Journal

I blog for a living now. Not here, obviously, but in general – I go into the office and I boot up a computer and I write blog post after blog post. When I’m not writing a blog post, I’m researching a blog post or pitching a blog post or putting together a blogging schedule. Then I’ll go get lunch, eat some sushi, then rinse and repeat the morning throughout the afternoon.

It’s a weird kind of job, blogging about stuff. I dig it. The focus helps a lot – for the first time in years I have a day-job that where the scope of what I’m doing is comparatively narrow. Go in, write things, produce content. It plays to my strengths, and I don’t have to switch gears too often. I like that.

I worried it was going to burn me out, doing this much writing. That the days I spent at the day-job would leave me too worn out to write anything when I got home. Turns out, that wasn’t a concern: writing begets writing. Doesn’t seem to matter what, exactly, I’m writing about, so long as I get to give it some deep focus.

So I write at work, and then I come home and write there. Yesterday I sat at work and spent seven hours writing about medical tests and poop and meal plans. Then I came home and wrote about young lovers who make the mistake of visiting a fortune teller, who warns them they’re going to kill each other one.

Then I sat down to write this post. Add another couple of hundred words to my daily total.

I do a lot of things with words, at the moment.

I could sure as hell get used to it.

I woke up early this morning and sent off some writing emails. Discovered another couple of emails that really need to be dealt with, so they’ve been flagged for me to deal with tomorrow morning. I begin to see the benefits of the dedicated admin day, which Kathleen Jennings has mentioned on multiple Sunday Circles, but I’m still not entirely sure where it’s going to fit into my schedule.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, this week, about the new job and writing and how to establish new routines that support what I want to do. Because my old job was familiar; I knew its contours and its frustrations and its routines. I could work around it, after five years at QWC, because I knew how to predict the effect of things going on in the office. Not with 100% accuracy, but with enough certainty to plan with relative confidence.

The new job is wild and unfamiliar territory. It operates at a faster pace, uses up a different set of skills. It involves a lot more people, which is its own challenge after nearly fifteen years of being part of a small, discrete team in various jobs. It is harder, on the day to day level, to figure out how what I’m doing fits into the whole. It is three days in a block, rather than spaced out across the week, so there is very definitely a chunk of my week where I am at work, rather than bouncing back and forth between work-brain and writer-brain.

Hell, even dressing for work takes up more time than it used to, as I figure out this whole thing where you wear a collared shirt and dress shoes to the office. And realise I will probably need to shop sooner, rather than later, to adapt to that.

None of this is a bad thing, but it takes up brain-space outside of work hours. I haven’t figured out how to leave the office at the office yet.

I did not expect to get a lot of writing done, while figuring out the new job this week, but I’ve done even less than my relatively minor expectations. What I have done is think about the problem: why aren’t I writing in the evenings? What am I doing instead? What are the triggers that set me down that path?

Because your writing process will change, over time. The things that got you through one period of your life will stop working when circumstances shift. Staying on top of things is a process of adaptation, and given the current state of my year, I’d like to adapt as quickly as possible.

Today is my last day at Queensland Writers Centre. As of 5:00 PM this afternoon, I no longer have a job where people get to ask me questions about writing or publishing.

Figure I may as well celebrating that by doing my favourite thing to do here on the blog: answering questions about writing and publishing.

If you’ve got ’em, let me know. Putting together answers will help me ride out the withdrawal as I face the existential horror of being technically unemployed for until the  new job starts on Tuesday…