Seriously, in 1998 I cowrote a movie script with David Goyer (and seven other people). Back in the day, TNT had a pretty fun website called Roughcut.com, whence I drew inspiration for my movie rating system. In late summer of '98, Goyer participated in a sort of exquisite corpse crowdsourced screenwriting contest at Roughcut, and I was one of the lucky few to earn a spot in the script rotation.
After my recent trip to Boskone to see -- among others -- Bruce Schneier and talk about data that survives the death of people and websites, I was reminded that Archive.org probably has some saves of Roughcut from 14 years ago.
The script is rather painfully '90s, but I still find it a lark to read, even after all these years. My contribution is part seven.
Ironically, I almost didn't know I'd won a spot in the contest, as my selection was announced as I went off to my senior year of college, and a snafu with my school's IT department had me locked off the web for about two weeks. Once I got back online, I had a string of desperate emails from the contest producer asking where to send my prize money.
I still have the $100 money order, uncashed, as a keepsake. It was the first occasion where I was "paid" for my creative writing, and the first inkling I had that I wasn't just better than most of the kids at my school in the fiction skills, I might actually have a shot at making a living stringing words together.
For seven and a half years, I've written a column called Geek Trivia. On Wednesday, April 29, 2009, the last issue of that column I'll likely ever write will be publicized in its e-mail newsletter. I'm taking a full-time job with a competitor of CBS Interactive, the publisher of Geek Trivia and its host blog, The Geekend, for which I also write several times per week. I built The Geekend from the ground up, and I have come to regard my Geek Trivia readers (of which there were about 60,000) as not just fans, but in some measure friends. Saying goodbye to them is more difficult than I imagined it could be.
Google my name--Jay Garmon--and you'll find my work for the Geekend in the top two or three results. Google Geek Trivia, and you'll find my work for that column first and foremost. In some ways, Geek Trivia and The Geekend have defined me, professionally. They've opened doors for me that I never thought possible.
Ironically, I've "ended" Geek Trivia before, only to have my fans demand its return. Twice. I cannot begin to tell you how gratifying those responses were. The only compliment that comes close is that TechRepublic won't continue Geek Trivia without me, which is equally sad and humbling all at once.
For over eight years, my career and my online identity have been tied in some measure to TechRepublic in general and Geek Trivia specifically. That's a quarter of my life.
And now I'm giving all that up.
It is a strange new world I enter now, one where I have to reinvent myself online. My wife is actually glad of this, as she's looking forward to my having just one set of deadlines (that of the new day job) and me spending the rest of time either away from the keyboard, or writing what I want to write, not what I'm obligated to write. Hopefully, that means my long-neglected personal blog (this one) will get some attention and, more importantly, my long-forestalled fiction writing career will finally get underway.
It's time to move on to the next chapter, but no matter how promising or exciting my prospects may be, I cannot help but be momentarily saddened by what what I'm leaving behind. It has been good to me, and I'm the better for it. Those of you who knew me as the Trivia Geek, please look for me here. I'm not gone, I'm just different. And I look forward to seeing what is to come.
On March 26, 2008, I was dismissed from a job I held for seven years, where I did good work with good people and had a lot of fun and earned a decent living. If I hadn't been shown the door, I'd probably still be there. Instead, I've spent the last year squarely outside my comfort zone, for good or ill, and learned a great deal about myself. These facts include:
Management is harder than it looks. During this past year, I was placed in an upper management position for around eight months. I was "the boss" in a very real sense for the first time. I'm rather introverted by nature, and my usual work flow is give me a task and let me go off alone and grind on it for a while. Being a leader required me to develop new skills that I had never touched on before. It was gratifying, but far harder than any actual "work" I've had to do before.
Entrepreneurship requires passion, which I'm not known for. GameJabs, the software start-up I helped get going, has stopped going. Our funding got held up, we missed our window in the product space (others have started building products similar to those we planned, and we can't beat the head start), and my partner who fronted the money is auctioning off the codebase to recoup some of his losses. We tried, it failed, and it sucks. I liked the product, and would have used it, but I didn't live and die by its success. None of us did, and I think that played a large part in its undoing. I'm an even keel guy, and I don't rush headlong into much, and that's not the mindset that makes for a successful entrepreneur. I'm going to think long and hard before I undertake another start-up opportunity again.
I hate sales, which makes me a lousy consultant. I've dabbled in consulting since December, when Vupal (my last day job with a different startup) folded. I've done okay, mostly on referrals from friends who had consulting work they didn't want or couldn't do. I've learned I'm lousy at chasing work, and selling myself. This, quite frankly, is the more important skill set for a consultant than actual competence at the work being done. I'm not a good consultant, and I don't like the lifestyle. I crave structure and certainty, and the freelance life offers neither. That's an important thing to know as I plan my next move.
I'm a great souce of ideas, but passion is necessary for execution. Every company, partner, or client I've worked for or with in the last year has benefitted from my ideas. That's not hubris; that's what I've been told by these other parties, and the evidence I've seen of it. I've got a knack for coming up with viable options for almost any venture. The problem is I lack the passion to push most of them past the goal line. Like my friend Michelle (another person I've come to know and appreciate in the last year) says, your work is to discover your work. That's what 2008 has been about for me. I'm done chasing things I don't care about.
I need to learn to say no. Lot's of people want me to help with lots of stuff (usually for free). I spread myself way too thin, and I don't like it. I missed evenings with my daughter, and weekends with my friends, and time at all with my wife, because I chased too many commitments and tried to please too many people. "No" needs to be an acceptable answer, even for people I know and like and want to see succeed. I can't do everything for everyone, even when I want to. This has been hard to accept.
I don't want to leave Louisville. My easiest career move would have been to relocate to New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, DC or Austin. The kind of Web work I've done is in high demand in those cities, though the relative cost of living would have meant a rather drastic step back in lifestyle for a year or three. That's not why I stayed. I have friends and family here. My wife and I have friends in this town we practically consider family, we've known them so long and so well. I want my daughter to grow up spending at least one evening a week with her grandparents. I'm willing to sacrifice employment opportunity--and it's a serious sacrifice, because as much as I love my hometown, it is designed against innovation in almost every way--to make sure I can keep close these friends and family, in every way possible. They've gotten me through this year.
I actually like working at home. Time was, I had trouble working from home because I had trouble separating work tasks (deadlines) from home tasks (laundry). In the last year, I've learned how to strike that balance, mostly through time management, and I've found I like--even prefer--working from home. I can get the car's oil changed and write up five blog posts in the same day if I manage my task list correctly, and I like that flexibility. If I land a day job that affords telecommuting, I plan to take extensive advantage of it.
I'm good at writing, and I miss it. In this whole mess of insanity that has been 2008, I've done almost no fiction writing. My skills have waned. My art has been optional as I've chased work. This has bothered me, more than I expected. When I finally get settled--hopefully with a new day job--I plan to carve out a lot more regular time to write.
I know what my dream job is now. When I was doing six things, chasing consulting work, trying to build a startup, helping a friend with her event-planning business, and had ten other balls in the air, I followed a whole host of people on Twitter: CEOs, social media experts, local ad agency people, technology experts, entrepreneurs, Web comic artists, and sci-fi writers. Only the last two groups ever really interested me. I relate more to the creatives, to the dreamers, to the folks that make ideas for a living. When all is said in done, that's what I want to do. I'm a writer, and I want to write. I'll need a day job for a while as I ramp up that line of income--and it may never be full time (Web work pays too well, and has benefits)--but that's what I want to do. I think I'm done with any other game.
I've been very lucky this last year, for all the jobs lost and stress endured. I've learned a great deal, and been pushed out of my comfortable niche to finally make some choices that I'd been putting off. My goals now: Get a day job, get my wife and daughter into a bigger house (as we're outgrowing this one), and get cracking on a writing career that has been stalled too long.
JA Konrath of A Newbie's Guide to Publishing lays out the difference between confident and delusional writers. I'm certainly not delusional, but I'm not confident, either. I have an insecurity complex the size of a gas giant. Sadly, being insanely self-critical has led to much of my career success, but it's also holding me back. Switching from self-defeating perfectionism to self-empowering confidence without indulging in delusion is going to be difficult, but if it was easy, anybody would do it.
So this "worst economy for three generations" is finally starting to creep into my family's fiscal standing, and thus I have to ask myself--am I willing to leave my hometown to find work? None of my many pursuits are really bound to Louisville, KY, not even my consulting business (which is slow right now--very slow). It is certainly easier to work on GameJabs when I'm in the same city as my fellow founders, but it's not required. It's also a great deal easier to be in the same place with all my family, most of friends, and even my writers group.
But this is not an economy that accommodates easy.
My family is far from destitute, but I've been without a day job since early December, and all my immediate moves to shore up income until GameJabs becomes a paying gig have stalled or fallen through. My wife has a job that she loves here, but she could likely get a commensurate position elsewhere, though if we change states she'll likely have to recertify as a therapist.
I've got eight years of experience writing and developing features for the Web. I'm pretty good at it. But for all that I love Louisville, it is not a hotbed of online enterprise. To get a job in my chosen field--especially in a reasonable amount of time--may require my relocating to a new area code. The question is, when do I finally give up on my hometown, and at what cost?
If anybody has some guidance on the subject (or knows of a kickass telecommute position), I'd love to hear it. Thanks in advance.
The awesome gang over at SFSignal have put together probably their best Mind Meld column to date, offering up writing advice from over a dozen published and professional science fictionwriters and editors. It has some great advice, including how to embrace hate mail, where Robert A. Heinlein was wrong, and exactly what it is that HarperCollins' new SF imprint is looking for. For the sake of example, we give you this paraphrased list from just one of the contributors, authorMatt Hughes:
Leave out the passages that readers love to skip. (Those would be the ones you worked hardest on).
Never open a book by describing the weather.
Never open a book with a prologue. They are usually boring.
Never describe the physical appearance of a character with details that the reader will soon forget.
There are three reasons, actually. The first is my glaring lack of talent, though I can name probably fifty professional authors that haven't let that stop them.
The second is the appalling rate of pay. While I dream of making John Scalzi money, I'd almost certainly make something below Justine Larbalestier money--and that's no knock on Mrs. L. She is teh awesome, but clearly under-appreciated and underfunded. As are most novelists. That's why most writers have day jobs.
But the main reason Im not a professional novelist is that, to do what Charles Stross does, I'd have to average an output of 1000 words per day. And that's finished work, mind you, discounting edits, rewrites, and those days when you merely manage to vomit something onto the page which deserves nothing less that complete and total abandonment, if not outright exorcism from the memory of the universe. Oh, and if one were to get sick or take a vacation, those thousand finished words would needs be made up on another day, skewing the workday average.
I'm not sure I speak 1000 words per day--certainly not 1000 usefully repeatable words--let alone could average such an output in written form. This is why I do about 6 billion other things besides write: partly because I'm better at them than writing; partly because they pay more. But mostly because it's an output I can sustain.
The side gig has been kickin' my lazy ass of late and the day job is rounding into bizarro mutant form with actual processes and duties and a business model that relies on me pumping out Web video show scripts at a mind-numbing rate (seriously, I'm looking for willing supplicants to do similar work on the cheap; ping for details). The mangy scrap of putrid fucktard fiction I vomited all over my writers group last week was such a waste of fucking time that I was seriously contemplating shelving my lets-be-us-a-fictional-type-author aspiration for, say, a decade.
And then Elizabeth Bear, who is not only published and a mondo mega blogger but also sports stamps of approval from both Ensign Crusher and His Lord John the Scalzi goes and reminds me that, yes, it's supposed to be hard--dispshit--and that it's the hard that makes it worthy, so on and so forth. But she invokes the platitudes so well, you see. And she makes these points, that well and truly have convinced me not to go gently into that cliched, self-pitying night:
I read something somewhere that opined that the difference between garage bands and bands that break out is not musical competence, but having found their own sound. I've listened to this happen to a couple of friends' bands, and it's true, I think.
It also applies to writers. You get stuck at that stage because you are trying to find the things that will lift you our of competence and into the next stage. And I can tell you what those things are.
One is confidence (hard, in a business where one faces constant rejection.) Confidence in the story you're telling. Confidence in your ability to tell it. That confidence is what gives a narrative drive, allows you to stop hemming and hawing and say what you mean rather than talking around it.
Another is voice. Sounding like yourself, the rhythm and swing of your rhetoric, the unique chord progressions that make this identifiably your song and not something anybody could have written.
And the interesting thing there is that that personalization--which is what's going to make people love your work--is the same thing that's going to make some people hate it. Strong opinions are what you're after. And some of those strong opinions are going to be negative.
And there's experience and technique and craft, of course, but those are all part of the competence. And mere competence isn't enough. You have to have that something extra.
See what she did there? She made this all my fault--which I already knew--but she also made overcoming it seem so very damn possible. And lo, cynical pragmatist that I am, I live for the possible. So here I be, resolving to stop second-guessing and just carve out some precious time to write my fucking fictional ass off for a change. All because I cyber-stalk Wil Wheaton's tweets and the magnificent bastard goes and lives up to his Nicest Mothefucker On Teh Internets rep.
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