I just want to provide an update on my “work” and “situation”. You can also look at a correlated post on the
“Information Technology Job Market” blog (check Blogger profile).
My goals right now are to have a publishable draft of
my novel “Angel’s Brother” by the end of 2017, and to have some of my music in
performable format (with some contacts with others who could perform it – and it
might be in the bits and pieces, or Schumanesque miniatures), to have a video
that communicates the substance of my books, and to start marketing the feature
screenplay “Epiphany” on my books.
There are a couple of caveats. There is something to the rumors, but nothing to announce yet. There is a possibility that I will sell my
trust’s “inherited house” later this summer and relocate. It’s possible that I could consider a lower
cost purchase in a city like Dallas, Charlotte, etc. There are a number of scenarios and I won’t
go into them in detail here. During the months of July and August I expect to
make a more concentrated due diligence to see if I should do this. One purpose is to make it easier for others
to work with me, and to make some kinds of travel simpler to set up if I should
wind up on the road a lot. (If there is
a “Do Ask, Do Tell” feature movie, you can bet my life will play out “on the
road”).
Another is that I have discussed a couple of scenarios
where I could go back to work (on the IT blog I mentioned above).
All of this brings back the deja vu of workplace experience in the weeks immediately preceding a merger announcement. It's "business as usual" in the meantime. But it's unsettling. Well, change is good.
I’ve made some progress on all the components of my
work, with essentially two cycles of self-assigned tasks since the end of 2015
(after a summer and fall that year of a lot of travel). I have some pieces of a documentary DADT
video self-filmed, but I would need to find some professional help with editing
and re-shooting to make them effective.
One particular effort will be setting up my screenplay
and especially the novel so that they would sell. I have some concerns about
both: people may feel that I am
pandering to old-fashioned, cis-gender, white-centric paradigms of virtuous
protagonist characters. Well, so did “Smallville”
and “Everwood” less than 15 years ago.
But in the past few years, identity politics seems to have entered art,
with the idea that specific groups of people need to be raised up (as in Groban’s
song), and that doing so would sell books or movies. I definitely see this in some feedback. I certainly have a lot of interesting ideas
that could sell a book, including how the next pandemic could creep up on us,
or what provable alien contact would be like if it really happened, and even
the idea of a novel way to get “proof of heaven”. Normally, these kinds of
ideas could sell well. In very recent
times, people seem to want much more reassurance from the characters an author
develops; they want to really find
themselves in these fictional people.
It's difficult to make concrete progress on unpublished material. A blog post becomes a "deliverable" and a concrete result, so sometimes I do post discussions or extracts of my progress.
In the future, I expect to make my postings about my “strategic
planning” on my Wordpress blogs: the
Notes blog, when I considered how these different components work together, and
the baseline Media Reviews blog, when individual components (like the music
compositions or novel plot) are discussed “hands separately”.
There is a write-up of “projects in progress” on the “Media
Reviews Executor” page here.
There is a directory to all my sites on the “Notes”
blog here.