Interruption From Offline Lameness

To continue the lameness ONLINE!

Hm… So the last time I wrote anything for the blog, it was on July 29, from the office. Now here it is, quite a few days later into August and I suppose people are wondering if there’s some nice, big juicy anecdote to share with oddness, neuroses and hilarity aplenty.

There isn’t.

I am making a few interesting discoveries about myself since I got promoted to being Editor-In-Chief at Playworks. These discoveries are an immense source of relief to me since it means that I’ve actually put my money where my mouth is and don’t spit venom from a position of envy because I lack the power of others. The first and most important discovery I have made of late is:

1) I have no taste for power.

Being in charge, having underlings or subordinates, being able to toss out orders and watch others execute them may be a dream come true for some, but personally I just find it annoying. Having to worry about someone will make the deadline or not, having to send out the umpteenth e-mail to some software company to make sure they’re sending in their press materials as promised, having to tell people this article won’t go in, or that article was too big and I’m taking the axe to it is NOT my idea of fun. Worrying when you tell someone to do something and you wonder whether they WILL do it at all is not fun. Being asked to make decisions about the quality or content of work done by someone other than myself is just plain irritating. Why anyone would want to have people subordinate to them is beyond me because it just means you have worries outside of your own personal sphere that you now must contend with.

2) I like to write, not edit.

I would rather be in the driver’s seat when it comes to writing. Being an editor feels too much like being a backseat driver, where you have to respect the guy at the wheel, ’cause he or she IS at the wheel after all, and yet at the same time, you still want to scream, “Left! No LEFT! LEFT!!! ARGH?!? WHERE’D YOU LEARN TO DRIVE!?!?”

I’m a good sport about having my stuff edited. I know my work ALWAYS benefits from having something edited. I just HATE editing myself, because once I start, I have this compulsion that I have to fight to simply tear the whole thing in front of me right down to basics and rewrite it my own way and then have THAT edited by someone else.

Editors are wonderful things that are necessary to the craft of improving writing, and I am quickly discovering that while I CAN edit, I would–perhaps selfishly–rather have MY writing improved than have to worry about improving someone else’s. Especially when some of the work comes and it has no basic understanding of grammar to begin with, which makes me wonder, “Why do you even want to be a writer in the first place when you obviously don’t even care about the fundamentals?” Which brings me back to my point of having my work improved, as opposed to rewriting someone else’s just to get it to a standard I’m happy with. Usually that rewriting means the content is now 80% mine and 20% whatever I thought was salvageable.

3) I am a totally disorganized schmuck.

Wow, big surprise on that last one. Before, it was a matter of having the editor tell me what they wanted, and I would just set my nose to the grindstone and start cranking stuff out. Now, I find myself in the much less interesting position of sitting before an Excel spreadsheet, pushing articles around to see what kind of page count we’ll have for the month, and whether an ad or another article should follow this or that piece and frankly it BORES THE HELL OUTTA’ ME.

I do not like organizing pages and articles. I like organizing thoughts and presenting opinions and articles, but I have no interest in further organizing those opinions and articles into a sequential order that makes up the entirety of the magazine. This to me doesn’t really feel like writing, it feels like administration and I am NOT an administrator, will NEVER make a good one, and will in all likelihood fuck this up big time at some point.

At this point in time, my plan is to wait for the inevitable “rival” that will show up, thinking that they have what it takes to make editor and bitterly resenting the fact that I have the position and they do not. The absolute SECOND that I smell so much as a whiff of that ambition, I’m going to be hollering GIVE IT TO HIM! PLEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASEE!!!!!! And practically be BEGGING for a demotion back to writer, because I AM a writer and not an editor. Let someone who wants this power have it. Me, I’d rather just crank out the pieces rather than push them around on an excel sheet to see how to squeeze ads in between.

In Other News:

Star Wars Galaxies continues to take up the vast majority of gaming time. It’s not like I haven’t been writing. Actually, I have, just making numerous contributions to a Star Wars forum as one of the unofficial Jedi Investigators because we’re all quivering in our space boots at the thought of one day becoming the few, the proud, the Jedi.

For those of you that don’t know (IE, those of you that have lives) one of the tricks to Star Wars Galaxies is that the option to become a Jedi Knight is NOT available from the get go. Instead, there’s some super secret mysterious process to go about becoming a Jedi that the game developers refuse to divulge. It has to do with the actions of your character. Whenever your character fulfills the secret criteria required, BAM! You “unlock” what is referred to as the Force Sensitive Character Slot. This means you must now abandon the character you’ve been playing with, and create a whole brand new one that has the ability to slowly train and become a Jedi.

I want Jedi.

So do thousands of other people. But so far no one’s done it.

So I’m just one of many sad, obsessive geeks who conspires with others across the net, putting out one theory after another on how to unlock FS, tracks the progress and investigations of others, and is basically devoting a rather unhealthy amount of energy to what more or less amounts to a virtual quest. But then since I’ve always wanted to be a Jedi, this, to me, seems like a pretty cool thing to do.

So How’s Everything Else?

Not too bad, actually, thanks for asking.

Aside from the discovery that I am not power hungry (An IMMENSE source of relief to me, I was always worried I talked about hating being in charge ’cause I was never in charge and thus envious. Nope, after being in charge, I can DEFINITIVELY say I LOATHE it) the job itself is still pretty okay. I get to do some writing, just not as much as I’d like. I’m still playing Star Wars Galaxies and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. The relationship still seems to be on steady ground as the girlfriend and I realize that we can live with each other without killing each other, although the one year mark is just a few months away now. At that point I’ll find out whether I have any sort of commitment phobic latent reflexes that were just waiting to kick in, but somehow I doubt it.

There is the little matter of the fact that I now have to keep regular hours, whereas she continues to live on Martian Standard Time of a 28 hour day, so sometimes she’s awake during the day, and other times she’s asleep, as her 20 hour day marches inevitably through the week, pushing her bed time around like an obssesive janitor with a broom and only one scrap of paper to clean in the whole school. But, we’re getting used to it.

How are things on the publishing front?

Beats me. I should write to my agent and ask him. I’ve been so plugged into Star Wars Galaxies that I completely forgot about it.

Which means, yes, that I haven’t written a single new word for the third book. But since I’ve got
two books under my belt anyway, I refuse to feel guilty about that. Two in the hole? I can afford to slack.

What movies have you seen?

Since Finding Nemo? NONE.

The combination of lack of money with Star Wars Galaxies has effectively put an end to that, so I haven’t seen The Hulk, Charlie’s Angel’s 2, Terminator 3, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or any of the other latter half summer popcorn flicks. That should be bothering me a lot more, but since watching any of those movies would deprive me of SWG time, it hasn’t. This same explanation also gets a big ditto for DVDs.

When the hell are you coming HOME?!?

Talk to my agent.

What is your idea of a perfect life?

Gee, I’m glad you asked.

First, I wouldn’t be here, I’d be in Vancouver. With the girlfriend. Do not ask about marital status, you’ll be giving her too many ideas that will be addressed eventually, but in the meantime, I don’t need any brochures for how to calculate your salary to buy a nice, shiny rock dropped in my lap “innocently” because she just “happened” to have it handed to her (after scouring all the best jewelry stores for the better part of the afternoon).

LET IT LIE.

I’d be in Vancouver, and I’d be a novelist, and I would have The Cave, my legendary escape from reality, sound proofed with the Uber Gaming Rig PC (IE, constantly upgraded with the fastest processor, graphics card, RAM, and other necessities to ensure SWG is always lookin’ fast and pretty) all the game consoles, a truly MONSTER plasma television with 6.1 THX certified sound and a DVD archive to rival the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences itself. I would probably also have a couple of 80′s arcade game cabinets in there, just for nostalgia’s sake, and some bean bag chairs set up. Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and various anime posters would adorn the walls, and so would a shelf full of genre fiction and comic books.

Aside from trying to live in The Cave (At our current apartment I have already set up what is called The Cave, although, to be fair, it’s really The Cave .02) I will crank out my novels, occasionally venture out to make a total ass of myself on book tours (Oh yeah, this all works under the assumption that not only do my books get out, but people really like them), or accompany the girlfriend on one of her Cons since I’m convinced she’s going to make a splash of her own in comics and thus will have to deal with her own set of fans who are, to be perfectly honest, probably a much scarier bunch than any I’d have to deal with.

I think in this life we’ll probably have favorite restaurants that we’ll be pretty well known at, wander around little shops in town or on the islands, and generally just be the weirdo couple that seems to only have one foot in this reality. The other is basically in our own heads.

Not everyone’s idea of happines, but it’s mine, and I’m hoping its achievable sometime within the next little while.

Okay, that was a fairly sizeable post. Everyone happy with it?

Good.

I have to get back to the Jedi Forum…