Frustrations – Page 10 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Thanksgiving report from Texas

So for Thanksgiving this year, I drove down with my sister and brother in law to have Thanksgiving in Houston with my other sister’s family. It’s Friday night, and I’m about to hit the sack to get prepped for the long 24+ hour drive back to Utah, but let me say, this vacation has been great!

It’s so good to spend time with family, especially when you live across the country and can’t see each other very often. My niece has grown so much in the past year, and she is so freaking cute it’s unbelievable. Earlier tonight, we were watching slide shows on my sister’s projector and playing around with my niece: “Where’s Aunt Dot? Where’s Oopah? Where’s Uncle Joe?” Heh, Uncle Joe. I will do my best to live up to the awesomeness of that title.

Thanksgiving dinner was AMAZING. Holy freaking crap, my sisters can cook. They put together a traditional dinner from scratch, and everything was perfect. I’m so glad they’re sending a bunch of leftovers with us on the drive tomorrow, because I would much rather subsist on that than random junk food from gas stations.

Besides family, though, one of the coolest parts of the vacation was visiting the Houston Space Center and seeing mission control and one of the original Saturn V rockets. That’s right–see that room in the picture? I was there.

Which immediately begged the question: Why am I not in space right now? Seriously, I would do just about anything to go up in space. Thinking about the Pilgrims made me think about colonizing other planets, and how the difficulties may be similar and yet different. It also made me think about my latest novel, Into the Nebulous Deep, which (I’m hoping) is a colonization story set in space, and how I can use some of the stuff from the Pilgrims in my own work.

Speaking of which, the writing has been going very slow recently. A lot of it has to do with interruptions from the vacation (which frankly are more important), but it also has to do with my growing frustrations with the current project. I’m about 15k in the rough draft of ITND, and…it just doesn’t seem as good as my other work. Of course, it’s just a mental thing–none of my rough drafts has ever been any good–but man, it’s tough to get through.

To complicate things, I’m going to have to find a job for the Christmas season, at least to tide me over. I’m really hoping to get that wilderness job, but the training starts January 13th, and I don’t have the funds to spend all my time writing, like I have this past month.

I’ll know for sure the first week of December whether I’ve been invited to the training–and if I am, it’s going to throw a real kink in my writing routine. Each job shift lasts a full week, during which time I’ll be completely unplugged, living in the wilderness. I might get some time to work on poetry or short stories, but no novels.

The upside is that I get six days off completely free to do whatever I want, but I’m worried that it’ll be difficult, at least at first, to regain sufficient momentum in that short time. I’m sure I can get used to it eventually, but for the first few months, it will probably be tough.

For that reason, I want to get as far in ITND as I can before January 13th, perhaps even finish it (HAHAHAHA!!! As if that’s going to happen). So the fact that I haven’t progressed from this one scene for like a week is really killing me. Throw in a temporary job for the Christmas season, and I’ll probably go crazy.

That’s what my writing angst says, anyways. In other words, everything is fine and life is great. Now I’m going to get some sleep before driving across the freaking country all day tomorrow and Sunday. Night!

Juggling projects isn’t a good antidote to procrastination

Yeah, the title basically says it all. I’m working on Genesis Earth 5.0 and Into the Nebulous Deep 1.0, and while I’m doing really well in the one, I’m not keeping up so much in the other.

First, Genesis Earth. Since I finished the previous draft more than a year ago, I thought I’d find a lot of problems, especially with my prose. Instead, while a lot of the sentence/paragraph level stuff needs tightening, I’m finding to my surprise that the writing isn’t all that bad.

Today, I breezed through over 8k words, and that between running, donating plasma, FHE, and a bunch of other distractions. If I put even a moderate amount of effort into this, I can have it finished before next week. That’s good, because I had an agent at World Fantasy request to see it; if I can put it on her desk before Thanksgiving, that can only be a good thing.

But as for my other project, ITND 1.0…yeah, it’s not coming along as well as I’d hoped. The reasons are stupid, too–mostly just lost momentum and writer’s avoidance.

Right now, I’m stuck in a scene where I’m trying to build romantic tension between two characters. I feel like I have a decent handle on who they are…but for some reason, it feels a little too shallow. Maybe that’s because I’m still discovering who these characters are, maybe it’s because I tend to go deeper than most–or maybe it’s just because it’s the kind of scene that’s hard to get into, but once you’re in, it really flows. I just haven’t forced myself to write it–maybe once I do, these problems will go away.

I do feel like I’m doing a pretty good job setting up the story. Last week, I ran the first chapter through my online writing group, and while it definitely had issues, everyone said that they would keep reading if this was a book they’d picked up off the shelf. That tells me that at least I’m starting in the right place.

The characters, though, and the conflict…I worry that it’s not as deep or as hard-hitting as the first book, Mercenary Savior. I skimmed over that book just a couple days ago before sending it out to a friend from World Fantasy, and…wow. I don’t want to brag, but I think I did a good job with that one. A damn good job.

So can I pull off that kind of depth and impact in the second book? That’s the fear, that it won’t live up to the first one. And certainly, the rough draft won’t be as good–not by a long shot. But the subsequent drafts? I don’t know.

Maybe I should just write and worry about it later, though. When I was in the middle of Worlds Away from Home, I constantly thought to myself how crappy the draft was. When I got to the end, though, and looked back on how far the story had come, I realized that it had potential to be at least as powerful as Mercenary Savior–perhaps even more. And to be honest, that came as quite a surprise.

I don’t know. I hope I’m not just deceiving myself–it can be hard, when you’re toiling in obscurity, to separate the truth from your own self-deception. But for now, things are going well–I’m making good progress in Genesis Earth, and while Into the Nebulous Deep has lost a lot of momentum, all it really needs is a good solid block of undistracted writing to get it going again. Life is good.

Word splurge and refining the query

So this morning, I worked on the fifth draft of Genesis Earth while Facebook chatting with some friends I made from World Fantasy. Next thing I know, it’s 4:30 and I’ve revised through 6.5k words.

To be fair, most of that work was pretty simple–polishing the prose, cutting unnecessary verbage, and the like. But…wow. Talk about a splurge.

Because of that, though, I didn’t get any work done in my other project, Into the Nebulous Deep. However, I did do something I’ve been needing to do since before World Fantasy: draft a query letter for Mercenary Savior. Here it is:

Dear _______,

My name is Joseph Vasicek, and I am writing to query my science fiction novel, Mercenary Savior. I thought my work would be a good fit for you because ______.

As the galactic empire slowly collapses under the onslaught of the starfaring Hameji nomads, the sixteen year old James McCoy sets out to rescue his older brother and sister, Ben and Stella, from the Hameji conquerors.

Things look bleak until he meets Danica Nova, captain of a down-and-out mercenary company, who takes him in and becomes his mentor. James reminds Danica of her brother, whom she failed to save when the empire slaughtered her family years ago. Now, she hopes to find some redemption from her demons by saving James from his own.

However, as the two of them spiral onto a collision course with destiny, neither of them realizes that Stella has become a concubine to the Hameji overlord–and that Ben has been brainwashed and made an elite shock trooper in the unit sent to hunt them down.

Mercenary Savior is approximately 120,000 words long. While it stands on its own as a complete story, it has potential for at least one direct sequel and several indirectly connected novels set in the same universe.

My previous publications include one short story published in the December 2009 issue of Leading Edge. I have also won first and second place in the annual Mayhew short story contest at Brigham Young University (for 2009 and 2007 respectively). In addition, I keep a regular blog at http://onelowerlight.com/writing.

Thank you very much for your consideration. As noted in your submission guidelines, I have included _____.

Cordially,

Joseph Vasicek

So what do you think? Does the pitch work? Does it resonate well, or is it boring / cliched / confusing in any way? Any thing else egregious that I should fix before I send this out? Please let me know!

I really suck at submitting stuff. Right now, I’ve only got three or four queries out on Genesis Earth, and one on Mercenary Savior. Like most things, though, the only way to change that is with practice. By next week, I want to send out at least five queries on Mercenary Savior and have the synopsis ready to go.

Also, my friend from World Fantasy had an interesting suggestion for me: try to break into the small presses with my science fiction stuff, to build a name for myself, and work my way up from there.

This runs directly contrary to Dave Wolverton’s break in with a bang philosophy, but it makes sense; very few major publishers seem to be publishing much space opera these days (with the exception of Baen). From what I gathered at World Fantasy, science fiction is a difficult sell these days, and several sf writers are going this route.

I could write more, on other subjects, but that’s enough for now. Good frickin night.

World Fantasy 2010: Day 2

Wow, what a tiring day. I feel drained, mentally and physically, and I didn’t even spend all that much time at the parties tonight.

I got started a bit early, prowling around the book-swap table, where I was rewarded with some books that look really good. If you know what you’re doing, you can totally get the price of your admission ticket in free books (and then some). I packed super light for that exact reason.

The convention started out with an awesome panel titled “Fantasy Gun Control,” where the panelists discussed why fantasy tends to favor swords over guns, even though guns have existed since the 1300s. Funniest quote from the panel: Walter Jon Williams asked what if Samuel L. Jackson was one of the Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers from Harry Potter, and Charles Gannon quipped “do I have to get magical on your ass?”

The other panel I attended was “The Tension Between Art & Commerce,” an excellent panel which very quickly evolved into a cage fight between Nancy Kress and her publisher, Tom Doherty. It basically went something like this:

Tom: I don’t think there is any tension; the best art always sells the best.

Nancy: No way! Just look at Danielle Steele: her writing is CRAP, yet she sells like crazy–and that’s the norm!

Tom: But true art endures beyond its time and sells much better over the long run. After all, just look at Homer and the Iliad.

Nancy: Homer? Are you serious? He’s been dead, what–2,000 years?

Tom: Yeah…but my point is, if you’re a writer, you need to write what’s in your heart and not chase the market. If you do try to chase the market, your writing will be crap, AND it won’t sell.

Nancy: True, but what about my apocalyptic novel about a plague that turns domestic dogs feral? I got four rejections that all said: “this book is great, but it would offend dog lovers so much that we can’t publish it.”

Tom: Well, those were just stupid editors.

Nancy: Uh, Tom…one of those was from your publishing house!

Of course, those aren’t exact quotes, and Nancy was very quick to make it known that she loves Tom and appreciates him for publishing so much of her work, but that was more or less how it went. It was hilarious.

At the same time, the panel was quite useful as well. Everyone mentioned how a writer’s willingness and ability to learn the craft and accept criticism is key–especially after getting an editor. Without this capacity to learn, aspiring writers will almost never succeed, whereas those who have it have a chance.

The rest of the time I spent hanging out and shmoozing with various people. I interviewed both Dan Wells and Peter Ahlstrom for the Mormon Artist article on BYU’s “class that wouldn’t die,” and those interviews went very well. Those two guys are seriously awesome–way down to earth and easy to talk with.

I also pitched to a couple agents, and I think it went very well. For one of them, I thought I saw her eyes light up as I described the characters in my novel from last year, Genesis Earth. It might just be wishful thinking, but her response was enough to convince me that I need to give that story a thorough revision and send it out to her before the end of next month.

I worry, though, that there’s not as much demand for the kind of fiction I write. My writing falls very solidly into science fiction (space opera, to be more specific), but everything I see here at the con is fantasy–epic fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal, steampunk. No science fiction, except from a couple small presses. Just fantasy.

In the art vs. commerce panel, Ginger Buchanan claimed that science fiction was never a popular genre–that the popularity was all due to a handful of specific writers and a handful of specific works. I’m not sure I agree with that, but it is a bit discouraging. Speculative fiction is a fairly niche corner of the publishing world to begin it, and to see and hear people within that niche treating science fiction as ANOTHER niche…it doesn’t bode well for someone who wants to make a full time living writing it.

But then again, maybe my stuff is good enough that it’ll find a home anyways–and not just a home in a small press, but with a big enough publisher that I can actually be a full time writer. I don’t hold any illusions about my books making me fabulously rich and famous or somehow spawning a new sub-genre unto itself, but I do think my writing is good enough that I can shoot big and hope to get somewhere–perhaps even expect it. I don’t know, but I feel that the hope is justified, at least.

Anyhow, that’s probably more angst than you cared to read. World Fantasy is going great, and I’m exhausted, so I’m going to hit the sack. Good night.

I’m still here!

Man, it’s been forever since I’ve posted something. I’d blog more often, but I think you guys would get bored pretty quick if all I did was tell you how the writing went each day. Don’t be fooled; the writing process isn’t NEARLY as interesting as the stuff we write (unless you’re writing amateur fanfic…just kidding!).

So anyways, life is extremely busy these days. Between my temp job at a warehouse, Leading Edge, Institute, church, Quark, and finishing the revision of Mercenary Savior, I feel incredibly crunched for time. I’ve been pulling about 1k to 3k words per day, but last week was horrendously unproductive and I’ve got to really push hard to finish this beast in time for World Fantasy.

But it’s going to happen–that’s for sure. I’ll finish my job at the end of this week, and with the extra free time I’m sure I’ll be able to finish it in time. I passed the 100k word mark last night, and it looks like this draft is going to be around 120k to 125k. Still a little long for a science fiction novel, but not too long (I hope).

As I get closer to the end, I’ve noticed that I tend to use a shotgun approach in resolving the conflicts in my rough drafts. Instead of following each arc through in a focused, logical manner, the last few chapters of my drafts tend to go all over the place, trying halfheartedly to resolve everything at once.

The bad thing about this is that the last half of the book requires a lot more work to revise. The good part, however, is that I can cut off a ton of fat at the tail end, significantly shortening the final wordcount. It’s good to be able to manipulate that number late in the game.

As far as my plans for November, if I do participate in nanowrimo, it’s going to be with a serious project that I was already planning on doing, not something wild and spontaneous. I don’t think taking the time off to write something I know will never be published is going to help me as a writer.

At the same time, however, it only takes about 1.5k to 2k per day for 30 days to complete nanowrimo, and that’s about the rate that I’m writing right now (a little less, actually). With World Fantasy smack at the end of October, I probably won’t start anything new until November 1st. So even though I’m not taking time off from my serious stuff to do it, I probably will participate in nanowrimo this year.

As far as other stuff going on in November, I am very much looking forward to seeing my sister in Houston over Thanksgiving weekend. Since I don’t know if I can find a job that will give me that week off, and since I’m already in a pretty good financial place with the money from this last job, I think I’ll take most of the month off to focus on my writing, rather than look for full-time work.

However, I have been thinking a lot about becoming a freelance translator. One thing I’ve learned from working in a warehouse (and I’ll blog more about this at the end of the week) is that I hate not using the stuff I learned in college. My original plan when I chose to major in Mideast studies was to use Arabic to find a regular job until the writing took off, and so far I haven’t done that.

Besides, I REALLY want to go back to the Middle East someday. If I can improve my Arabic to the point where I feel I can get along better than the average American student, I might just move over there for a year or two (or five or ten…).

Anyhow, I’ve got a ton of stuff to do (including writing–I want to hit at least 3k today), so that’s all for now. See ya!

Blarg!

What a crappy unproductive day.

This morning, I had all sorts of technical difficulties with my podcatcher and mp3 player. Spent so much time fixing those that I got no writing time in whatsoever.

Work actually got out on time today, which was nice, but I had so many chores to do before institute that I was literally eating dinner while I fixed the treats. Even then, I was still twenty minutes late (but the lesson was awesome, and so were the treats).

Went to the Quark movie forum to relax a little, watched a couple episodes of Full Metal Alchemist. It was good to relax and socialize, but I didn’t get back until 10:00 pm, and had to update my mp3 player for the next day of work. That took some time, because the podcasts were taking forever to download on the slow apartment connection…and to make a long story short, I only had about half an hour to write.

So I took an hour, which means I’ll probably be freaking exhausted when I wake up tomorrow. Blarg!

I’ve found that I need to get a solid two or three hour block of writing in each day, otherwise it’s a wash. Tomorrow, I hope to have that in the morning and after Leading Edge, but if things are going slow I might have to pull out of Leading Edge and just focus on the writing. World Fantasy is coming up, and I absolutely MUST finish this project and make it shine.

In other news, I heard back from the wilderness job today. They don’t have a spot open for the November training, since they need to focus on hiring women in order to have enough counselors to take care of their female students. However, they want to wait list me for the January training, which is a good sign. I’ll just have to find another short-term job to carry me through November and December (and get ready for camping on the snow–it’s going to be crazy!)

Anyhow, what am I doing writing this when I should be sleeping?? Ach! Goodnight!

Third Quarter 2010

This might be more than a little dorky, but I keep track of how much I write each day in a giant spreadsheet and do a blog post at the end of each quarter summing up how things went. It’s October already, so this is the Q3 report. Here goes:

In July, I was working part time at the call center and donating plasma while looking for work. I look back on it now and it seems that I had a ton of free time, and perhaps that shows in the way my productivity climbed way up in the first part of the month…but then it fell back down and never picked up again.

Part of that might have to do with the difficulty of the story. Around the middle of July, I wrote through my half-finished draft of Worlds Away from Home and started drafting entirely new material. It was my first time composing a new story in over a year, and I found it pretty tough. At one point, I had to bike down the Provo river trail and write on a park bench just to get the creative juices to flow. It was difficult.

The first big dip in the beginning of August came because of my day trip to Saint George to interview Dave Wolverton. That threw a fairly decent kink in my writing routine. The second dip towards the end of August came when I was between projects (Worlds Away from Home and Mercenary Savior).

I’m not sure why I was never able to break 20k words per week, or why most of the time I was writing below 15k. I got a new job in mid-September, but my writing productivity actually increased. It’s frustrating, because I wish every day could be a 4k or 5k day, where everything is flowing and the story is awesome. Blarg.

So anyway, with World Fantasy coming up in just a month (yikes!), my goal is to finish Mercenary Savior before the conference, which means I’ll have to do about 55k words in the next 25 days. That comes to 2.2k per day, but I want to push that up to about 3k if I can. No more Princess Maker or late night Halo!

Towards that end, I’m going to try out an experiment. Starting tonight, I’m going to go to bed before midnight and wake up before 5:00 am in order to get in a couple hours of writing before work. I hate coming home after a long day and thinking “man, I’ve still got to put in today’s writing.”

I’m hoping that this way, I’ll be able to get 1.5k/2k done in the morning, and another 1k or so in the evening. I’m also hoping that this will keep me from wasting too much time, since I usually spend a couple hours past midnight each night procrastinating going to bed. Not a sustainable way to live when you work 8 to 5.

One more thing. I submitted to quite a few places during the last quarter, and while I generally got rejections from everyone, I did get my first request for a full manuscript (technically June 29, but close enough). So things are looking up.

And that’s basically how things have been going these past three months: not too great, but not too bad either. And now, before I bore any more of you to death with this post, I’m going to call it a night. Take care and keep being awesome!

Danger: difficult plot ahead

Just a quick post before I turn in and try to catch up on the sleep that I didn’t get last night (insomnia sucks).

I’m entering a very difficult part of the revision for Mercenary Savior. I’m a little more than a third of the way through the story (as you can tell from the status bar to your right), which is usually where my writing starts to get iffy.

Up until now, most of the work has to do with revising or rewriting individual scenes. That’s no too difficult; it’s very easy, for me at least, to focus on the page itself and fixing problems on the sentence and paragraph level.

The problem now, though, is that some of the chapters aren’t working as coherent units. Some of them feel slapped together, as if scenes that don’t really have much in common have been thrown in the same chapter merely because I didn’t know where else to put them. That doesn’t make for good chapters.

So now, I need to take a few steps back from the page and look at the forest instead of the trees. I need to figure out which events need to be clustered into which chapters, in order for the scenes to resonate with each other and build up to the climax without bumbling on each others’ toes.

I’m going to try out a few new tools to help with the plotting, most notably Dan Well’s 7 point system. I’ve already worked out the essential plot points for about a dozen of the conflicts in the story; now I just need to see which ones go in which chapter.

I wish I had time to use it now, but dagnabit, it’s 1:30 in the morning, and I have to get up at 7:00 tomorrow. Dang. Well, at least I have work–and it’s good work for an aspiring writer in my position. More on that in a later post.

Anyway, good night.

Job – reliable internet = spotty posting

Sorry for the general lack of posts these past few days. I haven’t fallen off the face of the Earth (yet), I’m just working full time and living in a place that doesn’t have reliable internet. Someone in the complex tried to set up a wireless router, and now the internet is down. For some reason, the broadweave guys haven’t fixed it yet.

Student housing in Provo sux.

Anyways, here’s what’s going on in my life. I found a temporary full-time job working in a warehouse. They let me listen to my headphones while I work, so I’ve been catching up on a lot of podcasts and old recordings from cons and English 318. It’s actually kind of awesome. Definitely better than the call center.

I’m in the midst of finishing the research for the “class that wouldn’t die” article. Basically, I have about half a dozen more interviews to do, then write up the rough draft. I’m having lots of fun meeting all these awesome people and putting this article together.

But between work and the article, I’m finding it much harder to keep up with my writing. I’m still producing about 2k consistently, but that’s not quite enough to have Mercenary Savior finished by World Fantasy. Looks like I’ll have to sprint on the weekends.

I’m not too worried about it at this point, though. The revision is going great–in fact, I might post a few excerpts. I know the story’s solid, and the characters are a joy–especially Tamu, the slutty, self-centered concubine that becomes something of a mentor for Stella (to her horror, of course).

The Hameji are also quite interesting; one of my goals in this revision is to portray the rationale for their behavior as clearly as I possibly can. Towards that end, I have a list of points about their culture that I want to get across in the narrative, and I’m keeping track of which scenes convey which points. The goal is to have at least three scenes for each point, which will involve some substantial revision. But if it works, the Hameji will go from horrific, brutal antagonists in the beginning to sympathetic if still brutal by the end–kind of like George R. R. Martin’s stuff.

Speaking of George R. R. Martin, I’m reading A GAME OF THRONES right now and I’m absolutely loving it! I wish I had the time to sit down and read this book for hours. Alas, the only way I can do that is to give up writing, and I can’t do that. Weekends, though–better wait for the weekend.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on. I’d better go to bed now, before I jinx myself tomorrow morning. Or maybe I already have? Blarg. Night.

Things I learned from working in a call center

Over the summer I worked part time at a local call center. At the time, it was just what I needed: a flexible job that helped me pay the bills while figuring out where I wanted to go next. That said, I learned very quickly that call center work is not the sort of thing I want to do for large portions of my life.

I’m glad to say I quit my job on good terms with the management, and was one of their more productive interviewers. I don’t harbor any hard feelings against the company I worked for or any of the particular employees.

However, I do want to reflect a bit on the nature of the work itself, which was less than awesome, as well as some of the things I learned about myself in the process. Since this has nothing to do with the company itself, I’m not going to mention it by name. Also keep in mind that the things I have to say are heavily influenced by my own opinions, so they may not apply to you.

That said, here are some of the things I learned from working in a call center:

1) In the long run, jerks only punish themselves.

I spoke with a lot of incredibly rude people in this job. I also spoke with a lot of people who were courteous and well-meaning. Without exception, the jerks seemed overstressed and miserable, while only the courteous people ever seemed genuinely happy and content with their lives.

I think the way we treat others says more about ourselves than anything else. People who are mean and nasty to each other are never truly happy.

2) A small amount of patience makes most things go faster and smoother.

I hated it when people told me “just put ten for everything.” As an interviewer, I couldn’t do that–I was required to ask every question verbatim. Those who were patient enough to let me do that got through the survey quickly and painlessly, while the impatient people who tried to rush things almost always got upset.

I think it’s safe to say that this has a general application as well. When we’re patient enough to let things happen the way they’re supposed to, things happen faster and more smoothly. When we try to rush things that shouldn’t be rushed, we screw up.

3) The ability to genuinely listen is a rare skill.

I can’t tell you how many times I asked a simple question on a survey, only to find the person on the other line answering something completely different. I didn’t expect anyone to drop everything and devote their full attention to me, but how much effort does it take to answer a simple question?

I’ve known for a long time that listening is a skill that requires work to cultivate, but apparently, it’s also one that few people have truly mastered. If you can’t understand a straightforward question well enough to give a yes or no answer, how can you understand something as complex as another person’s feelings?

4) Political campaigns are evil.

This is a little tongue in cheek, but I stand by it one hundred percent. Every survey we conducted for a political campaign asked questions that were clearly geared toward developing negative campaign ads and manipulating public perception. None of them asked how the government could best serve the people.

5) Having a flexible work schedule makes writing both easier and harder.

It makes it easier because you can plan your time around other things that are going on; it makes it harder because your days generally have less structure.

I think I hit a pretty good balance by working in the morning and writing in the afternoon, then going in to work again in the evenings if I needed the hours. Call centers are always looking for people to work in the evenings.

6) Reducing everything to numbers makes human interactions meaningless.

This was, by far, the thing I found most frustrating about my work. I talked with hundreds of people from all over the country and didn’t connect with hardly any of them on a personally significant level. It was all about checking off boxes, where each completed survey was just another number in the system.

This tended to be more true of the short surveys, less true of the longer ones. For that reason, I loved it when I got a survey that took twenty or thirty minutes to complete. It’s very hard to talk with someone for thirty minutes without making some kind of a connection with them, however fleeting.

7) If you have a love of learning, find a job that lets you use your mind.

To be perfectly honest, I never felt completely satisfied at my work. A robot with sufficiently advanced voice recognition software could probably have done my job as well as I could (at least for the ninety second surveys). Over time, I felt like my work was turning me into a robot.

That’s ultimately why I felt I had to get out. Maybe I have a problem with authority, but I can’t stand being just another cog in the corporate machine. There’s got to be a way to pay the bills and still live life meaningfully.

Image courtesy W. Lowe