Still Uncertain
My last post was about feeling uncertain about the direction my novel project was headed.
https://vontonks.github.io/blog/2022/05/10/uncertain-uncommitted.html
Some of that has passed in the last week thanks to more thinking and preparation as I continue heading toward the actual writing part of writing a novel.
The direction that story is heading is fascinating. The process has seen me tie together a bunch of interests in science fiction and community building along with the original Narcissus theme that has expanded. I’m keen to keep going with it so long as I carve out enough time in my day which is something I struggle with. Nearly every day I begin with a set of intentions and expectations that I rarely meet in no small part because the most free time I have is in the evenings and honestly I end up watching TV or playing video games instead.
But tonight I’ve made this time for this blog so hooray for me.
Yes but so uncertainty.
I’ve started a new job, kind of, with ‘internal communications’ tacked onto my current journalist role. My new job title is ‘Senior Writer’ – something I was consulted on and honestly I quite like. Look at me, I’m ‘senior’. Also: more money.
The uncertainty is partly an ego thing – I’m not a journalist and they’re the like people with the scoops or whatever, but I’m also not a marketing guy or, I dunno, anything cogent I guess. I’m just the internal comms guy who talks to other people? I don’t know. It feels like an odd job to have. That said, it’s one that my new boss (formerly just my boss’s boss) is excited to have me do. Honestly, I’m kind of excited about it as a ‘new project’ as well. Organising things. Helping people ‘communicate’. I don’t know. It’s … yeah. I can’t say this is where I wanted to be but I also can’t say I’ve been directed toward anything either, career-wise.
People who had a strong sense of where they’re going from a young age have always fascinated me. The kids who wanted to be doctors and then just, like, did that blew my mind. Oh you’re 15 and focused enough to select the subjects that will maximise chance of entry, then to study enough, and do the pre-admission test preparation? I was drinking, smoking weed, listening to loud angry music, and playing video games. Guess who’s more likely to own their own home right now.
Recently I wrote a profile about a woman whose first job straight out of high school was software engineering for a major tech company.
https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2022/from-high-school-to-cto-in-5-years.html
Like my school peers who were studying medicine or law, she had a mad direction around tech and followed her nose which has led to her running an AI company out of New York.
Not to labour the point, but this self-direction has always been foreign to me. On the plus side, that means I had time to explore life and try different things and make mistakes and have lots of fun. On the negative side, it feels a bit like I’ve spent the years since finding my thing catching up on lost time.
I’m going to wheel this back around to the job uncertainty stuff soon but I want to say a couple more things first, starting with the discovery of writing.
In 2014, I learned I could write. The year before I’d learned about reading. Sure I was literate but I didn’t read much for pleasure until a course at uni introduced me to the wacky world of post-modernism and written experimentation and philosophy and all sorts of good stuff. Then I started playing around with writing of my own, got some things published, and realised I wanted to do this writing thing. For reals. I had a kind of epiphany about it was one night in a small student apartment in Kyoto, Japan when I was writing in a little blue notebook I have since destroyed.
Fragments of that notebook remain in my files somewhere, I don’t know. It got ingested into the whole mess of files and documents that my life has expanded to fill over the last eight years or so.
a small desk in the corner a thin single bed with a buckwheat pillow a kitchen a pile of empty beer cans and sake bottles a plastic chair the sound of ambulances politely asking drives to watch out because an ambulance is coming through at least I assume that’s what they said a shower I had to hunch over to fit in the different smell of uh let’s say digested food after a couple of weeks of a different diet heart palpitations fear excitement scribblings this small blue notebook desire AJJ’s album Can’t Maintain George RR Martin’s A Feast for Crows on a Kobo ereader
I was coming up to the end of my media degree with no idea what I wanted to do. Media courses were boring and I didn’t give a shit. I didn’t want a job. I didn’t want a career. I just wanted to have fun. Writing was fun. So maybe, I thought, I could do that.
That’s when I thought I’d stick around for another couple years, do some creative writing courses and focus on that. It was fun. Then at the start of my Honours year a bunch of things went wrong and my understanding of the world fell apart and I dunno man it sucked. I spent a year undecided about what my subject was and trying to write as much as possible in the shortest length of time and then stitch apart the rags at the end.
I took a lot of drugs, made a lot of mistakes, cried into pillows, and started to lose the thread of reality.
I also fell in love.
2016 was a big year.
So it ended, as all years do, and my slapdash ‘write write write’ attitude didn’t leave me with any post-graduate prospects at uni. I didn’t know how to work so I went on the dole and tried to write a novel. Well, I tried to write like three novels. They all sucked, don’t ask.
Anyway the point I’ve been trying to make is that at some point the economic reality of my situation meant I needed to get a ‘job’. But with my newfound devotion to this writing thing – which came with all sorts of dumb pretensions and snobbery about what constitutes ‘authentic’ writing – I didn’t know what to do. Sama vouched for me at a community newspaper and so I started getting paid … in cheques. What mattered was that I was being paid to write. The circumstances were odd – I had to physically cash cheques in 2017 if you can believe it – but my writing skills led to money going into my bank account (via cheque).
During this whole period or whatever I would semi-regularly meet with a Buddhist friend of mine called Mark. We’d get coffee and talk. He’s a good man and I don’t know if he’s still kicking around Adelaide or has moved to Bali to live out a monkish life. But so he would hear my lofty novelist ideas or whatever and say “Every poet needs a day job” which I found infuriatingly realistic and not at all befitting my undiscovered genius, thank you very much.
We had some great conversations, actually, about life and Buddhism and writing and coffee. I distinctly recall once during a discussion about the transient nature of all things, I suppose, briefly glimpsing the table, chairs, other patrons of the Howling Owl cafe down on what was it Cinema Place I think across from the Elephant there just off Rundle Street as sand kind of dissolving and Mark sitting across from me with a coffee in front of him his face becoming sand as he laughed and it fell off him like his face was desiccating and falling apart to reveal muscle that did the same and likewise the skeleton beneath all changing, becoming anew, dissolving into fine material to be lost to the winds of time.
Did I mention I had been taking lots of drugs?
Okay so here it is: the Point.
I never set out to be a journalist. I’ve always assumed this was a temporary path on my way toward Writerhood, or something like that, a magical place where I can just sit around all day tapping out words that people read and find interesting or entertaining or (one day) inspiring.
Which I guess I’ve been doing. Am doing. This is that. Sure, it’s 11.30pm on a Monday and I’m tired and have spent an hour writing out this pile of self-indulgence.
But maybe that’s just writing.
Current Projects
‘Kaylene’ a short story about a digital artist: 0 words today (2,280 total)
Now-unnamed novel: planning, character development; getting there.
2022 fiction word count: 14,059