I didn’t really expect it to happen like this. If I’m honest, I never really expected it to happen at all. It has always been my ambition to be a full-time writer, but it always seemed just out of reach. Something that I was always working towards but never seeming to get closer to. Then one day it happened but, like I said, not the way I expected it to.
At the end of May I was made redundant from my day job. It was a shock. I had been with the company for something like 14 years. There’s no hard feelings though. I don’t think it was ever the right fit for me. It was something to do while I waited for my writing career to take off. It was convenient because I could work from home and it paid reasonably well.
Then it was gone and I had to figure out what to do next. I considered various options but none of them was right. I didn’t want to have to go into an office. I didn’t want to have to get another “job”. And all the while I was thinking and looking into what I was going to do to make money, I was continuing to write fiction, as I have always done.
One day, I was talking to Tamzin and she asked me if I thought I could make money from fiction. I’m already making money, I told her, just nowhere near enough. But, if I could focus on that and start doing the “business” side of things as well, there was a pretty good chance that I could make more. So she told me to do it. And here I am.
I’m not starting from scratch. I have a decent back catalogue to work with. I have been publishing for more than ten years. The main problem is that I haven’t actually told anyone about it. There are people who don’t even know I am a writer.
Since that conversation I have spent a while learning more about the business side of publishing and working out what I need to do. This is an ongoing process. Nothing is set in stone. But I have ideas and I am starting to build up the things that I need. You will be hearing a lot more from me.
Cat Update
Pixel and Cody are doing well and getting more confident. Pixel has let us stroke her and was really interested in the smells on my trainers when I came back from running.
There are some things that we never “get over”. They are things that we carry with us our whole lives. Things that become part of who we are.
That is not what this blog post is about.
At some point I will write about what that thing is for me, but I can’t do it right now. I can’t climb that wall yet and, if I don’t go around it to write this, then I guess I will stand there looking at it forever.
Just because I am not talking about it now, doesn’t mean that it’s not still important. It doesn’t mean that I am not thinking about it constantly. It only means that I can’t write about it. Yet.
As long as we understand each other on that front, I can carry on.
The Cats
Yesterday we picked up two new kittens. They are a brother and sister. Oscar named the boy Cody after a character in Total Dramarama, and the girl Pixel after a character in Ninjago.
PixelCody
Pixel was the first one out of the crate we brought them home in, immediatly marking her out as the brave one. She was also the first one to use the litter tray. When Cody gets scared he runs over and hides behind her, so I guess he thinks she’s the brave one as well.
Cody was the first one to eat. We gave them some wet food as a treat last night and he was the only one to eat it. I guess that makes him the hungry one?
This morning I found myself starting to doubt the story I’m working on. I began asking myself whether it was really the best thing I could be doing, whether I wanted to spend so much time writing it.
Resistance is part of any project worth taking on and I am used to coming up against it. Sometimes I win the battle and sometimes I lose. Quite often, the battles that I lose, end up being projects that I look back on and wish I had finished.
“Resistance in my experience always kicks in when you’re trying to move from a lower level to a higher level or to identify with a braver part of yourself or your higher nature. So it’s that negative repelling force. It’s kind of the dragon that we have to slay every day if we’re artists or entrepreneurs.” – Steven Pressfield
Even now there are stories sitting half-finished that I think I might return to one day but that I wish I had never abandoned. They are stories that I think would have been really good. Perhaps they were stories which could have pushed my skill to a new level.
So the question becomes; how is it best to handle resistance?
“Don’t prepare. Begin. Our enemy is not lack of preparation. The enemy is resistance, our chattering brain producing excuses. Start before you are ready.” – Steven Pressfield
Which is where I find myself now.
There is always the possibility that what I am working on isn’t worth persevering with, but I won’t know that until I have some perspective. The only thing I know for sure right now is that most of the projects I have abandoned would have been woth persevering with.
I don’t know if I’m ready to start yet, but maybe I should take the resistance I’m feeling as a sign that I should. There are reasons to wait, good one’s, but there might be better ones to start.
When I’m writing I like to have a list of names that I can pick and choose from as I’m going. It saves me having to stop and think of them while I’m in the flow. It also means that I don’t have to type “XX” or whatever to remind myself to add it in later.
I already have the names of the main characters in my upcoming story, but I needed some extras to choose from for characters that I don’t know about yet. This morning I put together a couple of lists, one for surnames, the other for first names.
A couple of invaluable resources for this process are:
I am planning to add more “quick tips” like this. There are a lot of good resources out there and I am always interested to find out what other people use.
When you encode an analogue music file to MP3, some loss of quality is unavoidable.* I believe that the same is true when you pick digital tools over analogue ones.
You may have picked up on my preference for notebooks and pens over computers and phones. In my mind this is more than a choice over which is more fun to use. I believe that using analogue tools leads to a better output.
There are, of course, benefits to using digital notebooks, but as I considered this over the weekend (writing into my pocket notebook) just because there are some benefits, doesn’t mean they make up for the disadvantages.
I want to be able to leave my phone behind for days at a time and that won’t feel possible if I’m using it for notes. So, despite the many advantages of using my phone as a notebooks, that one disadvantage is enough to make it a no go.
There are other disadvantages, but that was the big one at the weekend. And it’s an important one. Being able to leave my phone behind makes up for the occasional inconvenience of taking out a paper notebook, for those times when it’s not possible so I miss something. It makes up for a hell of a lot and when you add it to the other advantages (quality, peace of mind, memory improvements) then it just doesn’t make sense for me to switch.
The problem with a lot of digital technologies is that by using them I would be encoding for loss. I know from the start that they aren’t as good as analogue equivalents, so by using them I am saying that quality is less important that convenience. As I mention in Compromises that is occasionally a compromise that I am willing to make, but not always, in fact, not even often.
*Yes, I understand that there are “lossless” formats such as FLAAC, but I would argue that even when using those formats a certain amount of loss happens by not having a physical representation on the music such as a CD or record. In my experience, listening to music goes beyond the sounds that you hear when you press play. At its best it is a tactile experience.
