If you fire up the time-machine and travel back to August of 2012, you’ll notice that about this time of year my life gets increasingly hectic. Weekends that used to be free for writing and bloggery get siphoned up by Writers Festivals, Conferences, and other work-related things. I start spending more time in airports than usual. Projects that have been ignored for a little too long start lurching their way to the top of the to-do list.My brain, known to be unreliable at the best of time, starts misfiring like you wouldn’t believe.
I’ve discovered, from hard experience, that it’s best not to set my own topics in this period. No-one is particularly interested in reading an endless cycle of well, guess how I fucked up today and seriously, me and airports, it’s like I’m cursed; I’m not particularly interested those posts either, but I know I will if I find myself ready to blog and unable to think of something.
Which brings us to this post: the beginning of the second ever Dancing Monkey Post Extravaganza series.
Once again I’m throwing open the doors of Man Versus Bear and crowd-sourcing topics you’d like to see me tackle in the coming weeks. Give me topics. Set me challenges. Fire away with single words that can be used as a writing prompt, if you want, and I’ll store them in a file and use them to fill the empty hours when the writer-brain is willing but the thinky-brain is weak.
If you’re interested in seeing the type of things we covered in last year’s series, you can find them archived here. I’ll note that the response to John’s question about plot is still among the most visited posts I’ve ever written; I may be brain-dead for these, but I do try not to half-arse things.
So, pitch away, people. Drop you questions, words, and ideas into the comments and I’ll get things rolling in the coming weeks.
You may notice some changes going on with the website this week. I’ve added a new title – Man Versus Bear – and finally changed the subtitle away from the description of writer, gamer, and angry nerd that’s been sitting at the top of the page for a long stretch.
Partially this is a response to the way my life’s evolved over the last two years. The majority of the old subtitle is still true: I’m less angry than I used to be, but there’s still plenty of writing and gaming happening. I still rant about creative practice at the drop of a hat, read far less than I’d really like to be reading, and generally spend a lot of time watching bad films and wrestling.
On the other hand, I’ve also got a job unlike any other that I’ve ever had, and I frequently find my attention split by the demands of work, writing, and having fun. The things that used to consume me on a daily basis are now balanced against going to an office, managing some pretty major projects, and generally embracing a schedule that’s unlike any I’ve worked with before.
Busy is a State of Mind
My flatmate is fond of reminding me that I’m the worst part-time employee in existence. It usually happens right before I leave the house on a weekend, heading off to a workshop, conference, or reading that I’m attending as part of my role at Queensland Writers Centre.
For someone who works three days a week, I work an awful lot.
Partially this is a problem of terminology. Right now I’m a part-time writer, part-time manager for a project I’m enormously passionate about. Both jobs require difference skills, different types of focus, and have come with some pretty steep learning curves in the last twelves months.
Both jobs have the tendency to be all-consuming and I adore them both.
I’m not really busy anymore. Busy implies there is a period where things slow down, where you’re not as busy as you once were. This doesn’t seem to be happening any time soon, so I’m learning to accept that what I once thought of as busy is simply the new status quo for my creative and working life.
The Creative Brain Versus The Business Brain
Back in 2012 I wrote up some thoughts I had puzzling through the conventional wisdom that all blogs should have a niche, offering up my theory that my blog was best suited to being the equivalent of a share-house living room at 2 AM. The kind of place where eclectic conversations emerge, from the deep-and-meaningful to the patently absurd.
I still believe that, but these days I spend less time staying up to two in the morning and more time trying to puzzle out ways to balance the creative and business aspects of my life. I spend half my time reading stories and novels, the other half of my time researching ways to hack my productivity at work, manage interns, or puzzle out the best way to promote a national genre writing festival.
Lately I’ve been thinking more and more about the ways I’m handling this balance. Not just in terms of the day job versus writing terms, but in terms of tackling what it means to be living a life that’s essentially a hybrid of traditional work and creative freelancing. I’m busier now than I ever was back when I did contract work as a writer/lecturer, or the months I spent working for the QWC full-time.
Like most things that occupy my attention, this kind of conflict filters ist way into the kinds of things I blog about on a semi-regular basis. And I’ve always had a metaphor for the balance between the business brain and the creative brain when it comes to writing:
The Spokesbear says Get To Work, You Slacker
The More Things Change
There’s more than a handful of cosmetic changes going on with the site. My last two years of blogging have been among my most random and haphazard, constantly at the mercy of outside forces associated with work or writing. Not necessarily a bad thing, but as I started developing more focus to the social media aspects of my day-job, it’s started filtering through to my personal site.
My mission statement remains pretty simple: talk about more cool stuff; offer up some useful insight for writers, gamers, and geeks in general; figure out how to get this odd, hybrid work-life running so I kick ass at both, offering up any useful pointers I find along the way.
Figure out how to change the world so it doesn’t make me quite as crazy.
It’s a tough job, but I think I’m finally getting better at it.
I forgot I had a story in The Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons. When the author copies appeared in my PO Box last week, I opened up the package and blinked at the two books inside for a while wondering why the hell I’d ordered a duplicate.
This shouldn’t be taken as a reflection on the book – I mean, shit, I looked at the names on the front cover and there was no doubt in my mind that I might have pre-ordered a copy. Instead, it’s a reflection of the long lead-times in publishing and my own scattershot state of focus over the last twelve months.
The timeline goes something like this: Paula Guran commissioned the reprint rights for One Saturday Night, With Angel, back in August of last year. The payment for the story came through in November. I put the details into my rights tracking sheet and promptly focused on other things.
The books showed up. I paged through them. I found my story and had one of those, oh, right, moments.
Then I went back and checked the table of contents and, oh man, did my natural tendency towards suffering from impostor syndrome kick into overdrive. If you made a list of short story writers who made me want to be a short story writer, this book would include all of them except William Gibson. I mean, Caitlin Kiernan is fucking phenomenal. Neil Gaiman is Neil Gaiman. Gene Wolf. Lucius Shepard. Charles De Lint. Peter Beagle.
It’s rare that I forget I’ve got a story coming out in an anthology, reprint or otherwise. I’m kinda glad I forgot about this one, ’cause I’ve been grinning every time I catch a glimpse of the cover on the shelf.
