The Unknown
Well, I was having a massive sift through my archive of digital junk when I found this screen grab. It's of an actual error I got a few years back using Word for Mac, which was even flakier pre Mac OS X, if you can believe such a thing. I still find the message brilliantly amusing, and somehow profound.
This was back when I was still a worker drone for a faceless and menacing beast known as a marketing agency. My job consisted mostly of trying to make nice websites that worked and looked great. I say trying because design by committee rarely works, and most of the time we ended up producing severely compromised work that looked and worked just about OK. The pity being that most of the time, our clients knew exactly what they wanted and we knew exactly what would work for them, us designers and developers. But the client "service" people would step in with their "I learned how to use the Internet by buying an overpriced holiday once on lastminute.com" attitude and invariably queer the pitch. Ah well.
So I'm a designer. I make websites. Still do, and I went freelance in order to give myself the freedom to choose the projects I want to work on, and still have time to do the things that don't necessarily make money, like music, writing, drawing and arsing about.
And it's been great, thanks. I do have more time, and my quality of job satisfaction is vastly improved, as is my work life balance. To invoke some more bafflegab. I downshifted. The band is doing very well too.
But here's the thing.
Somewhere along the line, I've realised that I've not really and truly done too much of the stuff that "doesn't necessarily make money". And I'm asking myself why that is, in the spirit of New Yearliness and Resolution and all that guff.
It's not for want of trying either...
In the past few years, I've started three novels, two screenplays, a short film, a solo music album, two graphic novels and I'm sure somewhere in my filing system I've made a start on some new form of life as well. What's even more bizarre, I consider these projects to be ongoing, even though realistically I know the chances of me finishing all of them are minuscule.
See, in my day to day work, I have project managers and timeboxes. In my band, I have the other four band members to motivate and inspire me. In my personal work, I have only myself. And I'm not a finisher. It bugs the fuck out of me.
I think basically, I like starting things because starting things is exciting and new, and bright and shiny and brilliant and lovely. And I cannot bear to finish things because the act of finishing means the end of beginning. How fucked up is that?
Well, ladies and laddies, THIS ENDS NOW. I'm going to start serialising one of my novels and my shorter graphic novel on this very weblog. If I so much as flinch from continuing to publish them, you, dear readers, must promise to punish me very badly. Together, we will finish some of my personal work. If it kills me.
2005, edit the unknown!
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