2/03/2003

Against Gravity word count: 8,778.

I was glancing over this blog and it's remarkable - to me, anyway - how much the book's storyline has changed since I started the blog. Keeping it has doen what I hoped it would do, which is externalise my thoughts so it would feel like I was working my ideas out to somebody who was listening, regardless of whether anybody was actually listening or not. That's me almost ten thousand words in.Still don't know what to think of it.

It's cold outside. Snowing today, so frozen ice to walk over to work tomorrow. I received an email from someone who edited a magazine I worked on a couple of years ago as a contributor and as the designer. He was very good at telling people what he was going to do with teh publication without actually doing anything about it. The best way I can put it is, I never before saw someone get handed a reasonably well-paying dream job about a million people in the UK would willingly cut throats to have (ie get paid to edit a music magazine, turn up at and leave work when you feel like it, go to a great number of free gigs, free music etc etc), and then pretty much try and talk his way out of it from day one. A very, very bizarre period of my life.

He wrote to me by email asking if I had copies of one of the magazines he edited so he could take them to a job interview. For some reason, he neglected ever to take issues of any of the publications he worked on home with him, ever. I'm convinced there is something of considerable meaning at the heart of this.

I look back on my time writing for a publishing company's magazines; also designing a couple of them, and eventually editing one of them for almost a year. In some ways I think, with justification, what a great opportunity, what an easy life I had there for a while. But I could never quite kid myself it was going to last.

Other times I think, with equal justification, what a waste, a shambolic, pathetic waste of an opportunity.

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