Choose Ye This Day Where Ye Shall Go

I lost my job today. They ended the contract at the worst possible time. My resources are low. Certain other matters are not quite as resolved as they need to be.

Two paths lay before me. There are, of course, many paths, but my recent unemployment experience has taught me that the BEST two paths are either

a) Pay a rather steep fine for canceling my lease and move back in with the folks. This will initially be expensive but save me a TON of money in monthly expenses, and this time it would not be for emotional reinforcement but financial stability.

This time I would only take a job as a PERMANENT project manager. Or I'd start my own damn company but no more tech writing and no more contracts.

But the price for doing this would be staying in Georgia...well, basically forever. At least for a very long time. I have been talking of moving for years and certain kinds of roots I have never put down because I have been wanting to leave for so long. No more. If I choose this route, I'm staying, and that means taking all the good and flaws that go with it.

Which also means all the baggage of my past mistakes.

b) Pay a rather steep fine for canceling my lease and move to another city. There would be no prep work, no scouting, no resource cushion, no job waiting, but the longer I wait, the less resources I have. And then take WHATEVER job I can find. Odds are I could get a job finding a tech writing job fairly fast.

I could move with the wind but I'm not doing that. I'd choose a city, and move there will little more than a wing and a prayer. Its risky but the pay off could be tremendous. A new start. All of my past mistakes and growing pains about becoming who I am would be gone.

The only baggage I'd have to deal with would be what I BROUGHT with me, and these days that's a LOT less than there was.

But its kind of nuts because my reserve is TINY compared to what it was the last time.

I'm not ready like I was last time. Not at all.

Are there more choices? Sure there are.

But I'm not a fan of taking them. I'm tired of this. I'm just tired of this nonsense living my life the way it is. I need SOME kind of a direction and while nothing is certain in life, what IS certain is that I'm sick of staying in Atlanta, and I'm sick of being a tech writer.

There are good things about Atlanta, and I could still make this place my home. There are livable things about being a tech writer and I could potentially eventually get a job in a different city.

At the moment, if you're reading this, a statement of support would do more than you might think. Thoughts on which path I should take would also be helpful.

We'll see what happens.

Regardless, whatever decision I make has to be made by Saturday. Tomorrow will be largely about gathering intelligence, and a lot of it, and very fast.

Nickled and Dimed to Death

So Dragon Con.

It was the best of Cons, it was the Worst of Cons. I'm going to do something uncharacteristic and keep the details to myself. I learned a lot, but the lessons I learned are slightly difficult to explain...so I'll try to at least summarize it. I learned I like to dance. A lot. I learned that I love life, and that even though elements of my life quite frankly suck, and always will, that there is still a great deal of value in what I have, and what I have is quite frankly pretty cool, especially if I ever get a chance to get some inertia going.

I'm more focused now; three paths-Writing, Voice Acting, Project Management. Those are my careers and I plan to make money at them. Everything else is just a hobby. With writing its going to be screen writing, audio drama, and poetry first, with prose and other things a distance second. Technical writing will pay the bills when it must, but I have grown quite weary of it, and will leave it as soon as a I reasonably can.

Work is both stable and unstable. IE, situation normal. However, I'm being nickled and dimed to death with all kinds of minor expenses. Not enough to hurt, but enough to slow me down. All the more reason to press forward with plans for alternate sources of revenue so that contract or no, I'll always have a steady income. I have a wide range of talents (even if I don't have the one I want) and I plan to maximize their utility to the hilt.

It does mean I'm keeping my moving plans VERY flexible. Magic 8 ball says, "WTF?" at the moment :) Seriously, this is perhaps one of the most unclear moments of my life in terms of what might happen, but my attitude towards it is more sure, more focused and more stable than it has ever been. Its not that the things that suck don't bother me, I just...put it in perspective. That includes friends. I pretty much accept them for who they are, and what their limitations or strengths might be. I help them when I can, and ...don't...when I can't. :) Part of that means understanding what is or isn't a friendship as compared to say...an acquaintance. :) But I still maintain that it is better to treat an acquaintanceship as a friend than a friend as an acquaintanceship, just have no illusions as to what the actual situation might be.

We recently cleaned out the house of Doom. We are winning. All but two rooms are done. Tonight I start to read, "High Midnight" by Rob Mosca and write my treatise for my script writing class tomorrow.