Day Job Blues

Hello again. Charlie Williams again here, your friendly neighbourhood guest blogger.

As advertised previously, I was going to talk about writing and the day job – pros and cons. But I’m not going to bother. These (mostly the pros) were covered comprehensively in the comments. Great points there, I couldn’t do it any better so I’ll leave it at that.

However, I would like to clarify my own position regarding work. I do know a bit about economic realities. My dad was a truck driver and my mum was an auxiliary nurse. Dad was away for two, three months at a time, hauling freight all over Europe and the Middle East. In fact he still is driving trucks (not overseas now). Mum worked nothing but nightshift for about 25 years. She grew up in a Glasgow tenement. I spent the first four years of my life in a hellhole English council estate. Mum and Dad grafted nonstop to get us out of there, and they did it. But, you know, that kind of life takes a toll, and they eventually divorced. Meanwhile I passed an exam that got me into a “good school”. Here I got a good view of how life is if your parents have money, which was nice. From there I went on to to university and escape from this cycle. Lucky old me.

Boo hoo. What a sob story eh? Yeah yeah, I know – there are many worse off, I recognise that. I guess what I’m trying to say, in my blundering fashion, is that I’ve seen the good that hard work can do, and the damage. I want to have “real work” in my life, but I want (want? need) to be able to write too. And write regularly, without people from work phoning me up at all hours. Do you know what I’d really like to do, if finances permitted? I’d like to go down the temp agency I used to register with when I was younger, and sign up for any kind of warehouse, factory, or outdoor work. I know it’s easy for me to say that because I don’t *have* to do it. But that’s what I’d do. It would satisfy that mind/body ying/yang thing (combined with the writing), and would get me into the kind of areas I like to write about. Ah, the romance…

So really, what I’m looking for – like a lot of people out there – is that elusive “balance” where I can have enough “real work” in my life to stay human, enough time and space to write, and enough money to fund my enormous appetite for cocaine.