It wasn't a great vacation, and maybe I'm not a real American after all - but I can't get too worked up about July 4th. It's partly because I've never liked crowds or fireworks, and partly because I go back to my home town that weekend to visit with my aunt and uncle - and that means I invariably run across one or other of the guys who hassled me through school.
Anyways, I'm back in the UK now and it's done with until next year. I had some good news on Friday 13th, and now I'm looking forward to work on Monday. I want to see just how much of my work that was supposed to be done while I was away has been done and whether I'll be able to see my desk or not.
I decided to change a couple things on this site while I was away. I've got some new ideas I'll be introducing, and some changes to make to some of the existing pages. The main one is this :
There were various things happening in my life when I moved here to settle and work in England, and I was feeling more than a little stressed, so I founded PlayPenOffice to talk about some of the things I had seen around me in work situations. I determined from the start to write only stories I knew to be true - things that had either happened to me, to my cousin Elli, or to people I trusted were telling me the truth about them. I altered them to hide the locations and protect the guilty, but I didn't use anything I hadn't checked. I was so virtuous.
However, the original caricatures I set out to use to tell those stories with seem to have developed and become people in their own right, and the fictional office has taken on an independant life of it's own. I became a little worried when I realised I was starting off a story only to find them taking it away from me again, sometimes working it towards a different conclusion to the one I was aiming for. There have been times I've had to fight real hard to drag it back. I'm still writing real life happenings into the week as well, but they're hijacking those things too now.
After a while I began to get a little annoyed with them all - I'd created these characters, they owed me, and I should be able to control them, right? Wrong.
I've given up trying to keep all fiction out now - let them do what they want. They all still need me though, to write out what they're doing. I don't know if they're actively looking for another narrator and I haven't seen the job being advertised anywheres, but hopefully they'll either let me apply for it when they do - or give me at least a month's notice before they lay me off. A pay review would be good, or even some feedback, but I guess that's too much to hope for.
read 01/07/02-06 or read 01/07/16-20 