Category Archives: Uncategorized

by

Can’t I just disappear for a while?

This morning I got up, dragged my sorry rump off to work, got stuck in traffic and rolled into work late. Not awesome. I was able to stay late to make it up, no problem. The bigger problem was that when I hit the parking lot and climbed out. My first thought was “I am so done, so done.” To be clear, I don’t hate my job, but I’m so so busy, so incredibly busy. I know I claim to be a writer and should easily be able to describe how many flavors of busy I am and how it feels to work in an environment so saturated with crises that everyone seems to think adding unnecessary crises is a pretty good idea  – you know to really show how busy we are, but the best I can come up with is that I can’t finish a current task without having two more added to the list. My colleague and I have written about 120 reports in the past five months. To add some context to that, this is roughly the annual throughput of the entire team prior to our arrival. As this is my job and I’m well compensated for it, it should be YAY us, we’re freaking awesome. Nope. Not feeling it -I’m tired.

Last weekend, the wife and I went to Seattle, sans children, to have a romantic stress-free weekend. This was fully achieved, it was great. I don’t care how many homeless people I didn’t see or how much I didn’t have my car broken into or any of those things that happen in big cities. I frikkin’ loved Seattle. LOVED. I figured the trip would really recharge my batteries. It did for about a day. Then, I came back and reality hit again.

I have made myself so busy, I now feel guilty about the 1 hour a week I’m devoting to watching Westworld. I’ve got a demanding job, for which I’ve recently had a title change that I can’t tell anybody about that because apparently something got screwed up, I don’t know what got screwed up, just that I have a shiny new meaningless title and I’m also pretty sure everyone thinks I’m slacking. On top of that, I’m trying to start another company for another company, which is NOT going as hoped. I’m also trying to write 2 (no, actually 4, but only two actively) books AND I’m trying to get a book published on inkshares – that’s not going great, but I’m doing the best I can to promote without being absolutely insufferable. To continue to add to the list, I’m writing a recipe article for my wife’s dad’s newspaper (any suggestions? – due tomorrow, looks like). Then, last but not least, I’m trying to keep up on my blog, which (obviously) is not going well. I’m so damn over-taxed that I’ve tried about half a dozen posts in the last week or two and have gotten just past the “hey, I had this great thought I wanted to share” point and realized I didn’t have the mental energy to get to the point and wrap it.

Yesterday, I started the audiobook for Felicia Day’s autobiography – it’s called something about being weird on the internet, don’t ask me the title, I’m too lazy to pick up my iPod or open another tab to Google it and get it right. This audio book is good, I mean I love her work, and think she’s a spectacular writer. I’m pretty sure the book is meant to be a ‘rah-rah, love yourself and follow your dreams’ sort of story. Well, it didn’t work for me. I pretty much finished it and have more or less come a way thinking that this woman is brilliant and talented, and I am not, and no amount of hard work I put into anything is going to amount to anything one tenth so brilliant.

Part of the reason I’m so busy at work is that I’ve built a system that lends itself to extremely rapid adhoc report development. Someone can ask me the question: How many CCU visits resulted in this particular diagnosis in August & September 2016 and the same for 2015. I can spin that around in like 20 minutes. The usual timeline for an adhoc like that is like six months – largely because it would take 3-6 hours, maybe more, and it doesn’t count as a big important thing, so it gets dropped to the bottom of the list. In any case, having built this system up, I am becoming ‘the guy’. I’m not the only ‘the guy’, but I am one, and so I’m in demand. On one hand, you could call this a win and say it’s brilliant within my work context, but I don’t see it that way. I still have 50 unresolved tickets and have a mountain of documentation and training materials, plus hours of meetings and requirements gathering for more reports, I don’t have much of a handle on planning or even progress, my whole project management game is shit, really. Basically, I have worked my ass off and am further behind than when I started. This is not a win, nor is is anything like brilliant.

I wrote a book I love and characters I think are awesome. That book received 0 response from more than 40 agents and has not gained any sort of momentum on inkshares. I have had TREMENDOUS support from so many people, who are endlessly sharing and tweeting and pre-ordering, but with less than a month and more than 200 copies to go. The win is looking beyond remote. That book is very unlikely to see the light of day. I can’t tell you how much THAT makes me feel like I’m letting folks down. So much support, and I’m unable to make the win. When you crowd-fund like that, the project becomes the project of everyone who supported, and for me to not hit the magic number is an ENORMOUS failure to deliver for EVERY SINGLE PERSON who has helped and been generous and supportive.

I’m not stuck on my other works as much as I simply haven’t got the time to work on them as much as is necessary to finish any one of them. I mean, I do write -every day. Sometimes, I get super productive and knock out 2K in a single night, but those nights are rare and with so little energy to spare, the best I can do is read through what I wrote on one of those WIPs and think about how much work remains.

So.

Here I am.

I don’t have the bandwidth. I just want to walk away from all of it. I’m tired and my motivation for doing more than coming home, having a beer and falling asleep on the couch is basically non-existent. I clearly haven’t got the drive or talent of a person capable of pulling off any of what I’ve set out out to do. The hard part is that I can’t help but try. I suppose that for every ‘I worked my ass off to get here’ story you get, you get as many ‘I worked my ass off and I’m no further down the road than I was ten years ago’ stories. Anyhow, now I’m off to work on something that requires my attention.

Maybe stupidity and unrelenting stubbornness will pay off at some point?

by

My firstest ever writer’s conference

I’ve been writing for years. It hasn’t always been my primary hobby. In fact, I took a break for a couple years to build a house become a parent, explore some hobbies, make sure my career was in solid enough shape to ensure things like retirement and food. What I haven’t been doing much is interacting with other writers. Sure, I started this blog to start doing that and also to share my various and sundry problems with writing and any solutions I may have cooked up to deal with those. What I haven’t done is any sort of face to face interactions. 

You might be asking why, if I consider myself a writer, I haven’t been active in the local community of writers or at the very least been a part of a critique group. Well, the truth is that I watched my wife (you know who she is. She’s a wonderful writer in her own right, if she doesn’t believe it herself), before she was my wife go through a creative writing class. It is rude, heartless, and just plain mean to say, but I’m going to say it anyhow. Most of the utter crap she brought home to read along with her own descriptions of pompous, self-righteous artist wannabes put me off the writing crowd. To further bolster this really unfair and mostly incorrect opinion, I joined an online science fiction and fantasy writer’s workshop. It was actually not horrible. The only jerk I ran across was me. The problem was that it relied upon writers providing criticism to one another. This is how it’s done, but since it’s an online environment, it’s not a super solid strategy. Many of the writers on that site/group/whatever were looking for validation more than advice or were as inexperienced as anyone else joining and couldn’t provide any more technical writing advice than a potato. It was your classic case of the blind leading the blind. The only thing I learned is that it’s not okay to actually hit someone for telling you to show not tell. Most of the advice was unhelpful at best and probably only somewhat understood by those providing critiques. Truthfully, the critiques were honest and generally contained a seed of ‘you have a problem you need to fix’ within them. Unfortunately, as a very new writer, most of the suggestions were less helpful than simply saying, this bit of writing is rubbish, go take a class. So, I gave up and decided to work on my own for a while. I suppose that went okayish, but not really. I spent more time on world building, home building, dealing with starting a family, and career than actual writing, but I didn’t really learn anything new about the craft. At least until I got online again and start trying to get connected with other writers – I did start to learn some things then.

Yesterday, for the first time ever, and in spite of years of spluttering on about it, I went to a writer’s conference. This was one of the best writing decisions I think I’ve ever made. In no way can I say that this conference will be the key to getting published or selling enough copies of a book to quit my day job and write full time, but it taught me something that I wish I’d learned years ago. There are places, groups, and organizations who genuinely want to help writers and will supply experienced advisors to help you get there. Social media is indeed one place as is (in retrospect) the online writer’s workshop I did, but there are other places. This conference though put experienced, indeed award winning, writers in front of a room to explain what works, what doesn’t, and share real world experiences. 

I’m such a jaded person, in general, that inspirational quotes do very little for me. I’d even go so far as to say they generally piss me off. In spite of that, I found myself not only inspired, but motivated. I came away with new tools, new perspective and a couple of new contacts. Here are a few of the most basic things I came away with.

1.) Go to writer’s conferences

2.) Bring business cards (Really? Yes – writing is a business too, it’s how business people connect why not writers?)

3.) Look over the agenda and pick your sessions, prepare questions

4.) Don’t eat 3 pieces of pizza

There was a whole lot more, a lot, but I can’t fit those things into bullet points, I’m sure I’ll write more blogs on this as I think about the new information and advice and try to put it into practice.

by

Wine Bottles and Broomsticks Inkshares campaign

Winebottles_Broomsticks

Inkshares link: https://www.inkshares.com/books/wine-bottles-and-broomsticks?referral_code=b03ff715

If you’ve spent any time at all following me on social media the past week, it’ll come as no surprise that I’m working on getting this project published on Inkshares. It’s more than just that though. I’m also trying to get the most pre-orders to win a contest with Geek and Sundry. If I can work this to the top of the list, Geek and Sundry will help me promote and sell this book. In order for that to happen though, I need support. Like A lot of support. I need hundreds of pre-orders. So, like a profoundly broken record with no actual sound, but lots of repetition, I’m asking for help. And the help is its own reward – if you pre-order for the usual price of a book, you get the book once it’s been edited. You’re just buying it ahead of time. Of course, if you wait, there won’t be a book to buy, so if you’re in the mood for a light-hearted urban fantasy in the vein of The Dresden Files, check out the first chapter. Don’t worry though, if i don’t make my goal, which really nobody wants, you get your money back. So, this is a win only situation, what do you say? Take a look at the sample on Inkshares.

-Dave