Career guidance required

It’s odd, what sets me off to blogging. I had to take the morning off work as there was a workman from Bob’s Plumbing (no joke, that is the company’s name!) coming round to do something technical to the boiler here at Meadow Towers. Non-urgent work, but work that had to get done before the cold weather comes back – knowing my luck if they weren’t looked into now the repairs would become urgent just when we were starting to freeze in our beds. *1*

Now I am so completely snowed under at work at the moment (the Energizer Bunny has had no admin for the past nine months… The resulting backlog and mess has to be seen to be believed) that I can’t really afford to take a morning off, but then again Moose was even more unable to take the morning off, so I had to do it. I quite enjoyed the extra hour in bed 😀 I had all these grand plans of what I was going to do this morning as well – I would catch up on emails, I would write some content for the poor blog (I have been neglecting it of late, sorry), I would… Oh, all kinds of things.

Do I get any of it done? No, of course not. For starters I am incapable of ‘catching up’ with emails. Some things are never gonna happen, no matter how much we may want them to. Blog posts? Don’t be silly. Part of the problem was that Bob the Plumber spent a fair amount of time drilling holes into the wall between my room and the boiler cupboard – hardly conducive to nice computing. The other part of the problem was, well, day time TV. Much though it sucks, I still ended up spending my precious morning off loafing on the sofa watching crap on Freeview. So I got nothing blogged.

Then what happens – I’m sitting in work surrounded by enough piles of paper that it looks like I’m building a fort around my desk and I get all inspired. Bollocks.

Luckily I’m able to fire up Outlook and write myself an email with the germ of the idea in it, but I do find it very hard to just leave things at the ‘germ’. Once I get an idea, I like to sit down and just write till the idea is done. I can leave it at the final polishing stage easily, but anything less and I get all antsy. I don’t like leaving things half finished and on top of that I am petrified that when I get back to something half-written, I won’t be able to finish it off. That the muse will have deserted me (this has happened on more than one occasion).

Aw crap. I clearly really need to get me a job where I can write for a living. The more and more I think about it, the more and more that sounds like a wonderful job. Not journalism – the whole sniffing out stories thing has never appealed – but… something. The dream, dream? Get a gig like Carry in “Sex in the City” and write a newspaper column (or, ok blog if you insist) about something that interests me, or failing that my life, and that pays enough to keep me in the style to which I would like to become accustomed.

Failing that, I would love to be an editor…

Anything but what I am doing and what I have the qualifications for, basically.

Anyone got any ideas how I can make this dream a reality? I would be really, really grateful! Make you a Minion and everything 😀

Endnotes:
*1* Meadow Towers is lovely, just really badly insulated. In the winter it is freezing to the point of being able to see your breath if we don’t have the heating on full blast. In the summer it can get sweltering to the point it’s hotter inside than it is outside. Other than that, and the lack of outside space, and the no-pets thing, it is a dream apartment.Back

5 thoughts on “Career guidance required

  1. The where there is a will notion comes to mind. It works for me on that one and I recently took my own advice and ditched the day job and went back to full time freelance. One of my aims was to build up my writing side in blogging and rebalance that work / life thing – something I’ve always struggled to balance and found blurs too much.

    My main suggestion would be sites like ifreelance where you can register and bid on writing jobs – I’ve got a few through it as web design and also writing. There are a lot of sites like that. I guess also writing off to sites / places you love and offering to work for them – if can do free and get in door that way is great but depends on financing it all. I know that if you go freelance there are options for you out there – needs to get a portfolio to do really but they are easily sorted. It’s not an easy gig doing it for yourself and there are times you will need clean underwear and a strong financial stomache to take dripping funds… but it’s so worth it (in my opinion). If you want to shoot me an email and hook up about what I have experienced I am more than willing. I can give you some links too for writing freelance which could help as have a load of them about that have brought me work in the past.

  2. There are plenty of science/history/archeology/etc rags out there. Why not check them out?

  3. Tammie – one email will be on its way sometime this weekend when I get around to it, thank you 😀

    Spooky – I would love to write fiction, but I don’t think I have the ideas or the skill. It is a phenomenally hard field to break into.

    And Surly – you have a point. Just… ah, you know me and getting off my arse to do anything!

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