I don't know what I'm doing with mine.
You know, I turn 40 in like a week. That'll fuck you up, son.
But I wrote a novel, I'm represented at a monster agency, I've got a hot wife, I've got an adorable daughter, I ride a hyperexotic Italian superbike and I mixed two network television shows simultaneously two weeks ago. So what am I doing with my life?
Slaying.
PROTIP: You aren't required to know what you're doing with your life. All that's required is that you have the stamina to get what you want out of it. A friend's mom asked me what I wanted to do with my life when I was seventeen. I told her I was thinking of:
A) being a chef
B) Joining the special forces
C) mechanical engineering
D) Law
or
E) Medicine
And I honestly would have been cool with any of those choices.
(I fought the hyperexotic italian superbike to a standstill this weekend. I know that thing pretty much biblically at this point. And after two days, I was worse off than when I started. And I walked in the door and my two-in-December daughter screamed "DADDY!" and ran over. Then she said "Daddy hug" and proceeded to give me a big hug. Then she said "daddy sweaty! Need shower! Sweaty! Need shower! and my wife was just about dying laughing.)
(Turns out I'm cool with 40)
1. Getting out of that whole depression funk. I'm still getting calls and emails from people I've never heard of that want to check in with me. It's like I'm living under a microscope right now, but maybe that's okay for the time being. Getting better, feeling a bit more okay since the whole individual therapy thing started.
2. Going on a date on Tuesday night for the right reasons for the first time in a long time. Been out with a few girls this year, but I never felt too good about it. This time I'm really excited and trying to live in the now with it.
3. Networking hard as hell (shoutout to kleinbl00), have two people at companies in Boston who will be personally delivering my resumes to some people within their companies and am working on growing the number of people who will be doing that.
4. Looking forward to what this week has in store. Probably a lot of Mario Kart.
- Shit man, I'm just waiting for the sun to shine.
I'm trying my best to carve out a little slice of prosperity for me and mine. I could be doing a lot better but I've been a lot worse too. Pushing hard for a new job. A real job I can stand to wake up for. A job you can start a family with. That's my focus right now and if I stay the course (and lay off the bottle) it's only a matter of time. I'm 27 and I don't want to hit 30 still living paycheck to paycheck. The rest of you sound like you've got it figured out. That gives me hope.
I like to listen to this when I'm doubting my existence's worth.
- I don't know what I'm doing with mine.
When people throw out the trope of "No one knows what they are doing" they really do mean it. It's so easy to put on the show of having it all together, and I've seen that lie fall apart one too many times to take it seriously. It's when the lie and reality somehow collude (ie. "fake it til you make it") that shit gets real, and you'd better have been backing up that lie.
Aren't you not even in college yet? Cause, if so, if any of your peers are stoically invested in some life choice right now, they are def just as lost as you.
Me: 26 on the cusp of 27 (ouch), on career option #3, bored, looking for career option #4 that hopefully involves waking up later and getting paid more and involves less soul-loss.
Graduated with a chem degree like 6 months ago, but what nobody mentions is how important having friends and colleagues are to getting anywhere post-grad. My goal was a PhD or MD, but that out of the question now. I've been kinda looking for a job, but I really don't like talking to people and I don't have any means of transportant.
I am moving to Japan in one month's time to be with my (American) fiance. I will most likely teach English. He works for an American company. When we move back to the states in a year or so I will return to the restaurant industry.
Working in a career I love and do good at, love owning a home and taking care of my yard and house. Love my wife and she's my best friend. Got married a year ago, had a baby 3 months ago, and am really still just riding those waves. What I'm doing with my life? Loving my wife, loving my child, loving my cats, loving my home, love reading, and working and owning my career in my free time.
I also like developing my photography and guitar skills whenever I have free time, which is rare these days.
I spent the entire weekend in bed thinking about things that I can't change and am better off not thinking about.
Today, however, I got up and worked on some stuff. I did some world building and outlining for my NaNoWriMo project - something incredibly generic that'll probably never be finished because I never finish NaNo projects.
I also cooked a meal and ate something bigger than a handful of chips for a few days. I could do with some fasting though, I need to lose weight. Everything I cook is too tasty to pass up though.
Tomorrow I need to clean everything up and get to work on some design stuff before getting into development for something that's actually getting me money. It's a good thing that Wasteland 2 is unplayable on the Mac, otherwise I'd be getting no work done.
NaNyNaNyNooNoo is the worst piece of shit waste of time I have ever encountered. I find that it is largely entertained by people without the stamina to finish anything - and they think that somehow joining a big wave of me-too slackers will help them check something off their bucket list.
The "novel" they want you to write is actually a novella by most standards and trust me - there's no market for them.
When I'm hot, I'm 4,000 words a day. That times 30 days is a novel. Problem is, the important part of writing is the shit you don't put on paper. You are far better writing 500 words of good prose four days a week than 5,000 words of drivel seven.
While all of that is true, I think it encourages reading and writing, which I can't be against. Reading a lot (And to some extent writing, just putting words in a coherent manner on paper) is the last bastion of honest intellectualism I can put my whole heart into. Yes you shouldn't just read trash, and write trash, but I am glad people are reading and writing.
If your goal is to produce something that will be published in a brick and mortar bookstore, Nanowrimo is not for you. If your goal is to get something out of your head that you've had knocking around and get it on paper, Nanowrimo is for you.
When I was a young kid age maybe 6-10, I had a tape recorder that I would ramble into for hours at a time late at night. I had a hard time sleeping because my imagination was so vivid and detailed. I took some form of creative catharsis from just getting the ideas out of my head. Growing older is to silence a lot of that, and channel it into other areas. Nanowrimo is permission to excise that demon.
One of those 14 books is Wool by Hugh Howie. He was the Elvis of self-published authors before he ever ended up in a bookstore.
I think it's f'ing hilarious that the best reason anyone can give me for participating in NinnyNinnyNooNoo is the same reason you pop a zit. Wash your faces, people.
- Wash your faces, people.
I think people try, but fail. Or they use dirty water, or wash their face with lard, to continue your metaphor.
Different strokes for different folks kb. If anyone gets some sense of peace or satisfaction out of expressing an idea, and it's not actively impugning on your life, is it such a bad thing? Even if you don't like it?
- If anyone gets some sense of peace or satisfaction out of expressing an idea, and it's not actively impugning on your life, is it such a bad thing?
Yes.
YES.
A thousand times yes.
Here - let's pretend November is National Ballet Dancing Month (NaBaDaMo) instead. Come late October, everybody decides to take some time away from their Facebook and Reality TV to put on some dancing shoes. So they go out to Goodwill and buy a pair of tap shoes or engineer boots (since "hard toes" are the only requirement) and talk for a week about their tutus.
Throughout November they all meet to encourage each other in their dance steps. They cheer each other on in online forums. And content-bereft listacle farms spew out puff piece after puff piece not about Mikhail Baryshnikov but about the six people who got to perform in their community theater version of "West Side Story."
At the end of November nearly no one is still dancing but they all pat themselves on the back for "sticking with it" and "getting it out of their system" and look forward to next year when they will again stand on tip-toe twice a week for two weeks and call themselves ballerinas. Now:
- Do you think that might denigrate the art of dance, rather than celebrate it?
- Do you think that might degrade the professional respect of classically-trained dancers?
- Do you think that time might have been better spent on something more productive?
NeenerNeenerNooNoo gives people an excuse to pretend they aren't letting their goals slip by for 30 days instead of all year round. It's like giving up chocolate for Lent except since it's a social media phenomenon it gives people an excuse to yammer incessantly about their fucking novel to the point where everyone is legitimately dreading further discussion of writing in general. After all, the only books they've heard of are Hunger Games, Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter and 50 Shades.
If you wanna write, write. If you wanna join, join. But don't for one minute think that joining will help you write.
It will, odds on, hurt.
I disagree somewhat.
It definitely encourages that a first draft is created by vomiting forth - the problem with NaNo is that it doesn't do anything afterwards and most people assume that the 30,000 word piece of whatever they're left with is suitable for publishing. That's the real problem with NaNo - false advertising.
For anyone looking to get an incredibly rough and dirty and detailed outline (to be murdered in editing), I think NaNo is still a great tool.
I think a week spent outlining is time better spent than a year typing shit to see what sticks. The very nature of NinnyNeener requires one to never.slow.down enough to figure out what the fuck you're doing.
Some math:
14 published Novels from NinnyNinnyNooNoo (2013)
11 published Novels from NeenerNeenerNoNo (2012)
So. 14-11 = 3/310,000 = 0.0009% chance your NinnyNeener will be published. Meanwhile, the dismal odds editors use to get you to step up your fucking game?
0.2%.
.2%/.00097% = 206 times more likely to get a NON ninny novel published.
If you could do one thing that would make your book more than 200 times more likely to get published, wouldn't you do that one thing?
That one thing is to not do NaNoWriMo.
I've no illusion of what NaNoWriMo is, it's something I do for fun, nothing more. It's generally where I send ideas I know aren't great to die. When I lived in Chicago, going to NaNo groups (as sad as some of them were to look at) was about the only socialization I had - the sense of community is more important to me than anything I write during it. Having a place to send ideas that I know logically suck, but still want to write, is useful.
I write around 2,000 words a day in various projects (when I write, which is about four days a week), though ironpotato will tell you that I'm perfectly capable of annoying people with far more than that. Generally my writing is research/non-fiction (biographies, working on Christopher Isherwood right now). I've steadily increased this from my original 750 words a day, which I started sometime when I was a freshman in high school.
Also, as OftenBen said, anything that encourages anyone to take an interest in writing is something I'm all for. Not everyone has a dream of publishing a novel, some just want to write - which is perfectly fine with me. I've also never been interested in publishing anything written in a month. It took me about four months to write and edit my book (and it was quite short) to a point where I found it suitable - and now when I pick my copy up and flip through it, I can't stand to read it because we didn't take the ax to it hard enough (not in content, but in writing style).
Writing is about all I've ever been great at, and I enjoy doing it. NaNo is an excuse to write some of the stupider ideas, and I'm just fine with that.
- though ironpotato will tell you that I'm perfectly capable of annoying people with far more than that.
This is the part I don't understand:
- If you don't want to sell it, you don't want anyone to read it.
- If you don't want anyone to read it, why do you need someone to tell you how to write it?
The idea that people need an excuse to "take an interest" in writing is a bad one. I suppose on some level somewhere it's "empowering" to discover that you can blather for a month straight and end up with something you don't want anyone else to read but I mean, fuck - Jack Nicholson did that in The Shining.
Writing is about storytelling. It's about conveying information from my head to yours. Stephen King calls it straight up telepathy and if you aren't trying to reach out to someone else, you're just "thinking."
It is a fuckin' tragedy that you wrote a book that you can't stand to read. But it is fuckin' archetypal that it's what NinnnyNinnyNooNoo is about.
You wanna talk about the death of reading, here it is: encourage people to type drivel for one month a year so they can be "novelists." That's why the writing magazines are all about low-residency MFAs and why literary agents are worshipped as gods walking the earth: we've created a culture where it isn't about what you write, it's about the fact that you closed Facebook long enough to puke-draft 50,000 words between Halloween and Thanksgiving.
Guaranteed: there were writer's groups that you missed out on because you were hanging out with the NaNoNinnies. They would have made better friends, they would have been more committed to success, and they wouldn't have let you put out a book that you didn't want to read.
I've written nine screenplays. I've optioned two. Eight of them are fan-fucking-tastic. I'll show 'em to anybody.
And that comes from a commitment to storytelling instead of typing.
I'm not sure why you're so angry about NaNo, but... I agree with everything you say about NaNo, I just don't come to the same end result.
I know what writing is, and I know what storytelling is. I read On Writing too, so I'm aware of the telepathy quote.
Being annoyed that I didn't edit enough isn't the same as not wanting to tell the story. I've told that story all over the place, as much as I can, because I love it. I gave it to the person who's judgement I hold above all others (with the exception of mine), and that's all I need. Wishing I'd edited more doesn't mean I don't like the story I told. I didn't write that book during NaNoWriMo because...
If I'm writing about something I care about, I don't need a bunch of shitheads in a cafe to tell me to write x number of words a day. If I love what I'm writing, I bleed it out of my pen until I have no ink left, and I buy ink by the barrel (<- see that? that's why I need to vacuum out). I've never written anything that I'm ashamed of, which is why if you troll around my website's subdomains you'll see pretty much everything I've ever written (samples of bigger projects I do want to sell). if I'm ashamed of an idea, it doesn't leave my head.
I use NaNo as a vacuum. All of the bad ideas and cliches that do get in my head, I pump them out during NaNo so I've got a more focused toolset when it comes to writing the stories that I love. My goal at NaNo is never to have something at the end to publish or be egotistical about, but to cycle out so all of my other writing benefits. If you don't approve of that or if you don't like it, that's fine. It's just what I do.
- I'm not sure why you're so angry about NaNo,
Because it's everything that's wrong with the amateur literature industry.
Because I've had to read some of that shit and it's execrable.
Because people who can't work on something for more than a month shouldn't work on it for a month.
Because it discourages discipline and denigrates hard work.
- If I'm writing about something I care about, I don't need a bunch of shitheads in a cafe to tell me to write x number of words a day. If I love what I'm writing, I bleed it out of my pen until I have no ink left, and I buy ink by the barrel.
And when none of the above are true, you play NaNoWriMo.
- I use NaNo as a vacuum. All of the bad ideas and cliches that do get in my head, I pump them out during NaNo so I've got a more focused toolset when it comes to writing the stories that I love. My goal at NaNo is never to have something at the end to publish or be egotistical about, but to cycle out so all of my other writing benefits. If you don't approve of that or if you don't like it, that's fine. It's just what I do.
That's fine. But we started here:
- I did some world building and outlining for my NaNoWriMo project - something incredibly generic that'll probably never be finished because I never finish NaNo projects.
And I'm just not sure why you'd waste the effort on something that you hate.
No, I've heard you all the way. You aren't hearing me when I say that your "tool" is harmful to your writing and your well-being.
And go ahead and mute me - but understand if I didn't give a shit about you and your writing, I wouldn't give a shit about this.
I'm kinda of on the same boat on you. i recently got a financial reality check which threw my plans off balance. I'm still in college so that's the most important part. I'm obviously going to class, turning in assignments, working, and living the dorm life but realistically it all feels like a blur. I just want to make it until fall break and sort everything out. Currently: Catching up on my blog posts and going back to my Netflix/games Future: I have no idea
Currently working at a mortgage company doing admin, I'm saving up for the future.
I might make a trip to Canada next year but I'm not sure yet. I've got a working holiday visa (lasts a year) but I'm not that keen on the idea because I originally got it so I could live with my ex-girlfriend which unfortunately didn't work out. I'm not sure if I want to still go because I'd be totally alone without any support over there while I'm working and/or travelling.
How is cost of living vs quality of life? I hear good things about PP.
I work for a medical billing company and I do poetry slams. Maybe a little further down the line, I will try to look for a better job but right now, I am fine where I am. That is pretty much it for the moment.
I'm high-school-ing, trying to figure out what I love to do, letting my cello sing everything that I can't, and doing everything in my (limited) power to find myself in the mountains as often as possible.
and trying not to think about how soon I'll be on my own.
working as receptionist at a small boutique hotel (5 rooms!), managed to be promoted to supervisor a few months ago but I#m frankly full of the drama that's going on behind the scenes. made myself so essential that I was able to leverage a reduction in hours (40h/week to 20/h week + 5 working from home) and a 50% pay raise.
now I'll have time to work on music, make 3d prints with a friend and spend more time with my wife! yay! :)
I myself took the weekend to chillax. Had class cancelled on Thursday, don't have classes on Friday so I just went nice and easy. It was nice.
Trying to get back into loving what I do (ala everything technology wise) I'd really like to start working on a portfolio for post college. I've got two semesters left I believe then I'm free. Not sure how to feel about that. If I'm not too far in debt I'll probably just start going for another degree. I don't know.
TL;DR: No idea what I'm doing or going to do. I like to just go with the flow.
Graduate. One solid option after that with a lot of vague ones that I don't want to think too much about because they're not nearly as good, and are far less interesting.
Super short term, staying up late, drinking anything with caffeine I can get my hands on, and writing.