Bryan W. Alaspa 1A day for pondering
March 20th 2010 20:28
Well, in typical Chicago-weather fashion, it is snowing as I write this on the first day of spring. I am not a fan of spring. I have spoken about this before. I don’t like when the weather gets all hot and sticky. For me, if the temps never got above 75, I would be a very happy man. 75 is the perfect temperature. You are warm enough to be out there without a jacket and cool enough that if you are a big man, like myself, you aren’t all sweaty and sticky and unpleasant to be around.
It has been a rough week with yours truly. I caught a particularly nasty stomach virus this weekend. So far 2010 has been the Illness of the Month Club year for me. I got some kind of infection in a tooth in January due to damage to a long-dead root, and it required dental surgery. Then, in February, I came down with some nasty virus-y thing right at the end of the month that required whopper antibiotics. My parents came down with the stomach bug first and we thought keeping me away from their house for a weekend would prevent me from getting sick. However, I visited the following weekend and, two days later, came down with the damn thing myself.
I don’t know what the deal is. I have been working at a blistering pace since 2006. I had to make a break at that time from the hideous and horrid world of working in Human Resources. To those of you working in Human Resources right now, you have my sympathies. There are few jobs that can be worse. Often, they talk about coal mining as being the worst job in the world. “Well, at least it ain’t coal mining,” you hear people say. Oh really? I think mining coal, with all of its dangers and (cough, cough) “I think I got the black lung, pop” it still beats working in HR. No one ever walks into an HR office or calls and HR department and says thank you for all of the hard work you have done to provide benefits for them. No, they come in and they are mad because something has gone wrong. That kind of negativity just gets to you after a while.
These days I make my living in writing. I work daily at a PR firm. I enjoy the work there and I enjoy the people I work with. However, it is not what I want to do for the rest of my life. What I want to do is make a living off of the books and articles I write. I have yet to get there. I have several works of fiction available and several works of non-fiction, with more in the works, but I have yet to reach a point where the royalties from those books alone is enough for me to life off of. The people I have met in my business who are able to live off of their royalties have something like 70 books to their name. I am not quite there yet.
So, I have been working hard. I was given a tough deadline with my most recent book contract for a true crime book. This book is my dream project, but it has pushed me hard after a very rough 2009. I wrote two books last year, kept up my pace of blog articles, wrote about baseball, wrote movie reviews, edited several works of fiction and published and then promoted several works of fiction. I gave myself the last three months of 2009 off from new projects, but then continued working on older ones, including finishing a novel I was writing. As soon as 2010 started, I pitched the true crime book and have been pushing myself hard to get it done.
So, today, as the snow falls on the first day of spring in the city I love, I am just pondering. Blogs are sometimes just a place to dump what is in your brain and that is what I am doing here. I am not complaining. I chose to make this change. I have wanted to write since I was in the third grade and now I am. However, I am wondering if my marathon pace is starting to wear me down. Who knows? Maybe my books will sell better if I am dead.
It has been a rough week with yours truly. I caught a particularly nasty stomach virus this weekend. So far 2010 has been the Illness of the Month Club year for me. I got some kind of infection in a tooth in January due to damage to a long-dead root, and it required dental surgery. Then, in February, I came down with some nasty virus-y thing right at the end of the month that required whopper antibiotics. My parents came down with the stomach bug first and we thought keeping me away from their house for a weekend would prevent me from getting sick. However, I visited the following weekend and, two days later, came down with the damn thing myself.
I don’t know what the deal is. I have been working at a blistering pace since 2006. I had to make a break at that time from the hideous and horrid world of working in Human Resources. To those of you working in Human Resources right now, you have my sympathies. There are few jobs that can be worse. Often, they talk about coal mining as being the worst job in the world. “Well, at least it ain’t coal mining,” you hear people say. Oh really? I think mining coal, with all of its dangers and (cough, cough) “I think I got the black lung, pop” it still beats working in HR. No one ever walks into an HR office or calls and HR department and says thank you for all of the hard work you have done to provide benefits for them. No, they come in and they are mad because something has gone wrong. That kind of negativity just gets to you after a while.
These days I make my living in writing. I work daily at a PR firm. I enjoy the work there and I enjoy the people I work with. However, it is not what I want to do for the rest of my life. What I want to do is make a living off of the books and articles I write. I have yet to get there. I have several works of fiction available and several works of non-fiction, with more in the works, but I have yet to reach a point where the royalties from those books alone is enough for me to life off of. The people I have met in my business who are able to live off of their royalties have something like 70 books to their name. I am not quite there yet.
So, I have been working hard. I was given a tough deadline with my most recent book contract for a true crime book. This book is my dream project, but it has pushed me hard after a very rough 2009. I wrote two books last year, kept up my pace of blog articles, wrote about baseball, wrote movie reviews, edited several works of fiction and published and then promoted several works of fiction. I gave myself the last three months of 2009 off from new projects, but then continued working on older ones, including finishing a novel I was writing. As soon as 2010 started, I pitched the true crime book and have been pushing myself hard to get it done.
So, today, as the snow falls on the first day of spring in the city I love, I am just pondering. Blogs are sometimes just a place to dump what is in your brain and that is what I am doing here. I am not complaining. I chose to make this change. I have wanted to write since I was in the third grade and now I am. However, I am wondering if my marathon pace is starting to wear me down. Who knows? Maybe my books will sell better if I am dead.
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