... but I stopped. Now I'm a dad, and may blog again...

Friday, November 26, 2010

126: stupid twat and positive steps

I’m wasting my time looking for apprenticeships in carpentry and library assistant jobs and all sorts of other ways to earn money that are mildly less soul-raping than the service/retail/customer service things I’ve been doing.  Apparently to become an apprentice carpenter you need previous industrial arts training or experience, and to become a librarian you need a post graduate degree in information management (I honest can’t fucking believe that; it deserves exclamation marks!).  The other way into becoming a librarian supposedly is to become an assistant librarian and work your way up... However a quick look at the job requirements for an assistant librarian job at MMU in Didsbury specifies degree or post-grad in information management as essential.  So what the fuck is going on there?  I don’t even want to be a librarian, but Christ in a fucking wheelbarrow why is it so hard to find any jobs that aren’t sales.  It’s my own fault for wasting the decade after leaving school; what a stupid twat.

Now I’ve actually decided I want to be a writer, after all these years of indecision, time-wasting and procrastinating, I need to stop distracting myself by applying for jobs I have no chance in getting simply out of a desperate clinging hope that I can get away from customers.  This effort needs to be put into finishing the stories I am writing and working out what the deal is with agents and publishers; then get started on whatever it is that needs doing.  I need to be writing freelance articles about whatever and whenever and finding out how to target them at magazines, periodicals and ... I dunno, Reader’s Digest?  Whatever it is that starving writers do nowadays to buy stale bread, mouldy cheese, rolling tobacco and coffee. 

How can I stop myself from putting so much effort into hating my day job?  It’s a way to pay the bills and nothing more, but I seem to increasing spend time and energy waving a stick at it in impotent and misguided rage.  I should be walking out of the door and immediately forgetting about it, then spending my time as a professional freelance writer.  Even though I make no money from writing I show my dedication from this here blog, I am taking my first tentative steps as a fiction editor for a magazine, and I know what my goals are.  The nagging negative annoyance in my noggin keeps reminding me I should have been at this stage eight years ago, but there is nothing I can do about that now.  I can change the future, but I can only rewrite the past.

I really don’t know how to make money as a writer.  The internet is just full of ‘freelance researcher’ jobs, which basically means being paid pennies to write academic essays for the idiot spawn of rich parents.  I have quite a few piles of magazines; perhaps I should look through them considering content and style, contact the relevant editors asking if they accept unsolicited freelance contributions, pitch some articles or just write some and send them in.  Might be a start?  And at least it’d be good practice and a positive step.  It might also turn out that we are all living in one of those weird upside-down alternate universes where good things happen: I publish some articles, get more work, build my CV and contacts list, get more work, and before I know it I’m well paid, happy, successful and producing excellent work.  But then I’d have nothing to moan about and it’d be downhill from there on in.  (Note to self: moaning is not interesting.)

The only thing holding me back from becoming a professional writer is a less than ideal work ethic.  I spent most of my life learning how to skive and do as little work as possible, and habits like that are fucking hard to break.  That’s what this blog is about.  When I first blatantly stole the idea of doing a daily blog (from Richard Herring, whose blog Warming Up celebrates its eighth birthday today) I was initially tempted by laziness.  I thought doing it everyday would be impossible, I was so sure of my own inability to succeed.  I thought maybe three posts a week would be almost achievable, but the reality is if I had gone down that route each week I would be hurriedly writing up three shitty posts at midnight on Sunday.  But if I had to do it every day without fail there would be no putting it off until a later date.  Every day is the first day of the assignment and the deadline; it’s quite exciting.  It has become a comfort and a thrill.  Even on days when I moan about having to do it I still complete it.  Every day I complete it despite not wanting to, I become a better writer and a more mature boy.  Possibly.

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