Greatly Diminishing Expectations

I haven't talked about myself much on this blog of late; I don't like to, really, but I have to get a few things off my chest. There's a lot in the news I feel a need to comment on, and I will do that, so I'll be as brief as possible. Which might not be brief enough.

It's been eighteen months since I left my last full-time job, a temporary assignment, and when I left, I hoped to use my open-ended down time to pursue various writing projects, all of which have pretty much flopped. I mentioned back in July a profile article idea I had to scrub when the person I wanted to write about proved to be impossible to find and I did not get nay help form the one person who could have helped me; well, a profile article idea I had pursued before that also went nowhere, and I'd had to abandon that as well. While I tried to pursue other ideas after that, I have not bothered to attempt profile articles since.

I did finish a play. Now if only I could find a way to produce it.

As for the other ideas? Well, I did manage to submit a couple of articles to Patch.com's Montclair, New Jersey site. I provided links to both pieces back in August. It looked like I had a nice little sideline. Instead, my experience with Patch.com's Montclair site proved to be as much as dead end as my experience with the Millburn site, which I'd written one article for. A third piece - a straight reporting job - fell apart for reasons that boiled down to a disagreement with an editor over a copy problem. Although I attended an informal meeting of Patch writers held by the chief editor to stay in the editors' good graces - forfeiting a chance to meet a Facebook friend from Massachusetts who was in the area for only that one day - I haven't had anything published by Patch.com's Montclair site since. A human interest story I wrote for and submitted to the site last week was not published, and so that appears to be the end of it.

At the time of my earlier pieces being published, I wrote, "Maybe things are looking up. . . ." This wouldn't be the first time I was wrong.

I also started writing flash fiction stories placing children in surreal settings. One had two five-year-olds tricycling across the country; another had a pair of grade-school-aged brothers arguing about French cinema. Yeah, I've pretty much lost my desire to pursue that idea, and for several reasons that are too random and complicated to explain here. Let's just say it's a bad time to pursue it. Also pretty much done to the point you can stick a fork in it is a blogging workshop service I tried to start. I didn't drum up any business, two people who were initially interested in personal tutoring lost interest, and my last workshop for the writer's group I belong to was such a disaster due to technical difficulties, I don't have much of a desire to have it again any time soon. If I'm asked to lead such a workshop, I will, but I won't pursue it.

And while the termination of my MySpace page earlier this month has little to do with my actual writing, it does fit a pattern of pulling plugs. So does the editing I'd been doing for a Web site, which that's gone sour as well. Another copyediting opportunity more recently fell through.

Meanwhile, the job market continues to suck. I thought I'd be working again by now, and with my writing "career" in even greater disarray, I have to turn my attention to looking harder to find employment, despite the fact that there's only one job for every five people out of work. So it looks like my writing is, indefinitely down to one thing.

You're reading it - this blog.

So stay tuned. I'm not going anywhere. Just like the rest of my writing isn't. Back with more musings later.