Saturday 5 October 2019

Recalculating....


This blog has been moribund. No, dormant; hibernating. It has slumbered through a long winter of attention-deficit. Let's see if I can prod it back to life, as I need prodding back to life. For nearly six years, I have spent a great deal of my non-earning time (virtually all, actually) dealing with a Domestic Situation which has left no time for this blog. The DS is shifting. I am allowed out. But the landscape is almost unrecognisable.

I don't usually talk about dreams, but I'll share the dream I had last night as it is a fine example of the subconscious speaking loudly and clearly:

I had an interview for a job; the first part consisted of playing chess in a well organised room on a neatly laid out board. I won the games easily. For the second stage, I went into a room with junk piled high and the chess sets were already half-played games. They were those travel sets where you have to push the pieces into peg holes. I tried to reset some, but it was a lot of aggro. I had to play against a disembodied voice. I told it I couldn’t be arsed with this and we could play without a set and spoke my first move. The voice was clearly disturbed by this change. It took a long time to make a move; it took longer and longer as the game progressed, and after a few moves I said I couldn’t be bothered — I didn’t want the job that much and I was leaving. The voice called, ‘Wait — you have the job.’ My response was ‘Why? And why would I want it if this is how you plan to run things? If it’s just gong to be a mindfuck, I don’t want the job.’ 
The second room is when things became complicated in my domestic life. The final question is now. Do I want this job? Being a writer has become a harder and harder way to make a living. But it's what I do. It's all I want to do, but I need to find ways to make it work better. I think that's something a lot of us in this job feel. I'll be poking around among my writer friends to find new strategies. One or two have shared their experiences already, in private, of how they added a self-publishing stream to their work which became very lucrative. I will be thinking about that. And thinking about other ways that give me more of the reward from my work. 
The next few posts will be musings rather than advice. There are fewer certainties in publishing than there were when I started this blog. The landscape has changed. The sat nav needs resetting. You can come along for the ride, or come back in a few months when I might know how it works. I will share the good roads, the back roads, the dead ends and the crashes here as I know a lot of other writers are in the same boat (whoops, mixed metaphor: if the boat is on the road, no wonder we're in trouble!)  

3 comments:

  1. Looking forward to this conversation! x

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  2. Welcome back! I’ll certainly be reading.

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  3. I am sorry you've had a tough time, and I agree with you about the landscape changing. But I'm glad to see you back. I always enjoyed your blog. So I'll be here, listening.

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