A mark of a serious hobby is one that requires meetings. Or perhaps that’s the sign that your hobby has morphed beyond the stress-relieving activity it once was. Either way you want to call it, my hobby has hit that mark.
For the first time in my life, I truly understand how writing could be a full-time job. The platform building and marketing that border on branding were always aspects that could demand full-time attention, but the distractions of a world that come at the speed of life have an uncanny ability to wrest attention away from the perspicacious details needed to truly make forward progress on a writing topic.
Spoken more plainly, the life of an artist is often interrupted by the art of life, which takes away the moments of brilliant insight necessary to craft the succinct, biting prose that makes the reader put down the written word and contemplate the grander scheme.
Or spoken even more plainly: life gets in the way.
But this is still several steps shy of requiring a meeting. Meetings can be enjoyable. Mind you, no one is ever going to say on their deathbed they wish they had participated in more, but it is important to note that Rome didn’t conquer their empire by sitting in meetings they went out and killed something.
My fellow world conquering tribe is a group I met in an online writing community. Our first meeting we gathered and schemed. Then we moved forward with execution. Now the heavy lifting of writing is finished and we’re in the polishing and planning for a launch stage. Work that requires meetings. Though we soon will go try our hands at taming the world.
We are on the verge of publishing an anthology of short stories. The year that was, knocked us all around a bit and we didn’t want to just let it go gently into that sweet goodnight. So we wrote one story with the theme of tolerance. Tolerance of everything but pornography, that subject was and is taboo, but anything else was on the table.
But who would want a book with only 10 stories? So we reached back into the dark recesses of our hard drives and manila folders for a “B” side story. One that was near and dear to us. For mine, I selected an anecdote my father once shared and built it into a story that even he might not recognize. Of course, the harder piece was the main story, and I pulled no punches there.
We will release it in an ebook and a print on demand format. There will be more updates on the book, and as always more stories to tell about the work, the team, and the process. For now though, it’s just an announcement. More to come, and soon. But first another meeting.
I wonder what the Romans could have accomplished if they’d used Zoom.