Hey, look! I have a blog. Another blog, since technically I've been running Unspooling Fiction for the better part of six months with my co-conspirator, braintwin, sister-in-arms, whatever you want to call her. I have no idea where that time went, nor how that became as successful as it did, but since I'm endeavoring to be a real grown-up professional something or another, I got my very own blog.
If you want to get really specific, I had a blog over on WordPress that I just killed, because I'd rather work with the Blogger interface and, frankly, the handle I was using was too restrictive. I don't want to pretend like I'm not doing half a dozen things at once at all times. Unlike Kitty, I'm not engaging in the unspoken authorial contract of Having A Blog; instead I'm engaging in the unspoken very busy person contract of maintaining an online presence. But my path to get here has been long, twisty, arduous, and I in no way promise that here will be the same place tomorrow that it is as I type. I rather hope it won't.
Going back some ways, I went to college and got an English degree, and now everyone is either laughing or nodding in sympathy. I didn't get it because I expected to make money off it; I got it because I loved the subject. I adore ripping texts apart and understanding them in new ways. (If you want to see me fall over laughing, just tell me with a straight face that I'm interrogating the text from the wrong perspective.) This did not lead to work in my field. You're all very surprised, I can tell. I have a jar with a surprised face for that; I keep it on my desk.
What it led to was a short series of jobs in fairly dead-end occupations, followed by the loss of my last "real" job a week before the market crashed in '08. (For "real," see 9-5 with benefits. There are reasons I put scare quotes around the term.) I did what I was supposed to for a good year, eighteen months after that. I applied for unemployment, then I applied for jobs. Job after job after job, looking for temp work or temp to hire or anything at all that wanted an over-educated liberal arts major. Eventually, I applied for state healthcare and foodstamps. Throughout it all, I was very lucky to have both savings and a partner who was working in a more lucrative field. But several things kept niggling at the back of my mind as I did this: crafts, writing, and music. I hated the process of applying for two jobs every week even if they were crap jobs or ones I was patently unqualified for, just to fulfill the unemployment requirements. I hated not being able to dive into freelancing as seriously as I might have, because too much and all my benefits would disappear and I'd have to start the whole process again. I loathed having to devote hours every month to ensuring that the benefits were there, since they were one of the few things keeping us from falling back on parental handouts.
Once I eliminated all the piles of bureaucratic bullshit from my life, I got a chance to start again. I spent awhile looking into Etsy and cross stitch, only to determine that the kind of cross stitch I did would be undercut by cheap knockoffs that flood the site. I sat down and wrote a novel, at least half to prove I could, and dropped the second one when I realized that I don't love writing. I love talking about writing, and I love analyzing other people's writing, but that's not the same thing. (Some people find this weird. I find them weird, so it all works out.) Then I fell back in love with music, and I haven't looked back since.
Right now I pay the bills through some arcane conglomeration of proofreading, editing, and translation on the rare occasions I can get it. It's not my first love, but I know the chances of making money off music, and I know I've got another year or more of work to build up enough of a fiddle repertoire to make a go with that. Which you all get to watch me sweat through! I have no idea what's going to happen or where I'm going from here, but I'm looking forward to finding out.
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