Never let work get in the road of a good story... unless you really need the cash!
Well my little vacation of working nights in a video store and trying to become a best-selling author by day is finally coming to a close with the realisation that a morgage, growing list of bills and pressure from my wife to some day settle down and have kids, means I need to go out and find a better paying job.
It's always a little bit weird to dust off the old resume, paraphrase what makes you so great (or at least employable) into half a page of bulletpoints and then dangle yourself around like a peice of meat and see who will bite. I guess as writers we do the same thing with our work, but that's just a creation of the mind and not the boring old pound of flesh bit.
I guess the purists would say that we're actually shopping our souls when we send out a story because every story has to be a true reflection of who we are inside, but I don't really buy that. As a horror writer myself who has shared beers with some of the countries most macarbe minds in Australian fiction I like to think that most of us are just nice guys who like to scare people with our stories, not repressed serial killers looking for an outlet with our work.
With all the job search stuff going on the fiction has taken a back step for a week or two as its a little hard to be dreaming up ways to multilate an innocent maiden while I'm trying to tell potential employees what a great catch I am. I still have three of my five latest subs out in submission land - two were kindly rejected last week - so I'll have to be content with seeing how they fare while I get the annoying life stuff under control first.
Till then...
It's always a little bit weird to dust off the old resume, paraphrase what makes you so great (or at least employable) into half a page of bulletpoints and then dangle yourself around like a peice of meat and see who will bite. I guess as writers we do the same thing with our work, but that's just a creation of the mind and not the boring old pound of flesh bit.
I guess the purists would say that we're actually shopping our souls when we send out a story because every story has to be a true reflection of who we are inside, but I don't really buy that. As a horror writer myself who has shared beers with some of the countries most macarbe minds in Australian fiction I like to think that most of us are just nice guys who like to scare people with our stories, not repressed serial killers looking for an outlet with our work.
With all the job search stuff going on the fiction has taken a back step for a week or two as its a little hard to be dreaming up ways to multilate an innocent maiden while I'm trying to tell potential employees what a great catch I am. I still have three of my five latest subs out in submission land - two were kindly rejected last week - so I'll have to be content with seeing how they fare while I get the annoying life stuff under control first.
Till then...
Labels: new jobs, writing habits
posted by Mark Smith-Briggs at 9:01 pm
3 Comments:
Heya Mark,
Good luck with finding more lucrative work. It certainly does suck up a lot of that creative energy to bring in enough funds to get by, but you'll settle into a groove again eventually.
Commiserations on the rejections, too.
Cheers, Felicity.
The ugly beast that is reality kills the seductive maiden of imagination! I know the feeling, all the best with both sides of the spectrum.
I did exactly the same thing for five years: worked nights at Video Ezy and wrote during the day ... till I had to give that all up. I miss those days, and the preview DVD's that came with it ...
Matt Tait
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