So this is my first blog, Work and Days. I hope the classicists enjoy the reference, Hesiod is one of my all time favorite writers. I in no way mean to copy his work of the same name, I am merely stealing the title. I admit that I have never been a fan of blogs. They seem a little too exhibitionist for my liking. The writer’s life, the artist’s life (and yes, I did cringe when I used those two words in regards to my self), is a dedicatedly private one. I need to work. Alone in this room, (and sometimes publicly in a coffee shop, or bar, or just wherever I am when I get out my notepad and put words down) I work. What more can I say that isn’t in the articles, essays, stories, novels, and facebook statuses that I compose daily? Or the non-personal stuff that ends up in my personal journal? I guess the rest goes here.
Another purpose for this blog, is that in conjunction with the rest of my website, I need to market myself, self-promote. I have some projects completed and several more in the works and now that I have begun publishing the stuff that I really care about (not that I didn’t care about the journalism that I have published, but it was what it was, and I will not disparage my bread and butter in any way) I need a greater presence online. Writers made it in the past without such a presence, but the industry is quite different now.
When I finished my first novel it was an amazingly great feeling, but the subsequent feeling was crushing. It was the feeling that went with the thought, “now what do I do with it?” I finished a first novel, it took three years, and no one cared. No one was waiting for it, no one was ready to publish it, it was done and then I (without an agent) needed to wear a very different title, “self-promoter.” It isn’t enough to be a writer, but until I have an agent, and really a publisher who likes me, there is a missing part to the reality of “writer.”
Can I just keep on working, making art, without the recognition of publication? Sure, as William T. Vollmann constantly quotes Gandhi on the subject (and Gandhi is likely taking it from the Dhammapada), “we must work without expecting results.” This is great for ethics and morality, and even for the artistic process, but it is tough in a world where it would be nice to make a living out of doing what one most enjoys. In an interview Vollmann also gives one tip to young writers, “never write for money.” I have written for money, but those were commissions I accepted for the paycheck. With my fiction or creative non-fiction I make the work the way the work should be without making any choices in consideration of sales. I hope people will like the works and that the works will find an audience (and a paying medium for that audience), but that is as far as my audience consideration goes. I am a reader, an audience for literature, and I rationalize that if I like it someone else will too, and consider that the odds are that many people will. So it just goes without saying (but here I am saying it anyway) that I write things I would like to read.
As I write I realize another reason for this blog. Though a writer/artist (cringe) is a private person, or a person who needs a lot of alone time, confidence is essential to self-promotion and the public part of being a writer/artist who is published and sells work. The exhibitionism of blogging, of having a place to declare my vocation as more than just an avocation to anyone who wants to listen (possibly a pretty large online audience) is good practice for me. I need to learn to not cringe. That is one of the hardest parts for me. There are good odds that some of you reading this (if you linked by facebook) had no idea that I was a producer of creative fine arts. Maybe you only knew me as an academic, or just some guy that owns a lot of books.
So this is Work and Days, it’s about my work and my relationship with the works of others, the arts, the way we fill our days.