{"id":15611,"date":"2008-06-10T15:10:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-10T19:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2008\/06\/10\/fresh-air\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:49:44","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:49:44","slug":"fresh-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2008\/06\/10\/fresh-air\/","title":{"rendered":"Fresh air"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I strung up a line this morning and hung my washing out in my rose-scented garden. Lately I&#8217;ve been keeping my window open, loving the feel of the breeze coming through the chipped old white pane. Last night I even slept with it open, and the cool night air was delicious.<br \/>It&#8217;s time for me to make my life a bit more wholesome. (Mom, stop reading.) It&#8217;s been rather <em>un<\/em>wholesome of late, mostly in reaction to things going badly in my personal life. There&#8217;s a point, though, where too much of that living mucks with my brain chemistry and skews my priorities.<br \/>So I&#8217;ve deleted my dating site memberships, and figure I&#8217;m taking a month off from &#8216;gay&#8217;, with a possible extension to the whole summer. Maybe it&#8217;s silly and idealistic, but the current state of things certainly hasn&#8217;t been bringing me joy. (Okay, brief bouts of joy, but nothing lasting.) I&#8217;m tired of being kicked in the nuts by people I&#8217;ve let into my heart, right when I&#8217;m having fun and not expecting it. And there&#8217;s so much else I could be doing with the time I spend reacting to this stuff, like making art, not treating my friends as also-rans, or being out in the world instead of trying to score attention from virtual people.<br \/>~<br \/>Meanwhile, I&#8217;m re-reading my novel <em>Finitude<\/em> and making small edits, because I only have one chapter left to write and want to make sure it&#8217;s in keeping with everything that&#8217;s gone before. It&#8217;s not for me to say, but, dammit, <em>I like it<\/em>. And every single day I see at least one thing mentioned in the news that I touch on in this story; it&#8217;s time for it to be out there.<br \/>~<br \/>Freud was once asked the secret to a happy life, to which he replied &#8220;Love and work.&#8221; Those are the two things I generally try not to talk about on here, but since I&#8217;ve already talked about one, I might as well get the other off my chest.<br \/>One of the things I was being hush-hush about was a copywriting gig I took on the side. That was published this past week. The end result looks amazing, and the client was over the moon about my work, which was a much-needed boost &#8212; finding out that others out there could respond with the same kind of enthusiasm about what I love to do as my existing client has in the past &#8212; because there&#8217;s always that one stray thought that maybe you just managed to fool them, but couldn&#8217;t fool someone else. I haven&#8217;t been writing for the main client for several months (I&#8217;ve been working on another project), and that was getting under my skin.<br \/>So I had a conversation with my editor about where my work with them is headed, because at the core I&#8217;m a creative person, and I need my work to be creative. It&#8217;s a conversation several people advised me not to have, since it could jeopardise my main source of income, but I had to have it. I&#8217;m not someone who can fake it in my relationships to any degree. Plus, these are amazing people for whom I have endless respect &#8212; based now on ten years&#8217; worth of proof &#8212; so it seemed to me I was underestimating them by not trusting them to &#8216;get&#8217; it. But they did, and now instead of dealing with this schism in my head about work, there&#8217;s a new possibility for bigger things. <em>Phew!<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-content\/uploads\/posts\/1080\/fresh-air0.jpg.webp\" alt=\"\"><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I strung up a line this morning and hung my washing out in my rose-scented garden. Lately I&#8217;ve been keeping my window open, loving the feel of the breeze coming through the chipped old white pane. Last night I even slept with it open, and the cool night air was delicious.It&#8217;s time for me to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15611\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}