jakebe | Entries tagged with day job

It's been a while since I've used this thing, but I think it might actually help me find my way back to writing. I've had a hard time recently organizing my thoughts, and renewing a daily journal practice might help with that. So far, everything's just a jumble of things to worry about.

I've been trying to get back to writing and it hasn't been going too well. "Boundaries", the serial that's currently stalled for my Patreon, has become difficult to figure out what to do with, and it fell into the same spot where "THE CULT OF MAXIMUS" did years ago: in the writing of it, I learned that there was a lot of stuff I needed to do before working through the story to make it better and now I'm not sure how to proceed. Do I just keep pushing through and posting parts of the story, making it as good as I can on a deadline? Or do I stop, get through the pre-writing (again), and revise everything I'd written up until now? I think that the first option would help me get over the hump now and in the future -- the whole *point* of the Jackalope Serial Company was to learn how to write on a deadline. But the perfectionist in me just can't commit to that idea; I know that the story isn't doing what I need it to do as it is, and we're into the second half of the 'episode'. How good can the resolution of the story be if the foundation of it is so rotten?

Moving forward is the more difficult option mostly because it won't quiet that voice in the back of my head that's so hard to fight through. I don't think I can actually turn off my internal editor, the thing that wants me to tinker and go back and fix mistakes. While I've gotten *better* at fighting through it, it's still far too strong for me to finish things and put them up for criticism anywhere. That's a huge problem for me; how am I going to learn how to edit properly or use my voice or deal with criticism if I can't even finish the things I start?

I'm also torn between working on "Boundaries", the submission for the New Tibet anthology, and my Pathfinder game. I have such limited time for writing, and making the decision to work on any one thing just makes me feel bad for not moving forward on the other things. I'm sure other multi-taskers have this problem, but I'm just not sure what...how to sit with that feeling and commit to the choice I've made. It really sucks that my anxiety disorder has just...sucked all of the joy out of writing for me right now. Whenever I sit down, I just worry about what I'm doing, all the time. I can't lose myself in the love of the words, or characters, or images. All I can think about is if I'm doing the right thing.

I'm not sure what to do about it besides keep plugging away. Just talking about it here helps to clarify a lot of the problems I've been having; identifying and naming the block is enough to help me to deal with it, so there's that.

The day job is...what it is. I was hit with a "performance improvement plan" back in March that I just completed last week -- with flying colors. I'm pretty proud of the work I put in to overcome that, and my manager is a great guy who I believe is invested in helping me to succeed. I really like him; he cares about people, and he's making the best of a bad situation.

I still have to get out of here, though. The 'next-generation' product we're transitioning to is built on a fairly bad foundation, and we can't roll back our commitment to it because the last CEO effectively killed the product I've been supporting in the marketplace. We're experiencing a small rush of people leaving now -- on both sides of the Atlantic -- and I get the feeling that we're not going to be replacing those folks, just giving the ones who are left more work to do. Which is no good for anybody.

The plan is to transition everyone in Technical Support over to the new product later this year, training folks by twos and threes. Instead of a nice one-month traveling training, they're deciding to have folks train directly with the Support Team in Belgium while they're in the US. This means that for seven weeks in August and September, they're asking me to work from 11 PM - 10 AM. My manager understands that this is a big ask, and he's pushing for a salary increase during those seven weeks and a week off at the end of training to get back to a normal schedule. Even with all of that, for the people who can absorb it best, it's basically asking someone to throw two months of their life down a hole.

For someone like me with mental health issues, it's...asking to put my well-being in jeopardy, and I don't think I can do that. It's such a drastic change and upends my life completely, meaning that I have to rip out my social life, my support network, my routines -- all to train on a product I really don't like. If I didn't know better, I'd say that management is *trying* to push folks out.

Fortunately, I have two leads for employment elsewhere. A couple of friends have recommended me for a position in Mountain View, which is a lot closer than my current position. I've gone through the interview process and from what I understand the company is *really* close to making an offer. The big issue is finances; the upper edge of their starting pay (which is hourly) is $7K/year less than what I'm making now. Honestly, that's fine -- I'll take the hit because I really want to work for these guys. But I asked for pay on the level of what I'm making now, and since then things have...stalled. I'm told that the hiring manager is in a small crunch period and that's the reason for the delay, but I can't help but worry because, you know, that's what I do.

The other lead is a contract position for a Project Coordinator. I'd be working under another friend, which I don't mind at all -- but there are a lot of question marks. The contract is for a year, and there's no guarantee the position would convert to a full-time job or the contract would be extended. It's in a completely different field and would put me on the path to a Project Management career, which almost everyone says is a fairly stressful one. And I'm really worried about work-life balance here; this feels like the kind of thing that could take over my life, bit by bit. But from what I understand the position is mine for the taking and the pay is...well, even if it's only a year, I would be in MUCH better financial shape at the end of it.

That's all I have time for right now: I gave myself a one Pomodoro limit on these things, and my timer's done beeped. See you tomorrow.

Now that the month is almost over, I think it's safe to say that February wasn't nearly as quiet as I hoped it would be.

The day job has continued to be incredibly demanding; five of the most senior members of my team were shipped off to Europe for training and integration with the company we've merged with. It's a big blow to lose five members of your team to begin with, but to have your most senior colleagues out of pocket for two whole weeks is a tremendous drain of knowledge and resources. Those of us who were left in the trenches have been scrambling almost non-stop to deal with the workload.

That isn't to say the work hasn't been engaging, even exciting -- I'm learning a lot of new things and it's forcing me to push myself further outside of my comfort zone faster than I would have preferred it. Given the naturally timid nature of rabbits and their cousins, that's not a bad thing. I'm pleased to have been able to step up into a more active role, honing my communication skills with our customers, practicing my troubleshooting skills and learning the skeleton and muscle of our system. But it has been exhausting, and it's left little room for anything else.

I managed to finish the first draft of "A Stable Love" at the beginning of the month, but since then writing has all but stalled. I've managed to be reasonably current with my Patreon serial, but that's still a struggle -- I always feel behind, and I'd like very much to have enough space to start organizing the story a bit better but that might be a ways off. And I wasn't able to get it together at all for my People of Color Destroy Science Fiction story, so "The Tourist" remains an unwritten dream. That's the thing that sucks the most, and I feel is my biggest failure this month. Not only did I miss the boat on an anthology I really believed in, I also dropped the ball with helping another writer workshop her story for it. She submitted a couple of pieces without me, and I'm proud of her! But it's still a bummer.

The Writing Desk has been bare this month while I struggle to deal with the demands of the day job, a Project Management class I've been taking for a couple of months, and other things that need to be done. I'll be trying to check in with small updates and shorter posts for a while, just to get back into the habit; but I'm not sure how long it will be before I can get ahead with the blog as well.

It's not ALL doom and gloom; reading has been wonderful. Steppenwolf has been a lovely surprise, mostly due to the wonderfully flowery language of its translation and the fact that I forgot just how "furry" this novel really is. It'll be interesting to talk about with a few other folks later. I'm slowly but surely catching up to my comics reading list, and I'm thoroughly enjoying the Project Management textbook for class. I can practically feel myself becoming more banal with that statement, trust me.

I'm working on a few guests posts for Claw & Quill and [adjective][species], both excellent blogs in their own right. I'm trying to organize my to-do list for the publication of New Fables this year, and restarting my Pathfinder game sometime in the next three months. And of course, there's that pipe dream of eventually starting up a mental health for geeks podcast that seems so far off right now.

For now, though, the big focus is the day job, the night class and the Patreon. It looks like making sure that's taken care of will take me through the rest of February.

January 2016 was an extraordinarily busy month; everything just took off like a rocket, and it was all that I could do to hold on. Most of the work was anticipated, but I think I under-estimated the effect of a lot of it, and of course my still-developing organizational skills weren't quite up to the task of keeping everything in order so I could get stuff done. I spent the last day of the month traveling from New York back to Silicon Valley, so exhausted I didn't even realize how tired I was until I got a good night's sleep.

Even still, I can't say it was a bad time. I did a lot of stuff that was fun and enriching, and now that I made it through the worst of it I can take a breath, look at what went right, what went wrong, and how I can use the momentum of the month to propel me through my projects for this one. Here's a brief rundown of the major events last month:

The Jackalope Serial Company
On New Year's Day or thereabouts, I launched the Jackalope Serial Company. It's an idea that had been brewing through the last six months of 2015, and I felt I was finally in a good position to make it happen. The JSC is basically the label through which I tell serialized erotic stories, one chunk every week, until it's finished. The idea is to put up parts of 1500 - 2500 words a week on the Patreon, then edit those parts into monthly chapters that get released to SoFurry, Fur Affinity and Weasyl at a later date. The first serial is The Cult of Maximus, which I'm expecting to be a 100K-word story when all is said and done. That should take us through the first year of the JSC's existence.

Launch was reasonably successful; to date I've got 17 patrons donating just over $100/month for the cause. I appreciate every single one of them! John Cooner did a bang up job on the launch poster/wallpaper, business cards and other assets that will be rolled out in the next month or so. And I've put up the first three parts of the story in January, with parts 4 and 5 coming (hopefully) this week to close out chapter 1.

I wasn't as regular as I would have liked to be starting out, for reasons that I'll talk about below. I'll be spending much of this month and next trying to build up a small buffer so I can make sure the schedule is regular even if something unexpected happens. For now, though, I'm flying by the seat of my fluffy white tail. Thanks to my patrons for the patience they've displayed and the feedback they've given so far; really looking forward to having things settle into a routine this month!

Further Confusion 2016
This is kind of the biggest furry event of the year for me, and this year was no exception. I took part in five panels this year: "Power and Privilege in an Anthropomorphic World", "Furries and the Other", "Write Now!", "Brainstorming in Real Time" and "Mindfulness and Transformation Workshop".

The first two were the biggest surprises and fulfilling experiences I've had at a convention in a long time; there's a real receptiveness to the idea of exploring our differences and power dynamics through furry fiction, and the audience was lively, insightful and wonderful. This is definitely a keeper; I'd love to be involved with it next year. The second two were awesome mainly because I just got to hang out with members of my writing group and talk with other writers about ways we can push ourselves past our blocks or think about constructing stories in a different way. I don't think I've ever laughed as much as I did in those two panels.

For Mindfulness/Transformation, my friend Kannik and I tried a structure to make sure we went over the most important ideas we wanted to transmit and I think that went over pretty well. The exercise portion of the panel could still use some work, but we talked about how to adapt that depending on the read we get from the audience; next year, I think we'll have a pretty good handle on things.

Away from the panels, having conversations and meals with a few people I don't get to talk to that often were the highlight. This fandom is full of such a varied mix of interesting, passionate and unique people, and cons are one of the ways we can plug into that directly. I love talking to people and seeing their perspectives on all kinds of things; it makes me fall in love with the community all over again.

The Day Job Summit
This was a bit of a wrench. My company had merged with a similar one in Europe after being bought by a holding company last year. Initially, the plan was to bring everything together slowly and carefully, making sure the customers for each side didn't feel spooked by what was going on. Apparently, the executives discovered that was no longer a concern and ordered a giant event for the merger kick-off this last weekend in January.

So, this was the first work trip I had ever taken, which is another milestone in my professional development. Thankfully, my husband came with me to hang out and be a tourist, so I was able to enjoy the vacation side of things through his eyes. We also know quite a number of people in the area, and we were able to visit with a few of them.

The overall effect of the summit was building a sense of community between two very different sides of the company; I'm not sure how well that came off, but I know that my particular department (Technical Support) grew a lot closer through the experience. I got to meet a lot of really neat people in European tech support, and we traded war stories. But for maybe the first time, I feel like a fully-accepted member of the team I work in, and that's just incredible. I can legit say I love the company I work for, and the people I work with.

We also saw our first Broadway show while we were out there -- the runaway-smash musical Hamilton. If you haven't listened to the soundtrack yet, do yourself a favor and pull it up on Spotify or your music-streaming service of choice. You will NOT be disappointed. It's a hip-hop/rap musical about a founding father whose story almost never gets told, Alexander Hamilton. The inversion of race (Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson and other major characters are black) really punches up the drive of the Founding Fathers, brings their tragedies home in a way I had never considered, and makes me empathize with them in a way I never had before. It makes this old, distant history alive and personal. It's so good.

New York City is a hell of a town. We visited Wall Street, saw people fondling the bull outside of the NYSE, visited Trinity Church and Fraunces Tavern; we went to Brooklyn and had brunch at Flatbush Farm with a major sci-fi/fantasy author (!!); and partied pretty hard at Celsius in Bryant Park, The Eagle on the lower west side (?) and Grand Central Terminal. We saw subway dancers who were amazing, listened to cellists and jazz ensembles, saw the knock-off mascots threatening people in Times Square. All in all, a hell of a trip.

Writing/Reading
I started out strong in January, finishing my first short story of the year for MegaMorphics ("New Year, New You") and wanted to have "A Stable Love" done but the JSC work sucked up all the oxygen in that room. I started The Cult of Maximus, but didn't get as far with that as I'd like, so this month will be a bit of righting the ship as far as that's concerned.

I did read an awful lot, though. I'm catching up on my backlog of comics -- I'm finding "The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl" to be a singular delight, and I'm really digging "Sam Wilson: Captain America". I finished Kindred by Octavia Butler, and that has been a life-changing book for me. It fundamentally changes my idea of black women for the better, and I'll need to let that cook for a moment or two. I started The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemisin, and I'm looking forward to finishing that, and I finished the third collection of the Apocalypse Triptych, called The End Has Come. It features (mostly) post-apocalyptic stories, many of them continued from stories in the other two collections. It was a neat idea that had a satisfying and surprising set of conclusions, and I'm looking forward to talking about that later.

Meanwhile, my reading stack grows all the time. :) Since it's Black History Month, I feel like I should be reading something theme-appropriate, and there is no shortage of books that fit that bill. I'll talk a little bit about that tomorrow.

So that was my January in a nutshell; incredibly busy, full of wonderful and enriching experiences, as well as a lot of opportunities for growth and learning with various personal projects. Tomorrow, I'll talk about my plans for this month and what I hope to have achieved when looking back on it sometime in March.

How was YOUR month? What were your highlights? What stories did you complete or make progress on? What things did you notice that you could do better?