Category: Work, work work

Valentino: The Last Emperor (2009): "A life's worth must be looked at with both pride in the accomplishment and the sad awareness of knowing when that tenure of work has ended."

Notes: This documentary about Valentino, the last great fashion designer still running the company that bears his name, has me thinking hard about one's lifetime body of work, legacy and how one would like to be remembered. Lined up next to the death of Michael Jackson, my new job and future book projects, these questions have been crowding my mind for the better part of the summer.

It's probably some kind of arrogance zenith to be thinking about legacy a month before your 36th birthday with one book and a modest pile of good ideas to your credit. But few things are more important to me, more fundamental to what I will consider the soil and sunlight of a well lived life. Can I look back on my work and be satisfied that I give them my best effort? That, on balance, I let creativity bloom instead of languish and that I did not give up because I lied to myself by believing I had nothing to say?

It comes down to work, steady, organic, doing until somthing real is born. Fuss with it as much as you like afterword. First you must bring it into being. And that takes a kind of time and space I feel like I must invent from nothing.

Writing is not as important to me as being a good person, as being the kind of friend, son, partner, brother I was put here to be. But it is a very close second. I could do without it. But I would be walking around with half myself, a butterfly with a rip in this wing.

Everyday I do. Or I try to. Otherwise it is a day, yes, a glorious celebration of being alive but one in muted colors and allegros missing measures. A day spent practicing one's art may end in pain, exhaustion, sorrow. It will always feel louder, brighter, grander than a day when we left our tools languishing on the work bench, waiting for someone else with something to say.

Wherein we discuss work habits, classical music, washer dryers and the awful responsibility of time.

MP3 File

Still catching up. Need one more day please.

Working on a book review. Must finish by tomorrow night. More upon completion.

I’m going to try beginning each day blogging my goals and tasks for the day. Since the workday’s almost over though, here’s a quick list of my goals for the month.

• Finish book proposal. My agent’s given my next book idea a greenlight so I gotta get the proposal done by Dec. 15th with the goal of sending it out early next year.

• Finalize BookTour.com partnerships for the year and set goals for 2008.

• Finish up remaining goals for 2007. I wrote them out on a legal pad last December and need to double check my progress. Think I’m on track for a very productive year.

• Write out 2008 goals. Worked for this year.

• Plot big fitness challenge for January. A 10K? A walk across San Francisco?

• Leave room for downtime. None of this is worth it without a sense of calm and serenity.

I just handed in the first draft of the proposal for my next book. Hooray! This is sixteen kinds of huge.

Nothing!

I completed the first chapter of my book on Tuesday. The beast weighed in at 34 pages and 9,943 words. I think it’s pretty good but Agent Man has the final word. He may say “we’re a go” which is ideal and means we’re ready to take this mutha out for a spin or he may say “fix this” or “tweek that” (more likely) in which case I do it as quickly as I can.

Either way, I’ve made a huge step towards this thing being born. And that makes me so happy, I started spinning in circles just walking to the mailbox yesterday. That combined with finishing my LA Times review on Thursday means I get to head off to SXSW next week with a clean plate.

Hooray. Hu-mother-lovin-Ray.

1. Book chapter. About 2 paragraphs from completion. 8,660 words.

2. Book review. Page 300. 284 to go.

It’s all about finishing two big projects before I head to Austin next month:

1. Opening chapter of my book. 2,983 words so far and I’ve outlined the last dozen or so paragraphs. 2 hrs a day minimum but probably more.

2. Review of a biography for the LA Times. On page 203 of 584 pages.

I push on, feeling oddly like I could get this all done.