Yeah, so I’ve used this one before, but it’s appropriate and a favourite, so nyar.

Why a slippery slope? Because I just cut my connections to the world of conventional employment; as of 4pm today, I am a full-time self-employed freelance. The slippery slope could be to self-determination and contentment; it could be to penury and the lamentation of my own hubris.

It’s up to me to make sure it’s the former.

Writing about music

Things are starting to pick up at TDP once again, with four reviews published this week. I’ve got another new writer on board (who handled the Architects album review, and who should be working away on a report from their live show this Tuesday just gone), adding to the cadre and providing me a specialist who is more likely to grok some of the more extreme and cutting edge forms of metal than myself. Which means he’ll be the one to endure the illiterate abuse of teenagers who’ve just seen someone call their favourite band generic or average…

Album of the week

No contest this time out; Old Money by Omar Rodríguez-López (the guitarist chap with the big mop of helmet-hair from The Mars Volta) is pretty much everything you’d expect. A mental mish-mash of high-paced prog weirdness, and no guitar tone left un-effected – put on your seatbelt before listening.

Writing about books

Regular readers will have noticed the first of my ‘reading journal’ entries earlier in the week, and I have notes on Interzone #220 to turn into another one sometime soon. No ‘proper’ reviewing has been committed this week, though I shall be taking a concerted leap into the Mind Over Ship piece over the weekend.

Futurismic

It’s been a busy and successful week over at the Big F. Two items got a link back from the Double-Boing (although, typically enough, they were the posts that I threw in as flippant filler; I’m evidently a poor judge of audience interest), and The Adam Roberts Project’s first headline appearance has generated a brisk comments thread and plenty of interest from elsewhere. These sort of things make a webzine editor a happy person^[1].

Freelance

So, yeah, this is where it’s all at now. Sailing the seas of self-employment, a one-man privateer with a letter of marque and a whole bunch of over-extended metaphors… or something like that, anyway.

Now the moment is actually here, I feel kind of strange – part terrified, part Zen-master calm. I’ve thrown myself into the maelstrom; now all I have to do is learn how to swim without floats, and from there it’s a short (hah!) step to surfing with the finesse and élan of a buff and tousled Aussie beach-bum.

Yeah, so, these metaphors: I haz dem. My mind’s in an odd place right now. Good, but odd.

But hey, The Big Project finally went live, as announced earlier today! Plus people have lots of work for me to do, of varying types. It’s rather a relief to now have the time to think about doing them. It will be more of a relief when yet more requests come in further down the line; the eternal hustle starts now^[2].

Books and magazines seen

Another blank week on the new books front. Not a bad thing, but still somehow disappointing. Maybe I like the attention; it’s nice when the postman actually has to speak to you. Nice for me, anyway; the postie always looks a bit discomforted^[3].

Coda

So, this week’s coda is not just the coda to a seven-day passage, but to a nearly-two-year composition, and marks the end of one suite at the same time as ushering in another… (See? Metaphors. Beyond my control right now, I’m telling you.)

People keep asking me how it feels, and I really don’t have an answer. Liberating but petrifying is about as close as I can get to summarising it. After years of saying “yeah, that’d be cool, I should do that sometime”, I’m actually doing something about chasing my dreams. So all you lot get to watch the highs and lows of some guy biting off more than he can chew… or (more hopefully) mumbling around a big but manageable mouthful for a while. I hope you’ll stick around for the ride.

Anyway, I think I’ve earned myself a Friday Curry; hell knows I may not be able to afford one for a while to come, so I might as well give the world of employment a decent send-off.

I hope you all have a great weekend, too. Peace…

[ ¹ - Unlike anonymous emails from people saying "I expect you're going to gloat over Realms of Fantasy shutting down, because you're a c*nt", which are incredibly depressing. And completely real, too. ]

[ ² - Feel free to plug me to anyone you know, loyal readers. I'm not proud. At least, not in that respect. ]

[ ³ - It's his own fault; if he turned up a bit after 6:30am, I'd probably answer the door wearing more than a towel. ]

No, Mr Brown. You are a weasel, a fearmonger, a small man in a big man’s expensive suit, and – like your predecessor, and many others – a panderer to corporate interests and waning governments with imperial ambitions which mirror that collapsed edifice which Daily Mail readers still feel should stretch around the globe by dint of nothing more than divine grace, stiff upper lips and unbridled paranoid bigotry based in a fundamental fear of otherness.

No one in the world ever has nor ever will do as much to curtail the freedoms I was fortunate enough to born with, Mr Brown, as you and others of your ilk. You wield fear like a whip, but you turn it on those you claim you are elected to serve.

What have you ever suffered or lost through the choices made by others on your behalf, Mr Brown? What have you given up to defend what you believe? What do you really know of fear, beyond the thought of losing the privilege you have amassed? Evidently not enough; as it has always been, the people will reap what the suits have sown. I hope that one day we will all turn around and feed it to you until you choke.

“Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant and I declare him my enemy.” – Proudhon

We now return you to what passes for regular programming on this channel.

Writing about music

Another slowish week, but that’s not at all unwelcome. Festival season means the PRs are all tied up promoting things I’m not yet a big enough wheel to be of assistance with*. I can deal with that.

Album of the week

Not a great deal to choose from, really, so The Offspring take the crown easily with their eighth album Rise And Fall, Rage And Grace.

Writing about books

The Love & Sex With Robots piece is all but finished; last few paragraphs and a brisk polish, and that badboy should be ready to roll out of the warehouse, so to speak.

I’m about a fifth of the way into Schmidt’s The Coming Convergence; it should be a swift read, because I seem to be a lot more technoliterate than the reader it is designed for (so I can skip a lot of the passages telling me stuff I already know).

Futurismic

The new Futurismic bloggers are settling in nicely, and by the end of this evening I should have fixed over 380 dead incoming links that got broken when the old Moveable Type installation collapsed on us – which I hope will boost our PageRank and SERPS somewhat, and bring with it a boost in passing traffic.

The other good news is it seems the Project Wonderful ad slots are starting to mature nicely, in that advertisers are recognising their worth and bidding competitively on them. I’m hoping for more growth in this area over the next six months – especially if the dead link fixin’ mentioned above has some effect.

Freelance

The tweaking of websites and the publicising of publishers continues at a steady pace; nothing substantial to show off yet, but there’ll be solid results by the close of business this month.

Books and magazines seen

It’s a lit-crit double whammy this week!

First off we have my long-awaited copy of Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics Of Fantasy – courtesy the author herself at last weekend’s AGM meet-up – which I have been looking forward to reading since hearing the framework of its taxonomy explained by Brian Stableford at last year’s Masterclass – bloody hell, a year ago.

Secondly I have my second review job for Foundation, namely The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (eds. Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman) – which, as far as Amazon is concerned, has been out in the States since 2005. So either it’s getting a relaunch on this side of the pond, or Foundation‘s reviews department makes me look like a paragon of organisation and productivity**.

I couldn’t resist it, basically, though I wonder if maybe I haven’t bitten off a little more than I can chew – I’m even less qualified to talk politics than I am lit-crit***.

But Ms Le Guin’s blurb praises the book as not just a good and valuable examination of her famous novel, but refreshingly jargon-free, so maybe I’ll be OK. One thing’s for sure, there’s gonna be plenty of food for thought in there.

Aside from those two heavy-hitters, some fantasy titles from Orbit are all for which we have to thank the deities of the postbox this week.

Coda

So, on the surface of it – and by any metric of meaningful use beyond the confines of my own emotional landscape – it’s been a pretty good week, if not as productive as I’d have liked.

However, things haven’t been entirely peachy; I shan’t go into details (because this isn’t LJ or MySpace) but I’ve been an emotional wreck for no clearly discernible reason, and have consequently been shitty to people who didn’t deserve it – so there’s a nice nugget of guilt for me to chew over the weekend. Mmm, tasty guilt.

Couple that with a growing panic about next weekend’s impending Masterclass (for which I’ve still yet to read anything from the reading list that I hadn’t read before receiving it), and a certain degree of riding herd on my new bloggers at Futurismic****, and it’s obvious with hindsight why I’ve been sleeping badly and unable to concentrate on anything. Hence nearly being assassinated by a blind taxi driver while cycling to the day job this morning tipped me into a state verging on hysteria.

Thankfully my line manager is a good person, and listened to me gibber for a bit before recommending I use some of my vast backlog of annual leave allowance and take some extra time off next week. End result: I’m working a two day week from Monday, giving me two clear days to attack the Masterclass material while clearing down all my other work; then I return to work the following Tuesday. Signing the leave sheet was such a tension-release that I almost wept. I suspect I’ve been letting things get on top of me a little.

But hey, it’s the weekend! And there are few ills that The Friday Curry doesn’t at least provide the illusion of healing. After which I may go and listen to hideously loud rock music in a side-street pub, if I haven’t already fallen asleep. Enjoy your weekends, folks – hasta luego.

[ ** Under-qualified like a toddler with dentist's tools, then. ]

[ *** Only kidding, Andy. ]

[ **** No discredit to them, by the way, they're doing great; it's just one of those jobs that eats waaaay more time than you ever expect it to before you start. ]