Gathering my nuts.

Like a squirrel, for the winter that is.  Geez you people, your mind is in the gutter!

So you probably haven’t heard from me in a while, and it wasn’t supposed to be like this, but I’ve had a bunch of ups and downs the last month or so.

Things have been pretty rough business wise for my website, I will admit.  And then there was all the trials and tribulations about getting to Montreal Fetish Weekend.  I’m preparing a different blog post just about that, but I’m gonna table that one for now and just speak as to what’s on my mind and what’s going on with me.

So, yeah, website revenues aren’t what they were, plus back in April the Satin Doll closed so making ends meet since then has been challenging.  Thankfully there is webcamming, and I can be found on either www.streamate.com or www.chaturbate.com depending on which one suits my mood.  I tend to broadcast on Streamate if I want to have intimate one on one camshows with fans, and go on Chaturbate if I’m a bit loose and lazy with my performance and just want a lot of attentions.  Each one has their pros and cons which maybe I’ll go into at a later date.

So a big part of what I have been up to this winter is preparing lots of attractive nooks and corners of my house to be wonderful cozy spaces to broadcast camshows from.  I’m doing this because my studio building is one large room and when winter finally comes to be, it gets fairly hard to heat the whole place.

So I have done a lot of room painting.  I have painted many rooms in my 250-year old house but for some reason (and this is somewhat telling about my love life), my bedroom had been unfinished.

Turning it into this:

with the inspiration for the room (and canopy bed) being this:
And then another room I have, my sewing room/second bedroom is slowly being transformed into the Hello Kitty bedroom.  Starting from this:
Lots of ancient wallpaper, yuck.
But slowly turning into this:
There’s obviously still  a lot of work to do, and I have already been picking furniture to re-upholster and decorate the room with.  This roadside find is looking smashing in pink stretch velvet. Before:
After: (actually “during” as it’s not quite done yet.)
I even painted and fixed up this chair to go with it.  In both cases, both pieces had some wood missing, and I had to use plumber’s epoxy to fill in the gaps, then white paint makes it invisible.

Some of the inspiration for these pieces comes from pictures of rooms like this:
And while I may never live in a house this grand, I can do my best to make my house as much of a dollhouse as possible, because you know, I’m a living doll.

Which brings me back to some of the “downs” part of the ups and downs.  September was a tight month for me financially, and even though I was finally achieved that magic number of three shoots per month, a few credit card merchant renewal fees really ate into my livelihood.  I had to ask people for money to get me to Montreal and to get by.

My goal forthcoming is to get myself going on a Patreon sort of thing, and really start working that angle.  The economics of producing porn have changed, and the economics of being an artist and financing that art has also changed.  So I’m trying to figure out that right now.

Now webcamming indoors this winter (which I hope is lucrative) is only one part of it.  Let’s be honest, I gotta make some changes to my site, and also to my image.   That’s coming.  It’s just that stressful times often make me forget about all the things that I have accomplished.

Case in point.  Last weekend I had guests in the form of two Canadians who are making a film about my life.  They stayed the weekend filming some of my day to day doings in being creative.  Sadly they came at a low point in my life where I’m worrying far too much about how I’m going to pay the next bill, which clouds my clarity about what I should be doing.  When you have 3 or 4 unfinished projects, it’s hard to pick which one to finish since you don’t know which one will actually turn some sort of profit.

I confessed to the film crew that I was at this low point, and that as much as viewing the footage to the unfinished Uranus Needs Shemales made me wonder if it was all wasted effort, it also reminded  me of how much I have accomplished, and that it would be a shame not to finish it and share it with the world.  Watching it I even felt embarassed to be a porn star.  It’s not a good place to be if I look back at the last 15 years of my life, where I’ve dedicated myself to becoming this sex object.  Now is not the time to waver on my goals, because the artistic result will be wishy-washy.

So where is UNS as far as completion?  Well, there is one Victorian sex scene I want to shoot, which is supposed to take place in 1880’s Paris.  It’s actually a virtual sex fantasy scene and I had some pretty grand plans about how I was going to shoot this, but time and time again, fates conspired to make this tougher than I thought.

A year ago last summer I started landscaping my yard, yep, I rented a Bobcat and went to town.  Trouble is, after I moved a bunch of dirt around, it didn’t rain for like 3 months and grass never grew back until the following spring.  So that window came and went.

Then this summer got away from me, and part of the set I want to build includes a ballustrade wall.  I have gotten as far as buying a mold specifically for making these:
And it took 3 tries to get it right, and the plan is to make like at least a dozen of them. If you’re asking why I’m casting them in cement myself instead of just buying them, that’s because it’s $70 per column pre-made, and it was only $65 for the mold, and concrete is like $3 a bag, so it’s far more cost effective to buy the mold and go to town with it.  When I say my film has a shoestring budget, I really mean it does.

But, alas, the fact that I got behind in the Parisian gardens set just at precisely the time that my autumn window of  “sometime-between-too-hot-outdoors-and-too-cold-and-the-leaves-have-turned”, well, that window came and went and I have little choice now but to try to simulate outdoors on an indoor set, and shoot this scene this winter.

Which might be a better thing anyway.  When you are going to have two male actors and a camera person and you’re trying to schedule it all and you could get all the stars alligned just to have it rain on that day or be 35 degrees out- well, fuck that.  I’m just gonna shoot it indoors, though now I’m going to have to make fake plants (perhaps there’s a place where I can rent that stuff??)

So that project remains unfinished.  And when I was showing the film crew my work on UNS, I noticed that I have pretty much 75% of the production finished for my next DVD “Transsexual Pinups #4”, just sitting in Final Cut Pro and I basically forgot it even existed.

So yeah, DUH, STUPID TARA, you should at least finish that DVD because DUH, that’s money that will come in because believe it or not, people still order DVDs and that’s a nice little windfall.

All this being said, I think that maybe, just MAYBE I have A.D.D.  What do you think?

And of course, this is not even to mention that repairs on the floor in my house suddenly leapt to priority #1 last week when it got cold and holes in the floor were like leaving a door open in the winter.

Basically an old bathroom and leaky pipes and floor had attracted rot and carpenter ants to this part of the house, so I tore that all up and had to replace/sister a few of the joists as well.  Not particularly expensive if I do it myself, just time consuming if I wasn’t able to plow through it and focus.
Thankfully I was able to FOCUS on it and for 2 days straight I had them ripped up, replaced, and best of all, all the rotted debris, burned in the firepit so it’s gone gone!

So now everything is solid and I also built a nice trap door under this which gets into the crawl space so it’s just like in those old WW2 films where I could hide a whole family of jews from the Gestapo.  It really does look like that now.

Anyway, moving right along, oh did I mention that I got comandeered into doing a roof at my mom’s house?  Well, essentially they’re dirt poor and the fact that no one has done the roof shingles in 25 years means the roof is leaking (mostly from ice dams in that last terrible winter).  Since I’m handy and they are poor, if I don’t do it, it won’t get done.

So yeah, fun fun fun. And I probably have to replace some of the wood underneath, and who knows I’ll probably fall and break my neck or my back and corner the market of quadroplegic tranny porn.  But I’m taking it slow, as they’re getting the job they paid for.

So basically, parts of my life really fucking suck.  But yet I still manage to clean up nicely and look great on camera still after hanging off a ladder all afternoon.

It’s really hilarious when people comment on my fit physique and ask if I work out in the gym.  Ha ha.  No, I DO SHIT.  Working on two old houses and building sets and just generally being neurotic will keep me in great shape.  Maybe if I’m lucky this winter, I can sit down and eat ho-ho’s and get a butt and some baby fat going.

So what does this all mean for my next shoots, oh my fans so eagerly waiting for the next shoot to grace my site?

There are 3 shoots I shot with a photographer that are “in the can” as they say, but I’m not sure who’s working them up, whether it’s him or me.  And for Montreal Fetish weekend I made two brandy new outfits, perhaps you’ve seen glimpses of them.
There’s this thing which came out amazing, though the only concept I can think about it some sort of kinky Dr Seuss thing ( “I will do that slut in the butt?”). And then this other one, which was wonderfully captured in Montreal by “Rogue Master”.

As usual, I need to put together some kind of concept to go with these, and I really want to come up with something different for these, but what it will be, I don’t know.  I also made this great dress which is now like my favorite thing in the whole world to wear.  I’m definitely embracing my inner Stepford Wife.

Oh and by the way I also have like 4 brand new wigs I have yet to use in shoots yet, AND I bleached my natural hair too.  For those of you wondering what my natural hair looks like, here it is in all it’s craptastic glory.  Yeah, I know, it’s on my list of things I gotta fix, and that’s a topic for another time.
I’m getting mighty bored of the painted backgrounds in my studio.  I’ve used the pink and white striped/pink and red striped backgrounds a lot, but I need to switch it up because I’m easily bored and when I’m bored, I’m not productive.

And these walls are currently being re-painted too, which means that hopefully in about a week I’ll be back to doing new shoots.

So what will be next for me?  As I juggle everything else, I think the next thing you can expect is some kind of website re-fresh, and maybe even that upscaling of the older sets project I talked about for a while.  I need to regain momentum on my site above all, because that will spurn me on to finish projects.

Or it might be something else entirely that I hadn’t planned at all. I have no idea what is next.

And if you made it all the way through that post to read this, thank you.

-Tara