that stings

Sometimes you gotta stop trying to explain yourself to everyone, tell all the people that don’t get you to leave you the hell alone, and do your own thing. The last few months have taught me that my life is full of a lot of people that I don’t know very well and that don’t know me very well.

It’s not quite time yet to do the 2005-2006 after-ABC-CLIO, after-the-girlfriend-came-back, after-the-girlfriend-left-again, until end-of-application-season post-mortem, but it soon will be. It has been a season that I would very much like to forget.

Early obvious things that can be mentioned now:

– Have lost some friends and nearly lost others
– Lost a whole shit-ton of money
– Took a step toward doing what I really want

Cryptic. Cryptic. One of the more bizarre downsides of blogs or web diaries is that they’re as public as you always wanted them to be, so you have to be as careful as you don’t want to be to moderate and manage what you publish until it’s no longer so timely as to be able to derail what you’re working on at any given moment.

Think of it as a kind of tape delay on the performance that is your life, used to mask the obscenities that you really want to hurl until the audience can no longer hear (or at least make any decisions based on) them.

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There are a lot of people I miss right now. Some of them aren’t talking to me anymore. I hope they read this and decide to talk to me again. Everything since October really has been a nightmare and a mess, and it would have been moreso if I had waited any longer to make the decisions that I made. But the point is: it wasn’t that I strayed out of contact because I didn’t care about people.

I strayed out of contact because I was in the throes of existential struggle and running to keep ahead of various genres of personal disaster. More on that when the post-mortem occurs, probably in a couple of weeks, give or take, along with (no doubt) a whole pile of posts on what happens next in life.

Stay tuned.

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If nothing else, it is time for me to expand my writing career and to begin to investigate other genres. The fact that the publishing house I’ve done a great deal of my work with for years is once again undergoing some reorganization (and thus, once again I’m not sure whether or not they’ll continue to work with me) gives me the excuse I need to start using my writing for things other than mere tutorial material.

In particular, I have one manuscript laid out, edited, and ready to custom publish, so you may see a publishing company spring up around me in coming years. I will also be shopping some other ideas that are probably far too big for my own marketing britches at the moment. They’re big. As in “I don’t know whether I want to be such a big author” big… Nonfiction trade paperbacks has been a kind of comfort zone in which one can labor in relative anonymity while still accumulating publishing credits and a modest amount of cash. When you move into “A-list titles” you’re trying to play in an entirely different league. Changing subject matter at the same time makes the whole enterprise into a fairly big gamble or, if nothing else, a fairly big lifestyle jolt.

And let’s face it, I’m what could be (generously) called a “nontraditional” individual in the way that I work through and conceptualize my life. The “A-list” of the mass marketplace may not be the ideal place for me in the same way that the field, or the cave, is.

But in any case, the point is that all of this when combined with the sudden increase in the emphasis on photography and design indicates that my life is headed for big changes and what could loosely be called my “second personal revolution.” I’m just barely catching my breath enough after everything that’s happened over the last six months to (perhaps) be able to facilitate it successfully.

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This is it. This is the only one I get. It’s nearly halfway done. How am I doing?