sashinka | observation orientated, with a twist of lime | a blog

My So-Called Life
I guess I'm feeling slightly ambivalent, but it seems like I've got a job.

It's bittersweet for a few reasons; my freelance work has really started picking up in the last couple of months (hence post-paucity), and I like managing my own time/being my own boss. But there's a recession out there, and nothing's guaranteed, and I have bills to pay, and pensions to fund, clothes to buy and holidays to take, I guess. And the other reason: I've spent the best part of a year pitching stories and ideas to magazines and newspapers, writing short stories and almost-completing a novel. But that doesn't, really, make me a writer. So the practical, pragmatic part of me knows I should just take a job, something I know I can do. The creative/writerly/bohemian side of me doesn't want to. But then that bohemian never really made a living. Or a success at anything. Whither the Renaissance? Those days, you could be a writer one day, in commerce the next, but in these specialist/specialised times, it doesn't work that way.

So, I've entered one of my short stories for a couple of competitions - I'll see what happens. I'm setting myself a personal target of finishing the book over New Year, although I'm not very good at meeting personal targets (if I was, I'd weigh, like eight stone).

It's complicated by the fact that the to-ing and fro-ing (it's all happened at public sector speed, which has had me itching to go faster) meant that I had to keep my options open, and am currently doing research into derivatives until February 7th. Which is actually quite interesting. I spent the weekend number-crunching my putative new-employers numbers, and I still have a few more questions - it's a tough job, but I guess I want a challenge, if I'm going to have a job. So Wednesday, I'm meeting up my potential boss, hopefully for the last time, to make sure we're all singing off the same excel spreadsheet or some such jargon.

Of course, I know better than anyone that it's not over till it's over, and there's still contracts and references and stuff (once, a very long time ago, the Wicked Witch of the West gave me a bad reference, and I lost a job offer, but that's another story).

I'll know on Wednesday for sure, but I guess it's a tentative yay. Of sorts. Of course, I'm still a writer, I'll just be writing conference programmes, contracts and joint-venture proposals. Which can be very creative.