In praise of the 4-day week.

Back in Birmingham, working as a Science lab tech at schools I used to work 5-days, 40 weeks of the year, with school holidays off. But I also used to work at Nostalgia & Comics, blessed comic shop in Birmingham, every Saturday as well. This pretty much meant I used to do a full-time job like regular people do.

Up here in Pocklington, working as ICT/Computing Teaching Assistant & Technician I started off doing 4 and a half days a week, holidays and weekends off. Oh, the bliss of a full weekend, especially on the rare occasions that I managed to actually leave school on Friday lunchtime, where it would sort of, almost feel like a three day weekend.

But then Molly grew up and started getting to school herself, which meant the reason for me needing to leave school at a time to pick Molly up was no longer there. Hence as soon as she got keys I found myself working later. And later. And later. Getting things done, filling the available time and more. You know how it goes. Eventually I realised I was easily working at least an hour extra every day and shuffled my working patterns around to stop this. Hence I now work Monday to Thursday. Have been for more than a year now. And bloody hell, it's a wonderful, wonderful thing. Seriously, if you can do it, you should do it.

It takes a while to get used to sure enough. Suddenly Wednesday is no longer the middle of the week, it's the day before you get that Friday feeling, and speaking of which Friday is now Thursday. Which means you wake up on Friday feeling a sense of incredible freedom, full of potential. Well, that is, if you wake up early enough. I'd be awake to see Louise out, and then Molly out, but all too often I'd head back to bed and completely waste the morning.

The solution? Start booking stuff for Friday morning. Doctors, dentist, deliveries, whatever I could, just arrange it for 9, stick all the alarms on and get out of the damn house. And getting out of the damn house meant it was a day full of potential. Or, more to the point, a day full of writing. Friday became, and is still, my favourite day of the week. A familiar pattern developed easily. Get up, do stuff, fulfil appointments, get things that need getting, then it's off to the local bar for coffee, copious amounts of coffee accompanied by similarly copious amounts of writing. The reviews seem to flow better there, less distractions, more focus. Before I know it, it's midday and I'm caffeined up to the gills. By then it's time for home and the afternoon. Some days that can be a trip to Burnby Hall, the local gardens. Some days it's jump in the car and head further afield for an explore (always with the laptop and reading material of course). Some days it's stay at home and listen to Mayo & Kermode's film review on Radio 5. But no matter what it is, the day always seems to be full of getting stuff done. And anyone that knows me knows what a joy it is to get things done.

So yes, if you can, switch to a 4-day week. It's so brilliant that I'm trying to work out if there's any way I can manage to swing a 3-day week. Unlikely, but who knows.

Of course, all this free time means I simply have longer to work on writing. I love it sure, but there's a bloody good argument to be made that I'm actually working a LOT more now than when I did do a proper 6-days a week thing!

Meanderings.... gin.... a post review glow.... of writing....

You'll have to forgive me for this, I know it's been awhile.

The sad fact of the matter is that I don't have the drive to keep writing here. So many other things are taking my time. I'd love to spend 10 minutes a day, maybe at the end of the day, documenting all the minutiae of Bruton mansions here. But it's not happening, hasn't happened for a long time.

There's many reasons for this. But probably most pertinant amongst those is the sheer amount of time, the sheer amount of writing time my work over at the FPI blog takes up. I get to the end of the night and it's too late to even contemplate writing anything else.

Take September. DC had this new thing where they relaunched every comic with a new number 1. And I decided, in a moment of all too frequent madness, to review all of them. Then, halfway through, I felt guilty at not balancing these DC reviews with some Marvel review. And of course, I had to do the usual reviews of things sent to me for review over at the FPI blog as well.

Which meant in September I reviewed something like 80 works. Now some of these were mere paragraphs. But as anyone doing this sort of thing will tell you, sometimes a paragraph to summarise a work is hell to write. Better occasionally to go to 2000 words than 200.

So I'm exhausted. It's back to school and of course I've picked up some delightful bug or other from the returning children, who seem to spend the entire six week holiday incubating viruses to inflict upon my person in the weeks we come back.

And I'm doing incredible work, review after review after review spews forth. And then I hit a wall.

All it took was one book that I really loved to bring me to a grinding, frustrated halt.

My way of working is a perfectionist's way. I have a rule that says I know I can't get to 100% satisfied with anything, so 95% satisfied is what I aim for. Yet occasionally even this isn't possible, usually with something I really loved, yet somehow can't find the words necessary.

And that's where I've been for the last week. Every night I thought I'd nail it tonight, the words would come, the review must write itself, after all I loved the book, so the words will just flow.

Sadly, not a bit of it. But somewhere in the rational side of the brain,. I've reached an accord. If I can't manage 95%, then maybe, just maybe, 80% will be okay? I think it might, I really do. Which is why I'm here. Right now I'm in that warm glow of post review happiness. Something that's taken a week to write only needs a final edit, a few pics added, and then it's done. Time to turn to the other books on the review shelf. But only after a celebratory G&T, and a sleep.

Is it Easter yet?

Oh my word, I'm tired. Candle burning at both ends and all the way through the middle. A combination of a long, involving term since Christmas and a desire to write more and more things down has left me with the sort of tiredness I usually have at holiday time.

Unfortunately I've managed to skip a week. I'm in holiday tired mode with a whole week left of school. Arse.

Smarter people than I would spend the week being careful and getting to bed early. But not me. Oh no, I have a list of things to do this week, both school and writing, that means early nights are something I can only imagine once the holidays start.

Oh well. Could be worse. I could have a real job that didn't give me school holidays off. How do you people do that?

Richard babbles on about reviews

For nearly 3 years now I've been reviewing comics over at the FPI blog. As far as I can tell it's going very well, I'm making a little name for myself in the oh so small world of UK comic-dom and because of that the comics and books to review keep rolling in.

This is a good and bad thing. It's fantastic to be well thought of, and lovely to get lots of stuff in the post for review. But it has meant that the review shelf has been constantly been overflowing with books that I feel pressured to review.

To that end I've been writing, writing and writing for the last few months to get it down to a manageable number. Ideally I'd love to have it completely clear and just review every new thing as it comes in. Oh, that would be lovely. And the grand plan is to start doing that come 2010.

Which is why I've been writing, writing and writing some more all this month just to get to that point. As long as I've been doing this I've managed about 15-20 reviews in a good month. But the plan for October and November was to do one a day, just to get the review shelf down to a manageable level.

October was a huge fail. But, with one day left in November, I've written 29 reviews and have the 30th and final review 60% finished. Barring calamity tomorrow I should have managed the very first 30 reviews in 30 days month. This means there's just 18 books left on the shelf to be reviewed in December. Yes, there may be some dropping through the post box in December, but it's usually a quiet month, and that should mean I'm clear for January.

I'm ridiculously pleased with myself.

Well, that was a rather meaningless post for anyone that wasn't me.

On writing......

Nearly finished with the holidays, but still cracking on with the review shelf. Tonight I managed two reviews, one of which had been haunting me for months - sitting there on the review shelf and intimidating me with it's presence. And the sheer physical joy of actually finishing the review is something I can barely communicate.

There was a point tonight where I sat back in my chair, read over what I'd done and suddenly realised it was finished. Complete. 90% done. (90% done for me is effectively the second to final draft - all it needs at that point is pictures adding, a final read through and final checking - but at 90% all of the real work is done.) And the smile that hit my face at that point was practically beautific.

That's the thing I find about writing. The actual process of writing anything is painful. Hard work. Mentally draining. God knows why I do it. But when the thing I'm writing is done and I'm satisfied with it - that's when I realise that I love to write.

And then I came across this blog post by Stephen Fry;

"It took my friend Douglas Adams to encourage me to go further and he did this by pointing out that the reason I had never managed to finish a novel was that I had never properly understood how difficult, how ragingly and absurdly difficult, it is to do. “It is almost impossibly hard,” he told me. It is supposed to be. But once you truly understand how difficult it is,” he added, with signature paradoxicality, “it all becomes a lot easier.”

It was many years later that Clive James quoted to me Thomas Mann’s superb crystallisation of this “A writer,” said Mann, “is a person for whom writing is more difficult than for other people.” How liberating that definition is. If any of you out there have ever been put off writing it might well be because you found it so insanely hard and therefore, like me, gave up and abandoned your masterworks early, regretfully assuming that you weren’t cut from the right cloth, that it must come more easily to true, natural-born writers. Perhaps you can start again now, in the knowledge that since the whole experience was so grindingly horrible you might be the real thing after all."

The important thing, the thing I read and immediately thought "YES" to was the Thomas Mannn quote: “A writer, is a person for whom writing is more difficult than for other people.”

And then I think - God, maybe I'm a writer after all. And I smile. Content in the work i've done and ready for the work I know I have to do tomorrow. It will be horrible, painful stuff. But if I'm very lucky, tomorrow night I'll sit back in the chair and the absolute satisfaction of having written something I'm proud of will wash over me and I'll go to my bed happy, ready to go back to work with a smile. And I'll do it again and again and again because maybe, just maybe, I'm on my way to being a writer.

No words .....

That pretty much covers how I feel right now. I've tried to write four different things tonight. Nothing major, just little christmas writeups and suchlike. But nothing has flowed, nothing has gelled, nothing has seemed to work at all. I just can't seem to find the words right now to do anything and it's really, really ticking me off.

I knew the Christmas period would mean a little break from writing but it somehow seems to have robbed me of the ability to actually sit down at the keyboard and write anything meaningful. The FPI blog reviews just aren't happening and the stuff i'm trying to write for the Fictions blog is just coming out as either simplistic shite or overly complicated rubbish. Either way I'm just not happy with it.

I have no idea what the solution is to this little dilemma. I fear it may be a case of just having to sit back completely from all writing to recharge a little more than I thought I'd have to over this christmas period and just see what happens in January.

Until then, I suppose going to sleep earlier wouldn't be a bad idea at all.