Finding New Footing, Again
Apr. 27th, 2011 12:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wyld_dandelyonIt's a mental and physical gear-shift to go from working full time and doing creative work when I can squeeze it in to being unemployed. I've done it several times now, in the last couple of years, and it does not get easier with practice. No matter that I always have creative work I've planned to work on, it takes a while to get into a mindset where the worry about when I'll have a regular paycheck again doesn't sap away my creative energies.
This time, things have been complicated by good things and bad: worrying and feeling depressed about having to demolish the old garage and cheering while putting aside as much time as I could to help (from hundreds of miles away) with getting the Torn World anthology put together. There have also been briefer distractions too, like getting 1/2 hour's notice to go to my kid's senior art show and see some of her photographs in the show ("Oh, I just put that one in because I had to have 18 photos I didn't hate...") and driving around to get her the papers she needs for financial aid applications.
Finally, in the last week or so, I started to feel like I'd hit my stride again. In the last few days, I finished a Torn World story I'd been working on, on and off, for several weeks, wrote the first draft of a story to create background I need for a different Torn World storyline, corresponded with other people about setting a timeline for some stories where our plots intersect, and finished off documentation for more than a dozen characters for Torn World (the mechanics of sharing a world are time consuming, but useful when I want to reuse a character, whether that character started as mine or someone else's).
I also was getting geared up for other creative work--starting to really look at magazine and anthology deadlines, tossing some story ideas in the back of my head for stuff that won't fit into Torn World, and thinking about participating regularly in #fridayflash and Wednesday #weblit, remembering #scifichat every Friday, and planning, once I'd caught up with a few Torn World things, to take a week or two to ignore everything but Fireborn or Clockwork Dragon. Oh, and I want to e-publish an anthology of some of the stories I've published in this journal, along with at least one longer story that has gotten lots of nice rejections, and I was considering whether I could, given enough time, do cover art that I wouldn't hate in a year.
I also was starting to plan some of the more time-intensive things I could be doing to promote the Torn World anthology (Gosh, the pages I've seen so far are pretty!) once I have some copies in my hands.
...and...
Early this evening I got a phone call from lawyers I liked when I interviewed with them last week about a job that suits me very well, and I start Friday morning.
I'm delighted.
And somewhat off-balance, because I was just getting settled into what I expected to be a very focused and productive creative groove.
It's time, again, to shift mental gears. I'll have a new job to learn--every company has it's own idiosyncracies, things that make life so much easier once you've learned them (from their computers' file management programs to how they like their papers filed) and a new routine to adjust to. I don't even know if this place has food nearby that I can eat or if I'll have to carry my food with me every day.
But there's always new details to balance, and there will always be more fiction and art, I'm not giving that up. And I believe, though I certainly won't get rich at this job, that things will be financially more stable. Even though there will be less time available, hopefully that will let the creative energy flow easier.
Stay tuned. It's been great to have you all along for the journey so far, and even if I can't predict how things will happen, there's more to come.
In the meantime, anyone want to help me raze a garage? Or chat about making cover art for that personal anthology I want to get published? You know how to reach me.
This time, things have been complicated by good things and bad: worrying and feeling depressed about having to demolish the old garage and cheering while putting aside as much time as I could to help (from hundreds of miles away) with getting the Torn World anthology put together. There have also been briefer distractions too, like getting 1/2 hour's notice to go to my kid's senior art show and see some of her photographs in the show ("Oh, I just put that one in because I had to have 18 photos I didn't hate...") and driving around to get her the papers she needs for financial aid applications.
Finally, in the last week or so, I started to feel like I'd hit my stride again. In the last few days, I finished a Torn World story I'd been working on, on and off, for several weeks, wrote the first draft of a story to create background I need for a different Torn World storyline, corresponded with other people about setting a timeline for some stories where our plots intersect, and finished off documentation for more than a dozen characters for Torn World (the mechanics of sharing a world are time consuming, but useful when I want to reuse a character, whether that character started as mine or someone else's).
I also was getting geared up for other creative work--starting to really look at magazine and anthology deadlines, tossing some story ideas in the back of my head for stuff that won't fit into Torn World, and thinking about participating regularly in #fridayflash and Wednesday #weblit, remembering #scifichat every Friday, and planning, once I'd caught up with a few Torn World things, to take a week or two to ignore everything but Fireborn or Clockwork Dragon. Oh, and I want to e-publish an anthology of some of the stories I've published in this journal, along with at least one longer story that has gotten lots of nice rejections, and I was considering whether I could, given enough time, do cover art that I wouldn't hate in a year.
I also was starting to plan some of the more time-intensive things I could be doing to promote the Torn World anthology (Gosh, the pages I've seen so far are pretty!) once I have some copies in my hands.
...and...
Early this evening I got a phone call from lawyers I liked when I interviewed with them last week about a job that suits me very well, and I start Friday morning.
I'm delighted.
And somewhat off-balance, because I was just getting settled into what I expected to be a very focused and productive creative groove.
It's time, again, to shift mental gears. I'll have a new job to learn--every company has it's own idiosyncracies, things that make life so much easier once you've learned them (from their computers' file management programs to how they like their papers filed) and a new routine to adjust to. I don't even know if this place has food nearby that I can eat or if I'll have to carry my food with me every day.
But there's always new details to balance, and there will always be more fiction and art, I'm not giving that up. And I believe, though I certainly won't get rich at this job, that things will be financially more stable. Even though there will be less time available, hopefully that will let the creative energy flow easier.
Stay tuned. It's been great to have you all along for the journey so far, and even if I can't predict how things will happen, there's more to come.
In the meantime, anyone want to help me raze a garage? Or chat about making cover art for that personal anthology I want to get published? You know how to reach me.
