All I Do is Eat and Sleep and Sing

I don’t know if it comes across in this Tumblr often, but I really like making grand plans.

I found an A4 blank notebook, and the first three/four pages are scrawled with the synopsis and chapter plan for the children’s book I want to write. There’s a draft pitch email, waiting for me to finish it and send it off on Tuesday morning. I’ve set up a YA reviews and analysis blog (read a semi-frequent roll call of the books I’ve read on the bus), but the only posts I have are blog FAQs and geeing up for the eventual post-Bank Holiday soft release. All this excitement and yet…

My New Year’s Resolution is to become better at my day job. That is, my not-at-all-creative and low paying office job. For all the missed opportunities and false starts in my writing life, I just think that the state of my desk and the filing system needs sorted out much earlier.

Since the day job started to attract more business over the past year, managing the increased workload was challenging. There were mini-crises doing the quarterly book-keeping, when I would start to panic when there was errors reconciling and kick myself when the tiny errors are pointed out and solved in seconds. The weekly dictation has mounted up. The filing system really is unfit for present use.

And what am I doing…refreshing twitter in order to remain “on top of things” and trying to pitch and apply for jobs, all the while still kidding myself that I have a future in writing. Since a flubbed job interview for a paid internship at a GP news website on a rainy February afternoon in London, the enthusiastic phone calls and emails from recruiters desperate to find more about me have stopped.

Don’t think that the enthusiasm has waned on their part - they have read the same CV that stops getting relevant by July 2010 - I’m bored of it too. I glaze over application forms for roles that suit my experience, before realising that trying to adjust my skills to their scary job description is too taxing for post-work me. I don’t care about most of my friends’ statuses about their nights out and their snarky comments about Twilight that they have to yell out the parapet, sorry, important things that they have to promote. It’s gotten so dull that I actually LOVE finishing paperwork without feeling distracted by what I’m reading elsewhere.

It’s a roundabout way of saying how much I like my stop-gap office job now. Saying this will disappoint past Journalism Lecturers who would tell us about our place in a “difficult” time for the industry, and how we should work hard to maintain it, but I’m glad I’m not part of it anymore. Instead of being one of so many ambitious young journalism graduates fighting for that big internship, I’m in a calm space working with people - not necessarily colleagues - who have become friends. I used to think of it as a taste of a disappointing future, but now I want to do my damnedest to ensure I will still have a job during this long slog.