(no subject)

Coming up on two months of unemployment here, but I'm doing fine. I've been sending in a few job applications every day or so, and though I haven't heard anything back, I'm still actively searching. I'm treating the process the same as before I quite the Former Day Job, making sure I focus at least a few hours' worth of searching, prepping, and sending out.

So what am I doing the rest of the time? A bit of this, a bit of that. Cleaning, errands, story idea research, personal things, catching up on old projects, guitar noodling, talking with a friend or two about career ideas. Sure, I'm doing a bit of goofing off, but I'm not wasting the entire day. I've also been reading some of my older stories, again, to get back into the groove of writing. No solid plans yet, but I'd like to at least be able to start writing new stories again.

I've also been listening to some of my 90s mixtapes and albums from the same era. This in turn has made me realize that it was about this time twenty-five years ago, in my broke-and-starving-writer guise, when I had the use of my then girlfriend's PC and decided to transcribe nearly all of my longhand work thus far to WRI files. In early summer 1995 on my days off from the Day Job (the movie theater) I'd gone through most of what I had on hand: the Infamous War Novel, the numerous now-trunked ideas, six years worth of poetry and lyrics, and so on. This, on top of working on the new project, True Faith. I had nothing better to do (and no money to do it with) than listen to WFNX and WBCN and stay up way too damn late working on these things. Essentially, my drive to write with a consistent schedule was partially informed by my inability to go anywhere at all other than maybe walking around Boston smoking Newports and feeling sorry for myself. 

That summer pretty much prepared me for the next few years creatively. Life and finances sucked, sure, but I've already gone on about that here and I've already made my peace with it all. All the positive moments then were me watching free movies (and scoring free popcorn, soda and hot dogs for dinner) and spending all that time writing, figuring out what kind of writer I was, what my style was, and what I wanted to do with it. I'd gone from struggling and flailing to a writer with goals, and I knew that was a Long Game, so by a few years later I hit the ground running when I started The Phoenix Effect.

I say all this because I think I'm at that point in my writing career again. The last five years have been extremely fruitful creatively, and not gonna lie, I'm damn proud of myself for being able to pull it off, exhausting as it often was. I deliberately chose to take time off after finishing up the Diwa & Kaffi project to step back and take a good look at where I was, both personally and careerwise. It was a much-needed distancing so I could have a clear head and heart, and figure out where to go from here.

So yeah, it's sort of like summer 1995 again. On a strict budget, listening to a hell of a lot of music, and making some more long-term plans. Only I'm eating a hell of a lot better, keeping in better shape, not depressed AF, and not smoking anymore, heh!