New Years Resolutions; Bell, book or candle?
What sort of resolutions might one expect from a Parking Enforcement Officer? Issue more / better / fewer parking tickets? Be more ruthless / be fairer? Lose weight / get fitter / healthier? Anything like that?
No.
I’ve been giving this some considerable thought over the past few months. Most of it is in the blog, but there’s a fair bit which I’ve held back on as it would finger me for sure. Right, here goes; If I come ‘out of the closet’ so to speak I get the grand order of the boot and a bad reference. If I carry on as I am I’ll just get more and more unhappy with the pressures of being in the shit sandwich I’m in. Public disapproval on the bottom, management pressure to perform on the top and nowhere else to go. Until of course I eventually burn out like the proverbial candle at both ends.
Now I can’t go back to what I used to do. I’m too old and there are a number of factors against me, including hot competition from less experienced, but younger and above all, cheaper people. It doesn’t matter that I keep my skill sets up to date – I have to accept that I’ll never work in that town again. The phone will not ring. There, I’ve accepted it – time to move on to pastures new.
Right, my resolution is this; I’m going for the big one, the fully monty, shoot the moon, the thing I’ve always wanted to be – a professional writer. Full time. Articles, short stories, books, screenplays, the whole shooting match.
For the moment I shall keep the job and the blog running until I’m ready to jump. Mrs Sticker has agreed to be my business manager and general organiser so I can focus on the quality and quantity of the words. Output. No less than a thousand words a day. What the hell, I do that anyway. Two to three hours work. Two or three hundred in the blog and anything up to fifteen hundred in the book, which is undergoing its third rewrite. This 440 word piece for example took me just over half an hour to write first thing this morning and an hour to edit and polish this evening. I can do it; I know I can. All I have to do is raise my game and push a little harder.
Mind you. Some of the stuff I’ve written will have to wait until I quit the day job. It may even be worth making it into a book. Bill Sticker; The Secret Public Diary of a Traffic Warden. Any takers?
Happy New Year anyway.
No.
I’ve been giving this some considerable thought over the past few months. Most of it is in the blog, but there’s a fair bit which I’ve held back on as it would finger me for sure. Right, here goes; If I come ‘out of the closet’ so to speak I get the grand order of the boot and a bad reference. If I carry on as I am I’ll just get more and more unhappy with the pressures of being in the shit sandwich I’m in. Public disapproval on the bottom, management pressure to perform on the top and nowhere else to go. Until of course I eventually burn out like the proverbial candle at both ends.
Now I can’t go back to what I used to do. I’m too old and there are a number of factors against me, including hot competition from less experienced, but younger and above all, cheaper people. It doesn’t matter that I keep my skill sets up to date – I have to accept that I’ll never work in that town again. The phone will not ring. There, I’ve accepted it – time to move on to pastures new.
Right, my resolution is this; I’m going for the big one, the fully monty, shoot the moon, the thing I’ve always wanted to be – a professional writer. Full time. Articles, short stories, books, screenplays, the whole shooting match.
For the moment I shall keep the job and the blog running until I’m ready to jump. Mrs Sticker has agreed to be my business manager and general organiser so I can focus on the quality and quantity of the words. Output. No less than a thousand words a day. What the hell, I do that anyway. Two to three hours work. Two or three hundred in the blog and anything up to fifteen hundred in the book, which is undergoing its third rewrite. This 440 word piece for example took me just over half an hour to write first thing this morning and an hour to edit and polish this evening. I can do it; I know I can. All I have to do is raise my game and push a little harder.
Mind you. Some of the stuff I’ve written will have to wait until I quit the day job. It may even be worth making it into a book. Bill Sticker; The Secret Public Diary of a Traffic Warden. Any takers?
Happy New Year anyway.
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