Blog: Where's A Careers Advisor When You Need One?

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It really is a FUNNY OLD TIME at the moment for me. After doing comedy and a bit of HOBNOBBING on Monday night I spent most of Tuesday on a COURSE about Safe Research on Administrative Datasets. I was shocked and surprised to find that, when called upon to engage in group exercises, I seemed to actually know what I was talking about. More amazing still: i found most of it Quite Interesting, ESPECIALLY the parts about individuals being indentified within apparently anonymised datasets. Does this mean i've been paying ATTENTION at work all these years or something?

Once the day was over I went and picked up my guitar and then headed over to A Secret Location to do A Secret Thing. It's all SECRET because the THING is being done for somebody's birthday, but basically someone wanted me to help them write a SONG, and then we videoed it. It's not the first time I've done something like this, but the difference on this occasion was that the LOCATION for it was WELL SWANKY. Also, during the process of setting things up, the possibility of another Exciting Project came up which, also, I can't really say any more about. Sorry about all this, I know it must be ANNOYING to have me being all ELUSIVE and that, I will try to report PROPERLY when I can!

The upshot of it all is, however, that I left the building in Slight Mental Turmoil. At the moment I find myself coming into regular contact with people SIMILAR to me who are doing CREATIVE THINGS for a living, and it looks GRATE. I'd really REALLY like to make that leap myself, but I haven't the first idea about how to do it - my Proper Job might be ending in March, and I'd like to use that as an OPPORTUNITY to force myself to have a proper GO at, you know, WRITING and stuff for a living, but I feel like I'm missing the KEY INFORMATION required to start getting that set up.

Yes yes, I can hear people at the back saying "Or maybe you is just too RUBBISH to do it!" and there may indeed be something IN that, but still, I would like to at least have a go. What I need at this point is some kind of MENTOR or Mid-Life Careers Advisor to point me in the right direction - like, how DO you go about getting festival gigs? How DO you get jobs in freelance writing? IS there a central commision for TV Theme Tunes? That sort of thing!

My main worry is that this is all very easy and I'm MISSING it somehow, and so letting opportunities for GOOD TIMES go by unnoticed. I very much fear I may have DRONED ON about all this to rather a large extent to The Lines In My Script last night, who listened very patiently and made some SUGGESTIONS. One of these was to ASK people, which I am going to try and DO (thus: "Anyone have a clue about this sort of thing?") and HAPPILY later on in the evening I had a reply from someone I had ALREADY asked.

When Mr J Kell and I had been to his wrtiers' group a couple of people had said they were writing things for COMPETITIONS and Calls For Scripts. "Is there a LIST of all this somewhere?" I asked Mr Kell. And LO! he said "Yes, there is" and SENT them to me. COR! I IMMEDIATELY saw an opportunity to enter Normal Island in for something IDEALLY SUITED, and also spotted a way to RE-JIG the whole "Tebbs" idea (which was going to be this year's Edinburgh show, until Moon Horse came along) for something else.

This made me feel a LOT better - thanks John! Knowing there's something i can do AND DOING IT makes everything feel all right again, and after all, it's not like i'm INCREDIBLY BUSY at the moment or anything is it?

In other news: we're moving towards completion of NOTES for the Final Mixes of the next album, artwork is nearly done, I'm doing a special Audience Participation show on Saturday morning at the Interesting Conference, off to see Half Man Half Biscuit tomorrow night, and this evening sees the first PREVIEW of Moon Horse in Northampton! There's PLENTY of time to write a couple of scripts around all that!

posted 16/6/2011 by MJ Hibbett

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Comments:

Good article from Lucy on this subject: http://lucyvee.blogspot.com/2011/05/when-do-i-give-up-my-day-job.html See also the 'resources' and 'inspiration' section on her required reading list! Links to other blogs on there, not just hers.
posted 16/6/2011 by

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