Dream Job
Icebreaker
Back in February, before covid, I hosted a board game night at my house with friends. It was a regular thing we did every two weeks or so where we would play table top board games such as cards against humanity, or Raiders of the North Sea. I bought this deck for a future game night. Long story short, we had one more in person game night before April. I’ve only seen them in person once since all year.
The Icebreaker card deck is 150 unique questions in 6 different color coded categories to “break the ice” and get to know people.
Example: I pick out a card at random and it says: “If you could write a book, what would it be about?”
Answer: I’ve attempted to write two different books before. Both fantasy. Neither is finished. One is an epic fantasy where an unwilling drug addict gets addictive magic powers. The other is about 3 old hens raised in the city that stop laying eggs and are sent to a retirement farm… Things go wrong and they have to adapt to “The real world”. Someday I want to finish both. One of my reasons to start blogging was to publish these stories one chapter at a time, while improving the other skills needed for modern novelists such as social media marketing, building an audience, creating a writing routine with a deadline, and improving my writing skills. I’m not going to promise anything about posting those stories yet… But as I write this post, it is something I want to go back to. I feel that it wouldn’t be worth it unless I had a complete first draft done. That way I could guarantee a certain number of posts. Both have structure issues. Professional grade novel writing is tough because the average word count for a fantasy novel is between 50,000 – 150,000 words. So a good rule of thumb is to double or triple the amount of words you will need to write after multiple draft revisions. Writing novels is full time work, ruthlessly competitive, and doesn’t pay well for years. Anyway one step at a time.
Going back and reading your old stuff feels like this:
What’s your dream job if money didn’t matter?
My dream job is money didn’t matter? Writing. Some combination of blogging and novel writing. My favorite genres are Fantasy and Sci-Fi. During this extended unemployment in the pandemic, I’ve been living this life. Writing first called to me around 2012 because I felt like I ran out of anime shows I wanted to watch. I wanted to write one myself. I attempted multiple times to learn to draw, but don’t have the patience to master it, so I focused on writing. For a while now, writing has been a passion hobby. I’m worried about doing it full time for money because it’s something I enjoy. I made the mistake of making an interest into a career — cooking in restaurants, and resenting it after year of doing it professionally. This is why I haven’t done many recipe blog posts because that stirs up those feelings.
Thanks to living a hermit lifestyle due to social anxiety and undiagnosed functional autism, I’ve watched 159.92 total days of anime. I don’t regret that time. I went to work, but didn’t have much of a social life. I’m okay with having a few good friends as an introvert. But those stretches of time were pretty unhealthy looking back. I did the best I could to cope with my mental health problems with the lack of consistent help from therapists. This year has been strange because I am comfortable in the antisocial hermit lifestyle, but I also don’t want to live that life anymore. Thank goodness that is in the past. At the very least, it seems an end date is approaching for the pandemic late next year.
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© Reilly Anderson. 2020. All rights reserved.
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