Just Another Day In Paradise
It’s a little ironic. Patti and I finally decide that we’re going to head back to Texas. I post my resumes on Monster and CareerBuilder so I might be able to find a job out there, and what happens? Both of my email addresses — and my cell phone voice mail — get filled with offers from recruiters in Seattle. And there isn’t anything I can really do about it other than either hide my resume until I move and can update it with an El Paso address, or just politely respond to each one saying "Sorry, I’m moving, didn’t want you to see this…"
Okay, it’s only a little ironic. Even what little irony there is exists mainly because last year, when I was actually hoping for a job in Seattle, no one was interested at all. I’ve also since learned the stupidity behind that desire: I hate driving ~35 miles one way to work each day; the drive to Seattle would be absolute misery, and I highly doubt any company worth working for would pay me enough to justify the drive.
So this morning I hid my resumes. And you know what? It might even be worth it to avoid those job sites anyways. I know I probably don’t want to do software anymore, and I know that El Paso is a terrible place to try and find a tech job. And the resumes are just hidden — they’re still there, so I can still apply to jobs if I find them, but at least I don’t have to put up with what amounts to little more than spam in my current situation.
Aside from that, not much has been going on recently (hence the lack of posts). Rager still hasn’t picked up Like Glass, but they haven’t rejected it yet either. And that’s fine. I need to let myself get distracted by trying to move so that’ll happen. Moving is something Patti and I can control; I can’t make someone decide to publish my book by trying really hard (though I have found out that I can make someone decide to not publish my book by trying too hard to get them to publish it).
And, since I’m sure every one’s just dying to know why I’ve kinda disappeared lately, I’ve been trying to stay off the computer as much as possible — even avoiding what had been my routine of a video game and a blog post in the morning. It hasn’t worked out very well. I’ve been on the computer every morning while I try to wake up, I just don’t really do anything, except maybe check out a couple of websites (lolcats are fun). Once I’m a little bit awake — generally around 5:30 or 6, I’m able to bring myself to break away from it and go sit around to wait until it’s time to go. Life’s fun, no? Staring at a blank television screen while trying half-heartedly to stay awake is better than staring at this computer screen, believe me. If someone had told me a year or two ago that I’d be this tired of computers, I’d've laughed pretty damned hard…
Anyways, it’s past time to get away from this thing for the morning.
A Change of Pace
I really need to refocus here. It’s kind of difficult to have any chance as an “aspiring novelist” if you spend all of your time writing programs and programming tutorials. I’d thought about writing a how-to book on C#, but it’s just not happening; it’s kinda fun, but it’s too easy for me to get caught up in the details (I’ll spend two hours trying to format source code snippets so they have proper syntax highlighting; by the time I’m done, I’ve completely lost whatever momentum I started with.Having gone a full year without selling Like Glass (well, to a publisher at least) hasn’t helped much on the motivational end of it — I’m having a damned hard time getting past it, and I know I need to move on and start on that damned Book #2, but it just ain’t coming. I almost wish I hadn’t written Like Glass.
That’s not true; I’m glad I wrote it, and if I never write another book, at least I can honestly claim that I have written a novel, instead of throwing another voice into the “Well, I could if I wanted to…” pile. But it was fun, and commercially viable or not, I wouldn’t go back and stop myself.
But I’m losing focus here, I’m worrying too much about programming and not enough about writing, and that’s gonna screw me over I think. Why? Because, even if I don’t feel like it now (and I’m starting to, lemme tell you), I’m going to get back to being tired of coding. I’ll get out to Texas and be lucky enough to get a good job, and I’ll drop it because I’m getting bored of it. Or I’ll get fired, or … whatever.
Sorry, I can’t look at programming as just another job. It’s got to be a career, it’s got to be everything or nothing. It isn’t something to just clock in to at 9 am, clock out at 5 pm, and forget about until the next day.
And I know that, if I’m ever lucky enough to be able to write full time, I’ll be the same way there. And I’ll probably get tired of it and bored with it eventually too. But it’s something different to get tired of. Hell, I’ve spent the past 8 years of my life focusing as hard as I possibly could on programming, eat, breath, sleep and yes, seriously, even dream programming (you don’t know how strange it is to wake up realizing that instead of flying through the mountains with a two headed bird, your night was spent in strange delusions of if/else blocks and polymorphism).
So, I need to start bringing myself back to writing. I need to start making that the focus of my future instead of coding. Coding’s fun, and I’ll get paid more for it, but it’s not the same. I need more passion in my life, more creativity, more dreaming (preferably dreams that don’t need to be compiled upon waking to make any sense).
Which means that either the posts here are going to change drastically, or they’ll stop pretty much altogether. Not because I don’t want to post, but because I’ve been having a hell of a time coming up with things to post regarding writing, though I’ve had very little writer’s block from the programming side of the spectrum.
Need to run and pick Patti up from work.
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