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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Still Fiddling With Those Knobs

There is an "air to fuel" mixture that every blogger tries to achieve for what they want to give to a blog and to get out of a blog.  I'm still working with that mixture to get it right.  I don't expect W.A.W. to give me fame or fortune.  For all my jokes about groupie threesomes, that's just the dumb smile daydream that I wake up from when my roommates scream "Chris, weren't you supposed to check the oven an hour ago?"  At best, it is a fun hobby that happens to coincide with certain professional goals.  I've made four cents this month--yep four cents--and I still get a kick out of it every time because I'm making anything at all for something I want to be doing anyway.

There is a "but."

I've been giving W.A.W. a lot of time. A LOT of time. Time is a writer's most precious resource. Theoretically a writer who is making money JUST from writing might consider booty call chits to be their most precious resource instead of time.  But most writers working a day job are constantly struggling against the clock and everything that demands they take time away from their writing (including just relaxing and letting the brain unwind--something totally important to creativity).  See the problem here is that there is no budget by the hand of man that can stretch four cents so well that this could be my day job.

I already have two jobs.  On Monday and Wednesday I teach English at a community college.  With the commute, it's a seven and a half hour day.  Now 15 hours a week isn't much, and I can read during the commute since it's public transit, so I can't complain about being overwhelmed quite yet.  But wait...there's more....   I'm also a househusband to Uberdude and The Brain.  Just keeping the house from falling to post-apocalyptic insanity takes about 20 hours a week. Any less than that and I start to run into skull faced robots programmed to wipe out humanity every time I go into the kitchen to get a soda.  Really, to really stay on top of this place (and maybe do a project/chore each week that this old fixer upper Victorian kind of needs) takes more like 30 hours.  So now I'm working more a clock puncher.  45 hours.  Still there's no commute on that second job, and some days it's not much more than doing the dishes.  Plus there aren't too many jobs you get to watch Psych while you do them.

Most people would call it there.  Most housespouses with a little part time job don't go looking for more to put on their plate.  But wait...there's more.

I put more on my plate.  Lot's more.  Mostly because I'm really stupid, but partially because I'm a tortured artist type.

Writing About Writing has taken me between two and three hours a day and sometimes more.  Even those "short" days on the weekend, where I'm just putting up a couple of links, suck up two hours easy.  I have to look for what I want to put up, write a little commentary, check the formatting, make sure everything is in order and the links actually go to the right place, and some little kid who stumbles upon my blog isn't going to find a link to "donkey punch" or something.  W.A.W. started at a 40 hour a week commitment, but mostly that was just because I didn't know what I was doing.  As the dust settles, and I realize what will speed up because of the learning curve and what won't, I'm still looking at about 20 hours a week.

So now I'm around 60-65 hours of work.  Even good, fun, rewarding jobs start to kind of suck around this point.  I also don't actually have a day off.  Every day I have to put in an hour or two.  But wait...there's more.

If that were all I was doing, I could hang.  But I'm also trying to work fiction in there, and even my moderate writing goals that I'd like to improve upon bump the work week up to around 90 hours.  That's just beyond me.  I know some people have it in them, but I can only work like that in short bursts, and for me that was February and March.

By the way, if you're wondering why I look like I'm trying to control my fist from involuntarily leaping into your duodenum when you suggest that I don't really work, maybe this will offer some insight.  

When you're starting and it's all energy and excitement it's really tough to simmer, even when you know that's going to be the best thing to do.  If I were making money off this blog--and I mean more than four cents in eleven days--maybe I might be able to put something else on the chopping block.  But for now I need to keep paring things down until I hit that air fuel mixture where I can keep up with W.A.W., fiction writing, taking care of my other obligations, and not wake up masturbating in a pile of my own feces while repeating "Timeisnotmyfriend. Timeisnotmyfriend. Timeisnotmyfriend...."

I'm still going to put SOMETHING up every day, even if it's just a link to another page and a three sentence commentary, but I'm still fiddling with the knobs.  In addition to a lot of small changes that probably no one but me will really notice, I am going to back off from Wednesday being a "meaty" day.  Well, except for this splat right here.

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