Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Well. This has been a rather bad day, with a good ending.

The day started with insults. All digital: e-mails and forum posts making wild assumptions or withholding information. Made me stalk around a bit, alone, to let off some steam before replying graciously. I was apologetic for causing any frustrations or making mistakes. Cleared up what misunderstandings I could, and turned away from a discussion that got nasty. It was that or get really angry.

On top of that, after looking over my finances recently, I came to an inescapable conclusion: I can’t afford to keep Otherspace going at the moment. So I e-mailed the Otherspace team this morning to inform them of this, and that I hope to start things up again in a month or so.

Man, that was unpleasant. I know my animators expect a regular paycheck, so if I’m not following through on that…I feel bad. I feel like I’m not doing my job. And I’m not, really; I should have handled my finances better. But, well, I didn’t. So here we are. I’m not hugely depressed, just mildly disappointed in myself.

Work went pretty well, and afterwards I swung by the grocery store for essentials, then home, where one of my Alibris books had arrived. It was Tom Peters’ The Brand You 50, which I spent much of the evening reading.

I’m taking its advice to heart. Which is: if you’re a white-collar worker, your job is not guaranteed. Heck, it’s almost guaranteed to not be around in ten years. So, go back to the way it was two hundred years ago: you’re a colonial, a pioneer, and you have to chart your own destiny. View yourself as a company; you have to think about how to market yourself, position yourself, do research, etc.

My initial response: I wrote down all of my major projects on index cards, and ended up with eight of them. I tore up half of them. I now have four projects on my plate: Writing my young adult novel, drawing a comic, becoming the Paranoid Masochistic Build Engineer for Syllable, and keeping up with Otherspace duties.

Of course, that latter won’t be much of a chore for the next month or so….