Thursday, March 17, 2011

Writing the Stories of My Life.

Another musical communiqué:


I am still trying to get a job, and I'm still trying not to let anything break-a my spine, but I have gotten a couple more rejections now: from Berkeley and USF. It just highlights how dreadfully long this process takes. I applied for those jobs in early February. So the next wave will be the Atlanta jobs I started submitting my resumes to after Collin and I broke up.

I've had several people putting in good words for me at Turner, and basically I've been told that it's easier to move around in Turner than it is to get into Turner. This fits with what most of the comments on the job search boards say, too, so I wasn't surprised. But I have been pretty disappointed and discouraged about the whole thing.

Finally will come the rejections from the jobs I'm now applying to - in San Francisco.


Ok, so I don't know where to start, and I guess in that case it's best to just start. This past weekend my relationship with Collin got much more complicated. We began by becoming friends again last week, and at this point, it does look like I'm going to go to San Francisco at some point in the near future. I don't know what that means anymore, for me, for us, for my career, for anything. I just know that if I don't go now, I'm going to regret it for the rest of my life. Collin is my best friend and I just can't accept the thought of living without him in my life in some fashion. He apparently feels similarly about the situation. Finding this out was what has really made this complicated, for both of us. I'm going out there at the end of this month, and we are basically going to have a long-weekend-long discussion and come to some conclusions. We both hope it works out, but we also both know that our relationship is... complicated. At the end of the day, though, we love each other, and we really have a good time when we're together. I think those two things generally go a long way.


(I really wish I could have been at this show.)

I'm absolutely terrified of what I'm going to do when I finally get out there. I'd like to be a writer. I've been trying to learn about how to "be" a writer, other than writing a best-selling novel (since that would take a little too long and I'd *probably* deplete my savings by the time I finished it, especially considering I have no savings). It turns out there are a lot of different ways. I mean, when you look around you, writing is everywhere; someone somewhere is paid to write it.

I have seen several writing jobs in SF, but the pay is abysmal, and most of them are only part-time or temporary anyway. Eventually a writer can piece together a satisfactory income from freelance work, but that takes time. Part of me - actually quite a large part of me - wants to get a job in a hotel or restaurant or something and just work my butt off in my free time building a portfolio and sending out pieces, and query letters, and calling people, and volunteering my services, and basically just begging for work. Eventually I know that would pay off.

It's very scary but also very exciting. It will be really nice to accomplish something based on hard work, though. Up until this point in my life, I've mostly just relied on my good brains. Great love and great achievements require great risk, as anonymous said, and I'm ready to take those risks.

So yeah. I'll keep you posted.

By the way, I figured out where most of my nightmares originated: this video.

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