
I wonder when it was that I finally got over the Fall feeling that I needed to get organized for going back to college. It was almost like a "spawning" drive that took hold of me in the late Summer and was pushing for me to return to class. Certainly all the time I was working in PR it was there ... and was a constant point of bemusement. Perhaps, in all these years that I've been out of a job, due to my days being unremarkably similar to one another (if it wasn't for paper print-outs of monthly calendars on my desk onto which I can scrawl the stuff where I have to be someplace at a particular day and time, I'd have no clue as to what day of the week it was, and sometimes even what month it was), the urge got smoothed out into my general malaise ... one more thing to ache for amid dozens, if not hundreds, of others churning below the surface.
I have, however, purchased some on-line training. The one I've started out with is in Technical Writing ... this is a purely practical choice, as there are lots of well-paying jobs in that niche out there, ones that I'm fairly sure that I'd be perfectly happy to do, but for which I have no "experience", or even a decent grasp of the nitty-gritty of the field. As I noted a week or so back, I decided that my best shot at getting this stuff done was to go off to the local library. Today was my second day at it, and I'm now 8 out of 18 units done ... not bad progress. Of course, so far it's all been about the technical aspects of Technical Writing, the way documents need to be structured, the stuff that has to be in them and the stuff that shouldn't, and a rather dispiriting bit about how this differs from "creative" writing ... and I have yet to actually write anything (which should extend the process into several weeks). One of the recent tasks was to determine what we were going to be writing about, and I (being the lazy sot that I am) opted to do a "manual" for creating my book review books, largely on the basis that I had typed up extensive notes on the process so that I didn't have to figure out "how to do it" each time I wanted to get another volume out (and I've still not ventured into producing the 2017 book). Needless to say, the "audience" (one of the elements that needs to be in the planning document) for this is mighty small, but it at least is a system that I don't have to start from zero with to detail the process.
Anyway, there's a lovely snap of my set up at the desks. Some days it seems to be a bit of blood sport getting on the actual computers (of which there are quite a lot, around the outer wall), but the main tables are generally only half-full and are quite handy, having pop-up outlets in the middle of them so I don't have to worry about running on batteries. The crowd isn't exactly like my old Starbucks, but it's not been too creepy yet. Of course, I'm still struggling with the odd hours they're open (some days not until noon, and only 8 hours each day), but I guess it will eventually be a habit (after this course I've got a bunch of others to slog into).
