Spinning beachball of death, and other occurrences

Oh, hello. I didn’t see you there. Or, rather, I had that feeling you were behind me, looking over my shoulder, wondering when the heck I was going to post again.

Or maybe that was just my internal to-do list.

I’m still here, it’s just that I’ve been mired in a freelance proofreading project for the past week. I’m behind and not used to having a deadline. I’m not used to having freelance work to juggle with the whole stay-at-home mom thing and with the renewed focus on my writing. Wow, am I out of practice with the multi-tasking and time management! Did I mention there’s a deadline?

As tends to be the case when a deadline looms — I think it’s some sort of law of the universe — something went wrong. That is, the universe threw a wrench into my already crazed week by having my beloved MacBook’s hard drive go kaput. First there was that telltale spinning beachball of death, and then my poor laptop just wouldn’t do anything. After several hours of cajoling, I managed to get it happy enough to back up all of my writing and photos (phew!) but that’s it. Then the spinning beachball of death returned and my laptop was useless again. Not good timing.

Long story short, I had to leave my beloved laptop at the Apple store Genius Bar (after an hour of diagnostic testing) and I was computerless for part of the week. I’m always amazed by how much I crave the motion of typing and actually miss my computer when it is gone. I had a bad case of writing withdrawal (and, ahem, Internet withdrawal), which unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to remedy since I got my computer back. The good news is, despite some lost data (mostly bookmarks, playlists and calendar items, but also a few files), I have a new, bigger hard drive with an updated operating system. And a new casing/touchpad for the top of my laptop (the “genius” I met with at the Apple store didn’t like the fact that a small piece of plastic on the corner of my laptop had fallen off), all courtesy of Apple. That’s right: I didn’t have to pay a cent! I have no idea why, as my computer was no longer under warranty and I’ve never ponied up for some kind of “care” package. The “genius” who was assigned my case was just nice, I guess.

Meanwhile, I’m re-learning Chicago style and proofreading daily until my eyes cross in order to meet my deadline. This is, despite what it sounds like, a good thing. I’ve long thought that any form of editing is helpful for one’s writing. It’s inspiring to read other writers’ work, for one thing. And, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of all those grammar, punctuation, and usage rules. Finally, there’s something about being nitpicky and correcting errors in writing that, at least for me, is conducive to producing better prose myself. Maybe it’s a misplaced competitive streak or something.

December writing links: The inspiration edition

Oh, hello. Somehow the month of December passed me by and it is January. It is 2010. That sounds a lot like the future, except suddenly it is not. I spent most of December in a fog of sickness, and the rest was a blur of holiday travel,  relatives, and jet lag, from which I am having trouble regaining traction in my normal life. December? Hello? What happened?

I finished November hopeful about writing, after banging out 30,000 words in National Novel Writing Month, only to loose my footing completely in the whirlwind that was December. Now I’m trying to figure out how to get back on track. I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions – or, well, I often make resolutions all year long, only to break them soon after. I think most resolutions are a lot like most diets — too radical to be sustainable in the long run. Which is why I liked this essay by author Ann Patchett so much. The more time you put into your writing, the greater your output will be. What a concept! And so, an hour a day for the first 32 days of the year. The idea being that you can set the tone for the year in the first month. Makes sense. Makes a lot of sense.

Another piece I liked quite a bit: this guest post at Writing Under a Pseudonym about balancing motherhood and writing by Meghan of Writerland. Finding a balance doesn’t have to mean ignoring your kids, but it does mean sacrifice. Meghan describes choosing running over yoga because it takes less time out of her day; she finds herself curled up with a laptop after the kids go to bed rather than on the couch watching a movie with her husband; she loses some sleep. I loved this post for Meghan’s clarity on the subject; I’ve been struggling for a year to discover what I’m willing to sacrifice for my writing and what I’m not while I balance a writing/editing career with taking care of a child. I’m still having trouble reminding myself that I don’t have time to surf the web, that I can’t fritter away a free hour the way I used to. This is my greatest challenge for the upcoming year, and if I had to make a resolution I suppose this would be it: To find balance between writing and the rest of my life.

Perhaps it was holiday spirit in action (or something like that) but this December edition of writing related links is full of inspiration. In this case, I’m talking about this post by Debra of Write On Target, describing how she acquired an agent. Take note: Debra’s blog and Twitter account feature prominently. Congrats, Debra!

Some more practical links to round out December:

Amazon will be accepting submissions to its annual Breakthrough Novel Award contest, starting January 25.

Freelancers: Now is the time to write those seasonal essays – for next year’s holiday season. Via Lisa Romeo.

10 tips on building your author platform.

The plus side of self doubt. There is one. Really.

on freelancing writing with an MFA

There’s a very informative post up on Lisa Romeo‘s blog about freelance writing and the MFA. She interviewed a number of editors, agents, and writers on whether having an MFA might help (or hurt) your freelance career.

The answer seems to be (surprise?) that it makes very little difference. As a freelancer who holds an MFA, I’d have to agree.

I attribute any success I’ve had freelancing, both before and after doing an MFA, to the following:

•Previous work experience. Hands down, I learned a lot about writing for magazines and newspapers by …um, working for magazines and newspapers. I think working for a publication at any level is extremely helpful in developing a sense for what’s appropriate to pitch to a particular publication, learning what editors want and don’t want, and, I hate to say it, but learning from other freelancers’ mistakes, which, as an employee of a publication, you often get a chance to witness. (My MFA program had courses in magazine writing that covered pitching different publications, etc. but I know that’s an anomaly. Most MFAs do not cover that kind of practical information. Journalism programs, however, do.)

•Persistence. True for any writing endeavor, really. There’s a lot of competition out there, and editors are busy people. If one publication isn’t interested, you have to keep trying other possibilities.

•Contacts. It’s all about who you know, and not being shy about asking people you know whether they have opportunities for you. Yes, you may gain contacts through an MFA program, but it’s not something you can count on going in. I find working reporters, freelancers, and editors to be much more widely connected than my professors were, and much more helpful in terms of potential assignments that can help pay the bills. (On the other hand, MFA professors tend to have agents and editors, so … it depends what you are after.)

I would not say my MFA was good for my freelance career, other than the fact that I honed my writing skills in general. I don’t usually mention my MFA when dealing with more journalistic publications. Literary magazines, yes, sure, I mention it. A newspaper, no. I probably wouldn’t bring it up. What matters to editors is that you can write, that you turn in your copy in pristine condition and that you turn it in on time.

If my goal was to become a successful freelancer, I probably wouldn’t have attended my MFA program. I could argue that doing the MFA actually hurt my (freelance) career, because I took a two-year pause from working regularly. I try not to think about such things too much. In all honesty though, I chose to do an MFA because I wanted to spend the time working on my writing, and I wanted the experience of writing longer, not because I had a particular professional goal in mind. Journalism is often all about short and sweet, and I could never get beyond a certain page length in my own writing as a result. Writing something book-length in my MFA program was a great experience. And that was worth it to me, despite the costs.

Attempts to bark up the right tree

I’m having trouble settling in to write today. Or to work. Or to focus on just about anything. At the moment this has a lot to do with the fact that outside our house someone’s truck’s alarm is malfunctioning. It keeps going off, every five minutes or so, and when the truck’s owner tries to turn off the alarm, it resists. Now he and another guy are out there in the rain, under the hood of the truck, trying to figure out what’s wrong. I’m glad, at least, that the truck’s owner is here … otherwise the alarm would sound — beep beep beep beep beep beep — all day long, instead of just every 10 minutes or so, as it has done for the past hour.

I’ve already left the house to try working in a cafe, but that didn’t help my concentration. As soon as I sat down I felt overwhelmingly sleepy, the result of staying up too late last night, and the gloomy weather. And I needed information from the Internet that I couldn’t access (yet another of my favorite cafés has done away with the free wireless!). And so I left and went to the bookstore. It is both luxurious and problematic that freelance life is so fluid. It is easy to make time for everything other than what you should be doing.

My time in the bookstore was, in fact, not completely for leisure. I was looking for magazines to which I might be able to submit a certain essay. It’s the second bookstore I’ve visited in two days with this goal in mind. Today, I found a magazine that is, I think, an ideal destination for my piece, and was so excited on the walk home as I thought about it. But a quick scan of the magazine’s web site made me realize that the issue I bought is over a year old, and that the publication is now two issues behind. Which isn’t a promising thing to learn about a publication you have set your sights on. It’s not even clear if the magazine is still going to publish. I’m disappointed, and not just about my essay. It’s the first lit magazine I’ve read in a while that I truly enjoyed. When I got it home I read a good bit of it, straight through, and wished there was more.

I’ve been thinking a lot about submitting this past week. Thinking about what pieces of writing I might submit where, yes, but also what type of writing I do. I have been thinking that I have been submitting the wrong things to the wrong publications. Or, rather, that I am submitting to all the right publications, it’s just that I am submitting all the wrong things, pieces of writing that don’t fit in with those publications’ usual style and content. It turns out that what I think I write is quite different from what I actually write. It’s an important revelation, and it’s why I have been on the hunt for publications I might not have been aware of. There are so many publications out there, and finding a good match is a lot of work. But it’s work with great potential for reward, or at the very least, a good read on a rainy, gray afternoon.

How it’s going (See also, gloppy mudfest).

People keep asking me how my freelance life is going and frankly, I don’t know what to say.

It’s not, exactly. Going. It’s not that there’s not work to be had, or possibilities, or freedoms. It’s just that, well, it’s a couple of things. It’s my arm, which tolerates only brief computer sessions and requires exercises, ice, frequent breaks, etc., (but is, I think, improving). But more so: My days are, of late, filled with mini-crises and other administrative things that must be taken care of and the writing, when there is any (paying or otherwise), comes in little bits of time that I manage to squeeze between all of the other things (which sounds a lot like my non-freelance life, now that I think of it). Today for example, I spent going to physical therapy for my arm*, researching door and floor contractors**, going to a last-minute appointment at the dentist’s***, walking the dog****, buying food***** and, when time allowed, attempting to research a story I am supposed to be writing.

So, alas, there was no actual writing, which is what I feel my freelance life should consist of. Yesterday was much the same. I had hoped to write — anything, something, just a little — and instead I ended up in Redwood City, some 30 minutes from my house, looking at office chairs and laptop stands, because the keyboard tray I ordered for purely ergonomic reasons on orders from the aforementioned physical therapist didn’t fit my desk and, well … it’s not important. The point is, for the past couple of days, that is what my freelance life has been like.

So that’s how it’s going.

*During which, today, I had the following conversation:
Physical therapy intern (doing ultrasound on my arm): So, are you from around here?
Me: No, I’m originally from Maryland.
Physical therapy intern: Isn’t that where K (my actual physical therapist) is from?
Me: No, she’s from Virginia. Not so far from where I grew up.
Physical therapy intern: Oh, are those different? Is Maryland a state?
Me (putting hand on hip to show that I was offended, though good-naturedly so): Yes Maryland is a state!
Physical therapy intern: Oh, I thought it was, like, a city or something.

**It turns out the water that the storm blew under our ill-fitting door didn’t just go under the door, it went under the floor. The nice, historic, lovely, hardwood floor. Yeah, that one. The one that’s now buckled in our front hallway.

***Trying to determine if the toothache I’ve had for four days is something serious. Probably not: it’s an old, cracked, silver filling that’s getting fixed tomorrow. Still, the dentist-who-was-not-my-usual-dentist declared that I must be clenching my teeth in my sleep (thereby pressing on the bum filling) and that “when we sleep the power we can exert through our jaws is greater than we can ever replicate when we are awake.”
I said, “Dude, that is so deep.”
Ok, I didn’t. But I wanted to.
He was very nice, really.
And then he suggested that I get a mouthguard, to protect myself. From myself.

****Three times. Each followed by some degree of dog-washing, since our park has turned into a gloppy mudfest. Did I mention the dog is white and he likes to wrestle?

***** Seriously, we were dangerously close to scurvy in our house, so few fruits and vegetables have we had here in the past week.

Enough.

I quit my job.

I’m returning to a freelance life. I would call this time spent as a full-time reporter a short-lived experiment, except that it was not really an experiment. It was my job, and I put my whole self into it, or tried, for more than four months. I have many, many conflicted emotions about all of this, some of which I am not ready to detail.

But mainly: The problem with my job was that I could not put my whole self into it. A part of me was, as anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while knows, always wanting to spend more time writing creatively. I have been frustrated by my lack of time, and specifically by my lack of writing time. I have been generally moody and unhappy since June. I have not been sleeping well. I have not been sleeping enough. I have not been eating healthfully. I have not been exercising much, beyond walking my dog to the park. I have let many, many things go in my life that I consider important. While any job requires sacrifice, at some point the balance was tipped: the sacrifices were outweighing the gains.

And so. In a few weeks it begins again. I will attempt to return to stories and essays that have been lying dormant in cobwebby files inside my computer’s hard drive. I will once again send writing out. And I would like to think I have renewed focus and motivation regarding my hopes for my writing.

There is NaNoWriMo, too, which I am looking forward to participating in for the first time. I may not be completely free of in-the-office obligations for some weeks, however. To anyone who assumes I will now have all the time in the world to sit around crafting a novel during the month of November, I assure you, I will not. I hope to have more flexibility by mid-month, yes. But a freelance life, as has been discussed here before, does not mean an idle life. I still need to work, to make money, and, socially, to live beyond my own writing. Drumming up assignments and marketing oneself is time-consuming. Freelance just provides the benefit of time flexibility, without all the awesome co-workers.

And so I will be carving out the hours needed to complete 50,000 words during a busy month whenever I can find them, probably at odd, early-morning times. I can’t wait.

It’s a job, OK?

People have been acting very strangely toward me when they hear that I’ve gone back to work full-time in an office. Which is funny, because the reactions I got for freelancing and writing, i.e. doing my own thing, were also strange.

When I told people I was a writer and I did freelance work to help pay the bills, they would respond in one of the following ways:
1. Get this distracted look as if they wanted to escape to another conversation, and say, “Oh, who do you freelance for?”
2. Say, “oh, you work from home?” and then say, “that must be so great, I wish I could stay home every day and not work.” Invariably, this conversation would then degenerate into, “Don’t you raid the refrigerator all day? I would!”
3. Say “Are you working on a novel? What have you published?” (No, and writers generally hate that question, especially if they haven’t published any actual books.)
4. After asking who I freelanced for, say “Oh,” in a lower voice, as if they were disappointed, and then tell me about their cousin/friend/brother’s girlfriend who freelanced for the New York Times and The Nation, and ask why I didn’t write for national publications.

Really.

That’s because a person who is off the grid (as I like to call the freelance life) is also off the grid in people’s brains. There are no reference points (OMG! no job title! no company name!), and I discovered that these things matter to a lot of people, particularly people you meet randomly at parties or the like, who are looking for a way to quickly assign you to a category, a social network, an income level, whatever. I don’t know. I found this surprising, and also, depending on the snobbishness of the reaction, a little annoying.

And now this. Last weekend, upon hearing that I had a full-time job again, someone I know pretty well said to me, “I’m so disappointed! You were living the dream! When I was going to work everyday I could always take comfort in the fact that you were doing your own thing.”

Then he laughed and said, “No. really. It’s great.”

Um, thanks?

I’m not saying that working full-time in an office again is the greatest thing ever and that I don’t miss my freelance life very much. But here’s the thing: “Living the dream” was more like “living in a dream,” in that I had no regular contact with humans, and nothing happened to me on a day to day basis. I had no annoying commute stories and no “my boss did this funny thing today” stories — only “my dog did this funny thing today” stories. Or no stories at all, which is a problem when you are trying to be a writer and when you thrive on experience and stories. When I was around people I found it so startling that I wanted to go back home and hide in my office, which seemed unhealthy. I had little to write about. I write best when I am wrestling with something — an idea, an experience, an emotion. I had ideas but there was nothing in my day to day life to spark emotion, other than what happened at the dog park, or how lonely I was. When I found myself considering a series of dog-related essays, I knew I had a problem.

I’m not sure what my point is, exactly, but: Working in an office is good, and there are other reasons I am doing it besides human contact. (That’s probably the subject of another post.) Living a freelance life is also good, in many ways.

What’s with the judgments? On the grid, off the grid, what does it matter? Neither of those states are who I am, which is maybe what I’m all riled up about.

the desire to write

I’ve gotten something back, something that up and left, oh, about six months ago while I was agonizing over my thesis. I’m talking about the desire to write.

I’ve been doing three things since the beginning of the year with regards to my writing:
-forcing myself to write because I feel I should, as in, “I guess I better do some writing now…”
-guilting myself into it, i.e., “come on Elizabeth, all of these other people are getting published and making progress, and what are you doing?”
-not writing and not caring, as in “Gee, maybe writing was just a phase. I think I’ll become an artist/designer/editor/dog walker/teacher/fill in the blank now.”

But for the past several days I’ve felt something that has been absent since last spring, when I was still taking a workshop in my MFA program: a twinge, the compulsion to sit down and craft a piece of writing beyond a blog post or a journal entry or a doodle with a few words added to describe my mood or the weather. When I was in school I wrote so much — I think one semester I had two workshops and slammed out nearly 200 pages in 12 weeks, in addition to reading some 20 books — that when I didn’t write, I felt off. Off, as in, cranky, or like I had neglected to eat — that’s how important and necessary writing had become to me. When I didn’t do it, I felt it. It was physical.

As you can imagine, when that feeling went away, I was frantic. I’ve been waiting for it to come back. And in the past couple of days it has. I’ve been wondering why — why now? why not six months ago, or three months ago? What’s changed? Well, yesterday I went to work in an office briefly, and on the way home the desire to write was overwhelming. Unfortunately I had other things to do and couldn’t take advantage of it. But it made me wonder…Is working from home hurting my desire to write? There are tons of writers who would kill not to have to go into a soul-sucking office situation every day. I am lucky to have had the time to write this year, as well as some income from freelance work, which means that I don’t have to go to work in a cube. But what if I need that other nine-to-five life to drive my writing, to keep me motivated in my creative life?

Hello!

Piles of freelance work have kept me from posting here much the past couple of weeks. But that is over. Well, it’s about to be over….just one more piece to write.

Yesterday I managed to stop in a coffee shop and scribble in a notebook (so old school!) for a while, over coffee and a yummy carrot muffin. I have not been thinking of my own creative writing much recently, and it was good to be forced away from my computer (evil Internet!) for an hour to focus on it. I wrote down the beginning of a story that’s been simmering in my brain (at least every time I go to the gym, since that’s where I thought it up) and I drew some (not very good) doodles of coffee cups and crocodiles and things.

I’m feeling the pressure to get back to my own writing. Pressure to send things off, to publish and to develop and work on new projects. I don’t know where that pressure comes from…Probably self-imposed, or a competitive streak…A professor from my MFA program has been sending out email updates on what grads of my program are up to. They are publishing books and stories and doing literary things and I know I shouldn’t compare myself, but it’s hard not to. Perhaps it is healthy to hear about these successes, perhaps not. But if it gets me motivated, I think that can’t be bad.

Ok, not *really* out of words.

Ok, so I didn’t really run out of words. Maybe I just ran out of focus and calm. I definitely have not been in my happy place, if you know what I mean.

Thanks for the encouraging comments and emails — for some reason it is always reassuring (in a dark sort of way) to know that other writers struggle too.

I’ve been totally swamped…and stressed! I’ve got less than three weeks left to finish my thesis, and for some (moronic!) reason, I agreed to take on some freelance work. Now, at crunch time. This was a bad plan leading to much insomnia and anxiety (although the cash will be nice).

But in not posting here for a couple of days, I managed to a) finish a chapter (!) and b) get through most of a freelance project that has been hanging over my head. Whew! I’ve got to finish chapter 10 and write chapter 12 still, and ok, there’s an epilogue, but I am close. So close. Still, it’s going to be a hectic couple of weeks.

One of the things I make sure to do when stressed or keyed up is go to the gym. It always helps. Yesterday, while I was doing some cardio I listened to a podcast of “Meet the Writers” from BarnesandNoble.com (downloaded for free at iTunes). It was an interview with Nicole Krauss, whose writing I love. I first discovered her when I read the short story “Future Emergencies” in a Best American collection. I haven’t been disappointed yet by either her stories or her two novels, Man Walks Into a Room and History of Love. I hear her poetry is quite nice, too. Anyway, the “Meet the Writers” podcasts are not in any way groundbreaking, as you might expect from BarnesandNoble.com, and the interviewer is kinda loud and doofy and asks waaay too many leading questions, but…Nicole Krauss was interesting to hear. She was almost frustratingly modest. She admitted to struggling with writing novels, learning the hard way. And she said she wouldn’t wish writing on anyone! For some reason that made me feel better. She admitted to wanting to quit sometimes (also made me feel better) and to being “addicted” to writing — thus she couldn’t quit. And, I found out something I didn’t know, which is that she’s married to the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. What a literary power couple. Aren’t they both under 30?
Sigh.

What are you going to do with an MFA?

People have been asking me, from the moment I announced that I was going back to school to get an MFA, “What are you going to do with that?”

My preferred answer has been, “That’s not the point.” And it wasn’t. If I wanted to use grad school as a stepping stone to some kind of traditional career path, I might have gone back to journalism school (which I attended for a year and then quit), or gotten some other kind of professional degree. Still, I feel like I have to have an answer to this question, especially these days, when the question gets fired at me more and more frequently. The closer I get to finishing, the more people seem to believe that radical career developments are in my future.

There are many people, both friends and strangers, who don’t understand this kind of thinking. They don’t understand that I went to get an MFA simply because a) it was something I had wanted to do for a long time, b) something that I felt I might never do if I didn’t do it at that point in time, and c) something I felt I needed to do to take my writing further. I was stuck, and I needed outside help.

There are quite a few people who don’t understand why a rational person earning decent money in a good job would drop everything and go into debt to pursue a passion that might not provide any (or at least not very much) income. And I get that, I see where they are coming from. Sometimes, though I wouldn’t trade the writing workshops and publishing-industry experience I have gotten, the practical side of me has had doubts that this was a good plan, believe me.

I have been thinking all summer about what I will do after I finish my thesis. Partly this is because I feel a lot of pressure to jump back into some kind of 9-to-5 job, but the thought of actually having any of the writing/editing jobs I see on Craigslist makes me feel sick. Sometimes I can’t even finish reading the ad, I am already so bored. The pressure to consider these jobs is, oddly, mostly self-imposed. It seems like the right thing to do. (There is also the delicious knowledge that job hunting means the thesis is done, and I cannot wait for that to be the case. So much so that job hunting now, before the thesis is done, is a nice way of procrastinating without feeling guilty about it.)

All summer I have been side-stepping the predictable questions about what I want to do next. I answer depending on how I feel that day. Freelance writing. Go back into journalism in some capacity. Book publishing. Freelance editing. I consider telling people other kinds of jobs — truck driver, pastry chef, dog groomer – just to throw them off.

I feel qualified to do lots of things and at the same time nothing at all.

But when I take the pressure off myself to get some 9-to-5 job in the financial district I can start to see other possibilities. I get a vision of myself doing a combination of things, which is probably what would make me happiest. I get bored easily.

And so: freelance writing, freelance editing. Maybe a little teaching. Maybe a little ESL-related teaching or tutoring. It may be a patchwork rather than one complete whole.

So what?

Creative vs. professional life

Now that I’ve finished most of my grad school coursework, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about What I Should Do With My Life. This is, and has always been, a fairly wrenching experience for me. My problem has generally been this: I don’t want to pick just one thing to do.

It’s not just that I get bored doing the same things all the time (which I do). I also am interested in so many different things, and can imagine myself in so many different roles, that having to pick just one feels just as heart-wrenching as being able to pick one cute little kitten out from the pound and take him home, only to leave five other adorable kittens behind. (Perhaps an odd comparison, yes. Some people think in terms of their children. I think in terms of cats, I can’t help it.)

I’ve been noticing that rather than choose between my many interests or follow even just one of these passions, I often just take what opportunities come. Meaning that if I can do a certain job, and it’s offered to me, I will do it.

Obviously, this presents problems. Just because you are able to do something doesn’t mean you should do it. There are plenty of things I can do that I hate doing. Sewing on buttons, for a simple example. I am perfectly capable of sewing buttons onto my clothes. I just absolutely detest threading needles and tying tiny knots. I will let a shirt that’s missing a button sit in my closet for months, unworn, because I am avoiding the button sewing. Thankfully, my husband is an expert and eager button sewer so this happens a lot less than it used to.

But I digress. The point is that I would never take a job sewing on buttons just because I can. I would be indescribably miserable. So why the heck would I take a job doing something else I don’t like, just because I can? One obvious answer is money. Lots of people out there go to jobs they hate every single day, because they need to pay the bills. But putting that aside for the sake of argument and general career betterment, there’s really few other reasons to work at a job you dislike.

This is probably no epiphany for most people. But it’s one that I have trouble taking to heart. It is easier, after all, to accept a job (whether you like it or not) that falls into your lap than to do the work required to make your passions into your profession.

The strange thing about doing work that isn’t quite what you want to be doing is that you start (well, I do) making more and more space for that work. It starts to become the career you see yourself in, and the things you are passionate about start to seem like they are part of a separate, private, other creative life that has nothing to do with your daily life, and therefore never gets priority. As an example, I have been contemplating changing my web site. I’ve been worried that I won’t be able to get appropriately professional freelance gigs with a web site that has sushi on it. I keep playing around with Photoshop and Dreamweaver, trying to create a sedate, straight-laced, “professional” web site that I can use to get freelance work.

I happen to love design as well as writing, and when I start playing around with these programs, attempts at creating “professional” sites usually dissolve into me making colorful, fun, artsy, creative pages. I get so sad that I can’t use these designs on my “professional” web site. I have even considered making a second, shadow site for my web site, with a completely different design, just to make myself feel better about having such a boring “professional” web site.

And then it occurred to me….Why am I trying to keep my creative life separate from my professional life?? Chances are that if I make a web site that reflects my design sensibilities, my personality, and my interests, I will have more success getting the kind of work I really want to be doing, rather than the kind of work I feel like I have to accept and trudge through. A long time ago, my aunt gave me a book called, Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow. It sounds a bit self-help hoaky, I admit. And to be honest, I don’t remember a thing about the advice inside. But I do remember the title. (Perhaps this is a case of poor titling, since, really, the title says all you need to know, right? Kind of like “Snakes on a Plane.” But I digress once again.)

Anyway, it’s time for me to do this and stop trying to pander to those parts of my brain that are always telling me what I should do, or to take jobs that I can do. I am ready to do what I want to do.