As usual with decorating, I’m not sure how, but I have ended up painting the outside of my front door too. So what with that and chatting to Emma on the phone, and heading off to band, to struggle and sightread three new pieces, and play again the marvelous Doyen, it’s been a good day. I think.

Today I skirted ’round the ringroad to the free Watereaton Park&Ride, and then cycled into town. Got there and back okay – and it was definitely quicker leaving Oxford at 5.30 on a bike than in a car! Signing up to the agency, was, on the one hand okay – I completely aced their tests with above average scores, but it did make me feel a bit low at the end of it. Next Tuesday I’m going to be out of a job, and that’s going to be a scary, frightening prospect. I really want the Sophos job now for a multitude of reasons, but at the same time I don’t want to get my hopes up or start planning for a future that hasn’t happened yet. I really am very very frightened of what the (near) future holds.

2. First band tonight. A couple more challenging pieces in which I alternate flute and piccolo along with Amy. I really like my piccolo when I get the notes right and they sore off over the top of the band.

3. And I met my new neighbour today, or at least one of them. Tim’s girlfriend was out, but Tim was outside his front door with his mate having a crafty cigarette when I got back from band. He seems like a nice enough guy.

4. It’s now getting close on a week, since I worked out what I need to do finish revising Part One, and I haven’t yet. Not because I can’t but just because I don’t seem to have had time. I will I will I will make sure that I don’t fritter my weekend away and get on and do it. I need to finish it and get the book *out* there…

5. …that is, except, I had a phone call this morning. Blackwell’s have got the book I ordered in. Four British Fantasists: being a book about Alan Garner, Penelope Lively, Susan Cooper and Diana Wynne Jones – or to put it another way, just about my four favourite authors of all time, in one book.

Anyway today was my interview for the Producer job. Seemed to go well, no deaths of silence and not too much (I think) in the way of umms and errs. In the end it will come and down to me measuring up to their project management requirements (which admittedly I don’t have much formal, corporate, experience of doing). It’s a bit annoying that because:

a) project management is the latest buzzword around the place, but if you are in a job that doesn’t currently require it, even if you have the skills how can you show you have demonstratable formal experience of using it.

b) it’s not as if project management can be considered as exactly rocket science. You plan, you prepare, you implement, and you review; and at each stage along the process you do a bit more of all of it (if you encounter a problem, doubly so).

If I don’t get this job (and I hope I do) then I shall definitely have to use some of the time in these consultancy meetings to find out how they can help me get over this conundrum. After all, they do say in the letter, that they will put every effort into retraining and redeploying me within the business (makes me sound like a chess piece!!)

Next step is to contact my union rep and see if they are the kind of person that I want to accompany me to meetings, and then to play the equal opportunities card I think. Hey, that aspergers has got to be use for something – I know my current job is done for, but there are other one’s out there in the company that have got my name on it….

I have done some washing. I have cut the grass. And I have continued my assault on the ground elder. I have also read some more of Steve Augarde’s excellent book, The Various. I have read posts and comments on LJ, and some snippets of The Play. I have not been able to settle on The Novel, today.

Roast Lamb and veggies followed by one of those (totally decadent) chocolate pots from Gu.

Doctor Who tonight was great, a million times better than than the disappointingly naff and shambolic season opener last week.

Then the week came, and with it business. Not huge business, but just enough that seemed to occupy too much of my time. After work on Monday I had to go and do the weekend shop, which meant that I ate late, and didn’t get much done. Tuesday I went swimming, followed by seeing Creation Theatre’s brilliant, if harrowingly tough King Lear in the BMW car factory. Wednesday after work I had to work on the programme for Abingdon Concert Band’s next concert. Thursday, was band rehearsal. Friday, I was just tired…

I’ve been thinking a bit about self-publishing my novel when it’s finished. There are a couple of quite good threads about it over on WriteWords, one started by me, and a much longer and more detailed one here.

It’s probably hardly an original though, but I find myself of the mind that it is a meaningless distinction between the ‘publisher’ and the ‘self-publisher’. They are all just Publishers, and that, for the most part is how the reader will think of them, if indeed they think of the publisher, which with perhaps the exception of orange-spined Penquins, or classic Viragos, they probably don’t.

I have been drawn by the idea of publishing my book under my own imprint, in part because of the difficulties of finding either publisher or agent, but I think for the most part because of why the hell not. I can produce print ready files, so why not do it all myself, if I can – so long as I am sure in my own mind, by testing it on a range of people, that it is ready and wanted by people (I wouldn’t want to release yet more dross on the world), and that I had given it to an Editor to scrutinise (I work with them, so should be able to find one to correct all those things I still manage to miss in the redrafting phase). Why then, would I want to relinquish control of my work to a ‘big’ publisher.

It’s really, all just procrastination for my inability to get down and finish chapter five…

Stop procrastinating Thomas!

My previous role compounded that view, and when I saw the differences between Production and Editorial, I felt right at home where I was. Now, having delved further into the murky world of production I see that it perhaps isn’t for me. Strangely though, the aspergers-related coaching has taught me a new set of skills, and brought to the surface some others that I didn’t know I had. I’m beginning to wonder whether, after all, I might be able to cut it in editorial. It’s an option, and something to talk to the nice folk at work about.

Meanwhile, having seen Production from the publishing side, when my novel gets accepted and I’m dealing as an author with my own production editor, will I be the model author, or will malevolence and revenge get the better of me and force me to take on the author from hell. *smiles wickedly* It’s worth a thought…

So last week, I had the finale, the curtain call to my probationary period in my new job. It was nothing that I did not know already – I have been finding the author corrections part of my job curiously difficult to get to grips with. Curiously, because at the beginning, I thought that was my greatest strength, and that where I would struggle would be with those softer skills, the communication with a multitude of different contacts all with a multitude of different agendas and approaches. As it turns out, with Bill’s help, but not exclusively, this has not been so much of a problem. The bread’n’butter part of the roll, that of the last pair of eyes to be cast across the papers before publication, is what has been letting me down. Quite why this has been the case we shall probably never know. Certainly it has not been for lack of enthusiasm, determination, and desire. Louise and Mel have been faultless in the help that they have given me, and they too do not fault me for trying. It just hasn’t been working out, and last Tuesday I passed the point of no return.

So that’s it. They are in a recruitment cycle anyway for a couple of other vacancies, so mine will be added to the pot, and when a successor has been found, I will bow out. Tuesday night I was bitterly upset, and I didn’t sleep at all. Wednesday I was upset, but I did sleep, I talked more rationally with people and I admitted this all to my mum (for the first time) and I felt better. I don’t know why I had kept all of this secret. Maybe, deep down I didn’t want to admit it to myself that I was failing? I think it’s more likely that I was just frightened. I thought that if I failed, then that was it, I was out, finished, without a job. And without a job, how would I pay the pills, the mortgage, by food, run the car. Money doesn’t drive me but, having some to keep to the bank manager does help. As it happens, I shouldn’t have thought that. I shouldn’t have let myself get into such a state. Louise, Will, Duncan, the company – they have no intention of casting me out on my own. Far from it. They want to find something else for ‘valuable Thomas’ to do. They just have to work out what. I have to work out what.

In the short term, I will be moving on to be Electronic Production Editor, and resuming my former duties and responsibilities. This is on, not back. And in the future, on again. I have great skills, some of them that I have always known I’ve had; a good deal of them that I’ve only recently discovered; and learnt. They are getting Bill back to help me through this and give me some more coaching, and if that’s not a beletia beacon of a signal that they mean what they say when they say they want to find me something I want to do, then what is? I know how much he costs.

This week? I think I’ve come to terms in my head with what’s happening, and I’m no longer upset. To say I’m not sad would be a lie. Despite everything that’s happened I still like the job. I do the tasks and I catch myself thinking, I’m going to miss this. I set in track something and I think: I’m not going to see the end result of this. Or I see something in the future, and I think, in some warped way, that I was looking forward to that. But, on the flip side, I think I am more relaxed, less stressed, happier person inside. I’m no longer fighting to prove myself. I know my strengths. Louise, Will, Duncan – they all know my strengths. It’s just this, this didn’t work out.

As one door closes, another one opens, and it’s kind of nice to think that, on the other side of that door, they’ve actually built a purpose built wing especially for me. There are lots of connecting doors through there. All I have to do is choose one…

It really, really does seem totally inconsequential now (like I said it was). I will write about it in due course, but surfice it to say that I am feeling better about it. I am sad about it, that it didn’t work out, but there’s a lot of positives that have come out of the experience, and I am no longer upset about it to the point of bursting out in tears about it in the middle of the day. Life moves on. There are more important things out there.

This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

Password:

By the time I got off the phone, the opening 10,000 words of a friend’s novel had turned up, and enticed me to read that, and good though that it is, it’s not writing, so I had to tear myself away from it, and now I’m writing this, and I’m still not writing my novel and now it’s gone half past ten and it’s getting on for bedtime…

2. I popped into Oxford again after work this evening to post ‘the unwanted’ back to Britannia, buy a picture frame for the photo I shall get printed for my Granpa’s 90th birthday on Sunday.

3. I bought Sigur Rós’ new album, Takk, which is as usual very, very good

4. The unlock code for lesson two of my guitar course has been emailed to me.

5. I want to go out tomorrow and find some blackberries to pick.