Years ago I stumbled across Steven Pressfield’s THE WAR OF ART (no, I didn’t write that down wrong) & loved it. Loved its passion & determination. Loved it so much I bought a copy for a friend’s birthday. Only to shortly hear that he didn’t want gifts that birthday. So I shelved it until an entirely different friend came visiting, complaining of her inability to follow her creative force, to build creative focus & to just *create*, goddammitt. And she picked up the Pressfield WAR OF ART book from my shelf like it had been destined for her — in its shiny silver, tactile cover — and said to me, “Is this a good book?”

“Even better,” I told her, “it’s YOUR book.”

And I fetched the copy that had been intended as a gift & I gifted it to her on the spot. It was a satisfying moment. THE WAR OF ART had found its other home.

So, if you feel the need to be invigorated, enraged, ENGAGED to fulfill your creative vision, THE WAR OF ART might be for you, too. Though I’m not sure if they’re still doing it in the tactile silver covers.

Thanks to the wonders of Twitter, I found Pressfield’s now doing a blog on creativity, & I wanted to mention that his entry called “Panic is good” is rather marvellous if you find yourself feeling afraid. And there are plenty of other entries if you’re up to some other part of your journey.

So. To war!

I’ve had some shitty day jobs.

There was the mortgage-processing job, where the boss was at great pains on day 1 to tell me about the culture of ‘no blame, only teamwork’. And two months in when I uncovered an error that had been made with some mortgage cheques, he tried to guilt-trip me about the costly solution he’d have to implement — apparently assuming that because I’d uncovered the error, I’d also made it. (I hadn’t.)

There was the workplace I refer to as the Toxic Avenger, where my last defiant act was to act as a witness in a formal complaint of corporate bullying. I hadn’t really considered the aggressive, ignorant behaviour of my superiors to be bullying until I went to HR for something else & they showed me a copy of the Anti-Bullying Policy. Which was about when I realised that no one had ever described my exec director as accurately as that document. He was also a liar, but the policy didn’t cover that.

There was the Narcissism Is Me workplace, where the MD was prone to sending self-pitying emails to all staff about stuff he’d decided to take personally: staff leaving, staff not filling in their timesheets, staff calling him a moron (oh, wait, no one told him that, right?). He also had a nifty way of firing people or downsizing a role without ever actually having to pay out a redundancy. He wasn’t so much a liar as a man living in a land of complete make-believe, fantasising about his own efficacy in the chaotic organisation he’d fostered. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those at greatest geographical distance from him reported being the most happy in their jobs.

Reading back over this list I can see the truth of the idea that people don’t leave bad workplaces, they leave bad bosses.

And of course, we must note the good jobs. The State Library job was a lot of fun. I loved working in a ‘cultural institution’, loved the events, loved the Library’s mission, loved the history, the building, loved a bunch of the people. The casual jobs I had while at or just after uni were great. I worked on campus in a bunch of roles: stuffing envelopes, staffing the info centre, admin-ing at the careers centre. None of it taxing, all of it cheering. The multimedia job I had (right before the internet ate all the multimedia technologies that weren’t net-specific) was also awesome for the 3 months it took the company to go bust.

But the caveat on each day job is that it must feed the writing. Occasionally this has felt like the inevitable failure to serve two masters. Sometimes — less often — it’s worked.

The multimedia fed the writing because it was both creative AND structured (I was a Macromedia Director author, in case anyone recognises that terminology) – but because I loved it I also worked a bunch of extra hours on it, which limited my writing time. In contrast, the Toxic Avenger allowed me a helluva lot of time (these were the years when I was most active in the blogosphere) but made me feel dead on the inside. It’s hard to write when you’re dead. Not so hard to blog, oddly.

I figure by now I’ve tried just about everything I can think of. I’ve tried the dead-end, dull job, I’ve tried the all-in, exhaustive job, & a bunch of patterns in between. I’ve tried a day-job in writing & several well outside. I’ve tried part-time & full-time work. I’ve learned what -– for want of a better word — works. I’ve tried my darnedest to maximise that stuff & minimise the rest.

And I think Eden Robins’ post over at Ecstatic Days is the picture-perfect day-job description. If you’re a similar kinda writer as me, that is.

Now that A Book of Endings is largely done — for me, at least (until the launches. Stay tuned!) — I can get back to projects I enjoy, have been missing have put off for the interim. My first task was to come up with a timeline to get me through the writing committments until the end of the year (project management fans: yes, I really do mean I made a Gantt chart). Then I prioritised the committments so I know which ones I can give up if I have to. Then I stared at the plan for a while with a kind of ‘holy fuck’ gaze.

Then I closed down the plan and opened up instead my favourite project (of the moment): the Great Unsaleable Novel. Which, I’m pleased to say, on Draft 4 is a lot less unsaleable than it used to be. But as I’m only at the beginning of Draft 4, there is still a shinto-load of work left to be done.

And all this mundane news is delivered in real time to your screens because I am bookending. Not bookmarking, as I read it initially, but bookending: the process of alerting a supportive friend to your plans in order to keep yourself on track, knowing you’ll have to report back later. I followed a link from the Procrastinating Writers to the Relaxed Writer (a journey I’d like to take spiritually myself someday) to find out about bookending & I’m kinda liking the idea.

Apart from the fact that previously whenever I’ve read posts/tweets announcing things like ‘Writing now’, ‘Taking a break from writing now to make dinner’, I’ve always thought, “Who gives a damn?”

But clearly I was in the wrong, & this is EXACTLY the kind of info you should be sharing.

So: I’m writing now.