I'm back

Long story short:

I can't separate myself from my job. My life is a long "To Do" list, and while I make an active effort to keep my life balanced, my career takes up over half of my time, and I like it that way.

Or I did.

About a year ago I discovered that the little start up business that I had poured my guts into for six years was going to be sold, and that my cut of the sale was going to be about 3%. You have to keep in mind that I had worked full-time for the company longer than the owner. I won the first government contract for the company, and I did it on my first try. I eventually grew that into a million dollar project that became the life support of the company during the recession, when almost all of our other work dried up.

So... that was all kinds of devastating. On top of the fact that I already had misgivings about the direction I had taken career-wise, I was now being told that the work that I had done wasn't valued. It took awhile for that to sink in, but if you look at my posting frequency, you can see that I became increasingly withdrawn, and then in May, I just stopped writing. At all.

Hmm... this seems to be more "long story" than "short."

So, if we just jump to the end... I resigned from my job and started my own business. I'm loving it. I wake up in the morning and bounce to my computer to get to work. My life and my work are all tangled up again, but I find myself smiling and singing at frequent intervals.

That being said, I'm still delicately managing a debilitating run-in with clinical depression. As luck would have it, I recently happened to catch an interview with Shawn Achor on the Groks Science Show (broadcast out of University of Chicago these days!) about his new book The Happiness Advantage, and I decided that I would like to implement one of his behavior modification exercises on the blog, partly to get me writing, and partly to do something that might make other people happy.

So every day for the next month I am going to post three things that are making me happy. I've done this intermittently before, but this is going to be a concerted effort. If anybody else wants to play along in the comments section, I would be thrilled and honored.

Thing #1: Feathered frost on my bedroom window.

This pattern of frost completely covered my window one morning. This kind of self-replicating braided pattern could probably be modeled using cellular automata, but I still just want to call it "magic."

Thing #2: Domestic partnership health insurance in New York.

Thing #3: Friends like you.

Things That Are Secret

I want to share something personal with you folks, but first I need to digress briefly into my understanding of  the differences between privacy and shame. Privacy is when you conceal something for your own protection. Shame is when you conceal something you know (or think) you've done wrong. Privacy is critical to living a healthy life in a hostile world. Shame is not; in fact, it's detrimental. I like to use clothing as my basis of comparison. Wearing clothing to protect your private parts from harm is healthy. Wearing clothing because you are ashamed (or at least embarrassed) of your body is not.

On that note, I have always liked to think that I am good at keeping portions of my life private without being ashamed of them. After reading the biography of an old college friend, I have had cause to rethink whether that is really true. In particular, although this blog deals with my writing, I have chosen to omit a significant fact. I thought at first I was protecting my privacy, but the more I think about that, the sillier it sounds. Simply put, the people who read this blog are either complete strangers or they are my best friends. The former don't know who I really am, and the latter know me well. The point being that, within certain limits of taste, I can say pretty much anything here.

Unless I'm ashamed (or at least embarrassed).

I don't think that's healthy.

So here goes. Let's do this in two parts.

First: I am a published author. Not famous, but published, and by published I mean I have published stories in real magazines that were then reprinted in real books by major publishers. I've even had stories blurbed for the inside front cover of a couple of "best of" collections.

Now you'd think I would be pretty proud of that, and I thought I was.

But I've never mentioned that fact here. In fact fewer than five people even know.

And that really doesn't sound like "proud" to me.

Which brings us to the second reveal:  The stories are sexually explicit.

Now, it is understandable that I want to keep my sexual writing separate from my real name. But this blog is not under my real name. Furthermore this blog is supposed to be about my writing, so neglecting to mention that I've actually been published is a pretty grievous sin of omission.

So the uncomfortable truth that I have now accepted is that I must have been embarrassed about what I wrote.

I don't want to be anymore.

So there, now it's out there.

***

A brief post-script.

I guess I should further confess that I am an ex-erotic writer and also pretty much an ex-published author all together. There are two reasons for this.

First of all, I ran out of things to say about sex, and I've found it difficult to sell other things. While writing erotica is not a stigma to writing other fiction, it's also not a stepping stone. So far no editor has said "Wow, your porn was reprinted by Little, Brown & Co? Let's give this new story a second look."

Second, after being a "successful" short story writer, I came to accept that there are other things that I am better at that also pay better. I am not Harlan Ellison (some of you are grateful for this). In particular I cannot write Hugo and Nebula award winning fiction over the course of an afternoon while sitting in a shop window. Even though I write regularly, a short story takes me months and, if published, pays a few hundred dollars at best. That's fine for a hobby, but nuts as a career choice.