they were doing these inspirational things and helping other people, it made me think if there was something more I could do with my life?
First, it was just the usual passing dream. I started to look at some of the buildings or spaces that I passed by thinking to myself, I could use that as a studio or something.
Then right before season 3 of the podcast started, I began bouncing the ideas I had off of people. About what this place I was daydreaming about could be? For the most part, I was mainly looking for people's reactions to see how they responded. Or even if the idea felt stupid if I said it out loud?
I'm not even sure how we got the idea to ask about getting the train car? I think we just thought of it because it was by our house and because we thought being on a train would be neat!
After we got done looking at it, we got in my car to go back to work and pretty much decided we didn't even really want to try looking at other places. This was the place we were going to use.
Now we had a place and it was actually becoming kind of real. But the question was still, how are we going to get and make the money to do this? I've always thought about this but I've never gotten this far before.
Luckily up to that point, I'd actually been setting aside money from freelance work and my graphic novel sales. So I was able to use that to help fund this venture.
Then one day an interesting idea kind of hit me. I've been collecting toys and artwork and things like that over the years. I always told myself, it's going to be worth something someday!
Well, guess what Tom? It's someday. So I'm actually going to put that to the test.
As a test run, I started selling some of my collections online. And pretty much instantly things began to sell. So I've gotten back into the collectibles game, I'm collecting artwork, toys and nicknacks that I think look cool.
As far as all the ideas that I've been kicking around for what this train car can be, I've decided it's going to be me, for lack of a better way of putting it. It's going to be things that interest me, things I like and things I do.
One side of the train is going to be collectibles and artwork featuring local artists and musicians work. And the other side is going to be a podcast and multimedia streaming production studio.
I want to create new shows with artists and musicians. I want to set it up so people can use it themselves, rent it out and do their own shows or want to do a live stream playing music... things like that!
So stay tuned because who knows what's going to happen? All I do know is -- I'm going to do it anyway.