Scale It Back a Bit, Composing, 10/06/2015

Originally, I was going to write a post about the nature of artistic influence. I was thinking about this because of the way I described why I’m reading Iain Banks, to see what techniques of his I can adapt to my own work. Because I had also come across a frustrating article through one of my Twitter comrades, an interview accusing Nic Pizzolatto of plagiarizing Thomas Ligotti in the first season of True Detective.

That post is still coming, but it’s coming on Friday. Here’s what’s coming on Thursday:

Yeah, Adam Writes Everything is taking its post frequency down a bit for the next while. It’s a question of priorities, really. For the moment, I have to concentrate on finding myself a job in my new field of communications. 

Even more daunting, the job actually has to pay money for my work. An unpaid internship won’t pay my bills, and unfortunately, the Earth’s economy can’t quite allow me to pay my rent in downloaded experiences of working at the office of a PR firm or communications department.

Sometimes, a guy is just too damn busy to do it all.

So I’ll be spending a few extra hours each day applying to four or five jobs in my field each day instead of my current rate of two or three. Any of my friends still working for their living in the academic sector may feel slightly envious that I get word every day of that many positions that have freshly opened up in the field just in this city, or in Mississauga, which is close enough to my home in western Toronto (secretly Etobicoke).

Frankly, that’s one reason I left the academic sector. It may be just as insane a job market, in terms of how many people chase after how few positions. But at least there are always new positions, not just a slate of posts every Fall scattered all over the continent, after which the unlucky have to scramble for whatever survival work will help them get through another year until they can try again, always worried that their longer time without teaching experience will create an even bigger hurdle next time.

Nope, nothing self-confessional in that paragraph at all, is there?

I started this blog about two years into this rut of underemployment, when being stuck in this labour market was frankly depressing the hell out of me. It was a promise to myself that I’d get something accomplished each day, and maybe hone my popular writing style at the same time. If you look back at some of my 2013 posts, compare them to some of my recent ones, I’ve gotten a lot better at writing about some trippy topics for the web, for an audience outside the land of pure expertise.

While I’m under a decent amount of stress as I look for work in my new career this summer, it’s not the hopelessness that a couple of years ago I found so debilitating. And my writing career has picked up enough for me to feel more confident about that too. I’ve had a novel published, I’m back to working on the Alice film script for Lee Skinner, and Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is coming out this August. 

As well, I have ideas for another couple of books, and my collaboration with Steve Fuller from this Winter/Spring may yet become a standalone publication in 2016. I’m thinking of places to publish my book set in St. John’s, A Small Man’s Town, and new approaches for future productions of You Were My Friend. And I will slowly build my research necessary to write Utopias.

That all takes time, but it doesn’t pay all that well. And the main reason I retrained at Sheridan was so that I could find a job that uses my creative talents and also pays me respectably.

On average, the amount of work that goes into a blog post here is about two to three hours. I have to read and research interesting philosophical or literary things for an hour or two every day, and I spend another hour or ninety minutes writing and posting the blog. Right now, I need to give some of those hours to my job hunting. Because just like how my blogging style has improved the more I’ve done it, my application writing will too.

I still plan on reading and researching interesting philosophical or literary things every day, and writing about them. But I can’t guarantee that there’ll be posts outside of my new Monday-Wednesday-Friday update schedule. 

Thanks for reading. Please continue, because I will.