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 ...and Who am I?
I would love to be just an "author"; working for myself, spending my moments envisioning strange
alien places and alternate times, as I pass my thoughts along to my computer on the first step to sharing them with the world; as I FB my friends and fans (and strangers who have no clue who I am) about my "word count", and talk of "whom" I'm hoping will buy it, or what "awards" I'm aiming for.
But no --or at least not for
today or many tomorrows yet to come-- although I carry the title of "author",
it only describes a small piece of what I do. In the past I've tried to
expand upon this, but now it's become so cumbersome that I've
had to invent simpler ones, that of "Story Mechanic" or "Trench-Author".
I've tried to work out just
what it is I have done in this field (for use on a job application) and suddenly realized just "why" I never have time to write. Over the last five years --while I've been home sick-- I have been a: writer, author, editor, technical consultant, packager, anthologist, publisher, administrator,
advertiser, interviewer, reviewer, artist, graphic artist, cover artist,
illustrator, layout artist, color corrections, prepress, web artist, web
designer and webmaster; and this was just for the Defending The Future (DTF)
series projects; now I'm taking on related works for Dark Quest LLC, as well as
moving back into my original field of game designer.
Then again, over the years I've come to realize just how lucky I've been as an author. The people I've dealt with overall are honest, and dedicated to the art of storytelling. In the past few months I've met publishers that will happily blowing smoke up your asre about their net worth, while locking you into what amounts to a life-time contract; so you can just kiss your work with them good-bye if you wish to move it to a new publisher. I'd quite all this long before I would put "the business" of publishing before my personal core values.
Mike McPhail, 2011.
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