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 It took awhile for that to sink in, but if you look at my posting frequency, you can see that I became increasingly withdrawn, and then in May, I just stopped writing.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.

"Why Do You Write?"

Last Wednesday at 2:30 AM I was driven out of bed by insomnia. That used to be a frustrating and frequent occurrence... I would snap out of a fitful sleep, my thoughts spinning. It would be great to say that my mind was consumed with some ingenious solution to the fighting in Gaza or to the spreading economic collapse, but these brain seizures never seem to address anything significant... even on a personal level. It's just some short-circuit of the mind... and suddenly all processing power is devoted to some triviality like naming every teacher that I have ever had... it's just crazy, useless shit.

Mercifully, the insomnia doesn't happen much anymore. When it does, I no longer lie in bed while the ball lightning bounces around my skull. I get up and do something. Usually I write. On that evening I wrote about why I write. I didn't post it on the blog, because I don't let myself blog after bedtime. (Partly to encourage a regular sleep cycle, and partly to prevent myself from posting stupider-than-normal stuff.) After I finished dumping my brain into my journal, I checked the blogs I read, and was suitably stunned to see that Brad Green (over at "Elevate the Ordinary") had posted an entry entitled "Why do you write?" the previous evening. Quite a strange synchronicity... must be some disturbance in the ether.

So, all of this is a rather long preamble to summarizing what I wrote about why I write. It is, in fact, rather telling that in order to figure out why I write, I wrote about it. Writing is my natural method of problem solving, both on a personal and professional level. On the one hand, it's how I told my Dad that I'm gay, and it's how I grieved when my dog Dante died. On the other, it's how I get myself unstuck when the research isn't moving forward at work—I just pull up a blank page and start exploring my assumptions.

I write in the same way that other people hum to themselves or sketch in notebooks. It is how I explore and map my internal landscape. Because I have been writing for as long as I have known how to spell, and because I write every single day, I have achieved a certain level of skill. I take it very seriously, but only in the same way that a jogger takes running very seriously. Like anyone else, I have fantasies that my novel will be successful; those fantasies are not what get me up before dawn every day, though. I don't expect to become a best-selling author any more than a serious jogger expects to win the Boston marathon. That's not cynicism or false modesty—it's just statistics. The brutal truth is that, if I decide to try to publish my novel, I probably won't even secure an agent. If I find an agent, she probably won't be able to attract a publisher. If the book gets published, it probably won't survive a month on bookshelves. And finally, even if the book did sell well, the next one probably won't.

So, no, I don't write because of any particularly lofty ambitions. The simple truth is that I write because it comes naturally to me, because it is personally challenging, and because it keeps me healthy. That's all I need.

The Return of the Word Count Graph

In my previous NaNoWriMo blogs I would post progress charts of my daily word totals. They were pretty popular (well, OK it was only cs10 who commented on them, but we make every effort to content the kill-bot), so here they are again.

The graphs are built by a spreadsheet that I use to track my writing totals. It also calculates how much I have to write per day to stay on pace to meet my monthly goal. Maybe I'll write more about that another time.

The January total was 14,519, which was 94% of my goal. We'll grade that as an "A", right?