What It Is (Personal)

When I’m not hopping around as a jackalope online, I’m this chubby black dude who has a day job at a tech company. That much you know. I’m going to talk a little bit about what’s going on with me personally here, but I’ll try to be vague enough that there’s not so much overlap between my fuzzy self and my chubby self. For so many different reasons, I’d like to keep those two buckets separate for now.

Last month, we found out that my company was bought from the venture capital firm that had been funding us up until that point. The official line was that it would allow us to progress on our vision without having to worry about money so much — up until then, it was a bit of a struggle to make sure we had enough to do what we wanted to do, when we wanted to do it. Basically, we’re in a fast-moving segment of the marketplace, and there’s a real advantage of rolling out workable technology as quickly as possible while also making sure we refined what’s already there so everything works smoothly. You know the saying “If you want something, pick two of the three: fast, cheap, good”? We were trying to do the impossible.

Anyway, there was a footnote of the buy-out meeting that there was another company that might have technology that would complement ours, and we could work together to create something really special. That was all in the planning stages, but they would have more information for us when it became available.

In the meantime, it looked like my position would be phased out after six years in an unrelated reworking of my department. So, in order to progress, I would need to dive into a more technical position. A plan was drawn up to document how to do all the things I was responsible for, divide my responsibilities among the rest of the department, and become one of the crew. I’d get a provisional title for six months, and after that they’d see where I was and bump me up to a full-fledged member of the society. So I was working towards that.

Then I was told that because of the situation with a potential merger, I wouldn’t be able to move into that provisional position and would stay where I was. I should still plan to hand off my responsibilities and train for the more technical position, but on my own.

This week, I was thrown into a pretty intensive boot camp to learn the technical specifics of my software. This caught me by surprise. I’m actually excited to be thrust into this world that I never thought I could handle because of…well, self-image and anxiety issues, and while the learning has been difficult it’s also been rewarding in its own way.

Long story short, there’s a lot of change happening at the day job, which means that something has to give. I was gearing up to do a lot with a Patreon for serial stories that was set to launch this month, but I think it’s better that I set that aside and focus on being the best technical worker bee that I can be. It also means that I’ll need to pull back my admittedly ambitious writing schedule so stuff will be coming out a bit more slowly. That’s fine — it allows me more time to really dig in to something and make it good. Just because I’m just starting my million-word apprenticeship as a writer doesn’t mean I can’t consider those words more carefully.

For a while, I’ll just need to slow down; focus on the quality of the working process and not the quantity. I just wanted to give you folks a heads up that might mean fewer journal entries for a little while and fewer Fiction Fridays but hopefully better ones.

See you folks on the other side!