Not-writing

As a newly, self-published e-author, you could probably guess that I'm not quite to the point of quitting my day job (yet).  That being the case, I still need to do something other than writing.

What do I do to pay the bills?  Not-Writing.

For myself, and, I assume, other people trying to break into the authoring game, the world breaks down into two jobs, Writing and Not-Writing.  It doesn't really matter what the actual job is.  I could be working the counter at McDonalds, or a CEO pulling in six-figures, and it would still amount to the same thing, Not-Writing.

I had this little epiphany a while back, and at first it depressed the hell out of me.  It made me fully aware that it didn't matter what I did, or how well-paying the job was, or how happy I should be to have as good of a job as I had.  I still wasn't going to be happy with a career, unless that career involved weaving words together on paper*.

Then I had another epiphany, and as far as double-epiphanies go, this was a pretty good one.  It dawned on me that, even though I'm spending 40 hours a week Not-Writing, at least now I know what will make me happy.

Maybe that's the key to finding your way, career-wise.  Maybe instead of trying to figure out what we should be doing, we should figure out what we're Not-Doing.  Are you Not-Teaching?  Not-Farming?  Not-Singing?  Not-Accounting?  That's probably nonsense psychobabble, but it worked for me to look at it from that perspective.

Once I boiled it down to those two options, it cleared everything up for me.  If I wanted to be happy, I had to find a job that wasn't Not-Writing.  Once I knew that, it was easy to justify 4-5 hours of sleep a night while I wrote my book, (see previous entry).

Will I get to the point when I can quit Not-Writing?  I hope so.  Even if I can't, I found what I'm supposed to be doing.  It doesn't matter if I make another dime or not, Writing is my career as far as I'm concerned.  Not-Writing is just a chore that needs to be done.

  

*For the kids.  Paper was a medium that people used to use to put words on, before the Interwebs and Twitters and Facebooks came along

I don't sleep.

I should probably be in bed.

It doesn't matter if you're reading this now, or five years from now (hi future people!), odds are that comment still applies to me.

Ever since I got out of college, I started convincing myself that six hours of sleep is a full nights sleep, while four hours will work in a pinch.

Sleep just uses up too much of my time.  Like tonight, I'm staying up to wait for a task to complete on the Simpsons: Tapped Out, in order to get extra points towards exclusive Christmas items write a blog post to entertain you fine people.

My weekdays consist of getting up at 6 AM, getting the kids up and running and out the door, then spend eight hours not-writing for a living. After that, we spend the evening running to various high school concerts, gymnastics practices, Lego league, random errands, and so on.  After that, it's bath time for the kids, and bed.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

If I had committed myself to getting a good night's sleep every night, there's no way I'd have finished my book.  I also wouldn't have been able to do things like binge-watch The X-Files on Netflix or read every Marvel comic from Fantastic Four #1 to the present, in order of release date.  You know, important stuff.

Mainly, it's because I know my clock's ticking, just like everyone else's.  We have a finite number of days on this flying rock we call home (unless we develop de-aging technology and warp drives in my lifetime, obviously).  There's no do-over, there's no restore-from-a-previously-saved-state, there's no 1-ups.

So I try to put myself in my future-self's shoes, which I assume will automatically tie themselves like on Back To The Future II, and try to figure out what he's going to regret when he hits the big Game Over.  Somehow I doubt it'll be "I wish I'd gotten more sleep".

Future me's a pretty demanding, yet strikingly handsome, old man.  And when we finally meet, on the porch of his future house, brandishing his stun-gun at the neighborhood kids to keep them off his genetically modified lawn that...I don't know...mow's itself or something, I'd rather not have to explain to him everything that got left undone, just for the sake of 8 hours of sleep.