Job woes...

..

I know I've "gone dark" these past few weeks... apologies. But I have an excuse this time, honest!

Earlier this month I joined the Unhappy Fraternity of the Jobless, when my company "laid me off" friom my job of 12 years. I've been spending the last few weeks taking stock of my professional and personal lives and deciding what I want to do, as well as utilizing the outplacement services provided to me by my ex-employer.

Being unemployed, in a word, sucks. I've been told that, since I got a severance, I should look at this as an "unplanned paid vacation", but I guess my brain just doesn't work like that because all I can imagine is my severance money running out and not being able to make rent.

Faugh. Just... faugh.

Now the good news...

Since getting laid off on Feb. 4 (via speakerphone BTW... classy), I've completed two new short stories as well as 6 chapters of a new novel. I've also done about 85% of a novella, set in the same universe as the Blood Magic books, and have story seeds for at least 2 other short pieces. I really should be using this time to write agent letters, to try and get my urban fantasy manuscript out in front of editors, but every time I try I get breathless and tense... Guess I'm still not recovered all the way, yet.

Wish me luck on finding a new job so things can get back to normal.

-Matt

..

Proofreading porn (for Sherrian)....

.

...who might find THIS funny.

"People who say there’s no such thing as easy money have a point. You don’t know the meaning of tedium until you are midway through correcting the spelling and punctuation in a thirty-page description of fellatio written at breakneck speed by an engineering student trying to make enough money to go to Cancún for spring break. Thirstily, she wrapped her hungry, vampire-red lips like a Baker SPD open side-pipe vise around his throbbing machinelike…hmm, take out that second comma, of course, but are vampires red? And can a vise be said to wrap? Doesn’t it more, let’s see, clamp? Tidying porn prose induced in me a peculiar irritability, almost a kind of claustrophobia—there was the frustration of having to inch word by word along such idiotic sentences, and also the other kind of frustration, which those sentences, despite their idiocy, induced."

Thanks go to Andrew Sullivan for the link...

..

I hope they're teaching this in schools....

.

11 well-spent minutes, indeed...



The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo


..