So, a little exciting news that’s not being widely shared yet: about an hour ago I accepted a job as the Programs Manager for the 2022 Brisbane Writer’s Festival, starting next Wednesday. It’ll be my first foray into full-time employment in about seven or eight years, and one of the few full-time gigs I’ll be working for longer than six months. I am excited, and daunted, and a bit terrified—while I’ve worked on big events before, the scale and scope of BWF is way larger than anything I’ve done in the past, particularly in this role.
The job also presents an interesting challenge: rebuilding all my writing and publishing systems from the ground up, and incorporating more people into the process. My partner and I had been talking about creating space for them to get more hands-on with the company, and Brain Jar titles sell well enough that we can bring in freelancers to cover a lot of the jobs that used to land on my desk. But there’s still a lot of moving parts that rely on my expertise, my own writing projects that I’d like to finish, and a PhD thesis that I need to polish off sometime between now and March.
My radio silence for the last couple of days has been the result of grappling with just how much life would change if I took the job, and making sure that my beloved and I were both onboard with that. It’s exciting, but it’s a lot of change and new systems slotting into place very, very fast and it’s going to be a test of my ability to implement systems and live that ampersand life of multiple competing priorities.
So, in the very near future, I’ll likely have to make some choices and weigh up different things on my to-do list. I’m doing my best not to make rash decisions today (because the whole thing is both shiny and terrifying), but I’ll be mapping out commitments over the weekend and figuring out what to scale down while I get my feet under me and figure out what is still feasible to build on this new foundation.
