A Hearty Handshake and a Boot in the Ass

This is my last day at my current job. I’ve known about my end date for the last eight months.  When I wasn’t dealing with maintenance tasks or farting around, I busied myself by keeping an eye on job openings and honing my geek skills so someone will hire me.

Not bad work if you can find it. Still employed, I was able to learn Python as well as Ruby on Rails. I rebuilt platypus.org with the latter, the first time the site had been touched in 13 years. I also made a new version of this site that discussed in my last post.

Starting tomorrow I’ll have even more time on my hands, but alas no paycheck to go with it. I have no idea how long this will last, hopefully not for long. Whether it’s six days or six months, I do have plenty to keep myself busy. 

The first order of business each day will be the job hunt. That shouldn’t take a huge amount of time. Find out who’s hiring and if it looks like I’d be a good fit, apply. There will also be time spent on nerdy platypus.org projects that I won’t bore you with here. The remainder of my productive hours will go into work on a number of fiction projects that sit in varying stages of being partly done.

There’s a collection of flash fiction in the works. There is also material for one or two collections of longer short stories. And then there are the novels, or rather first drafts of them.

For the last three years, I’ve taken part in NaNoWriMo. For those who have never heard of it, it’s National Novel Writing Month and participants spend November knocking out a rough draft of a novel with no fewer than 50,000 words. It’s daunting but doable. You can even pull it off as I did while holding a full-time job. You just have to resign yourself to the fact that you’ll have time to work, write, eat, and sleep, and not much else.

Of course, writing that much in that short an amount of time is likely to produce a piece of shit. My efforts have been no exception. They are however salvageable pieces of shit. I have already begun the revisions of what I wrote in 2011. I hope to have that complete before November 1 when the time will come to add yet another first draft to the queue.

I’ll post more when any of these efforts (novel or short fiction) come closer to fruition.

6 thoughts on “A Hearty Handshake and a Boot in the Ass”

  1. Cool! To your many projects, anyway. Not saying cool to the losing-your-job thing. Which story was the 2011 one?

  2. I’m proud of you for doing what you’re doing. Drawbacks and stresses will happen but you’re still making an effort and working and above all else, you’re hella pretty.

    Write more. Scribble until your brain melts and your hand doesn’t feel like yours anymore.

    Your girlfriend’s weird though.

Leave a Reply to Stacy Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *