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Hi, I'm duderium, you might remember me from such recent threads as "are your bosses acting shittier lately?" and "is it ethical to write a novel inspired by Jeffrey Epstein?" Well, I got fired from my blue collar job about a week and a half ago for incompetence (after lasting for two years at that place), so currently my job is just writing novels. (My spouse has a good job so we're alright financially.) I applied to three similar kinds of jobs, got two interviews and one offer, and accepted it. I start next week and am not excited about it at all! There's a gardening job near where I live which would probably be way easier and less stressful, but the salary is lower and it's basically a dead-end job. At the last gardening job I did, I was forced to do tons of busywork (cleaning shitloads of plastic pots), which was bizarre, and my boss there was also never satisfied with my work. I've more or less accepted that life for me in the USA is going to be about either unemployment or just trying to survive at my jobs long enough to put them on my résumé. I work as an oil technician (fixing oil-fired boilers or furnaces at your house) so it's going to be interesting to see if this kind of job even exists a few weeks or months from now!

I prefer writing and teaching but no one will hire or pay me to do that, so for the moment I'm condemned to crawling around in disgusting basements while fixing machines that should have been retired and outlawed decades ago.

I think that my Epstein novel is finished for the time being. I listened to the criticism I received here on hexbear about it and did my best to address it, and also cut out eighty fucking pages over the last few days in order to appease my agent, who said that the novel was too long. Sixty pages of that huge cut was done in one day. The following day, I was so exhausted I could barely bring myself to even think about that book. I'm going to submit the third draft to him today. Hopefully he will send it to the publishers at that point, and hopefully they will publish it without forcing me to do too much editing (yeah, right, if they accept it, they're going to make me cut out a lot more ).

I also have a science fiction novel that is almost certainly going to be self-published because that's basically the only way science fiction novels written by unknowns are published these days, as far as I can tell. It's about another Earth orbiting the sun in the present day, except on this other Earth, it's the year 1492. Where did this Earth come from? Why is it there? You'll have to read the novel to find out! The story is told from the perspective of four characters: an American astronaut racing to the planet, a Muslim astronomer living in Granada, a Mayan (not Aztec) translator living in Tenochtitlan, and an American scientist living on our Earth. People don't seem to be into these kinds of novels these days, ones told from multiple perspectives I mean, but I just couldn't resist. There's a scene early in the book where the astronaut shoots Columbus in the head. The whole first draft is done except for the final section, which is for the translator. I'm not sure how to wrap up her story, but I'm very happy with how everything else has turned out. I think at this point all, or nearly all fantasy and science fiction is orientalist, so I'm doing my best to ground my stories in research and respectfully describe the cultures in them.

Getting fired sucks and is kind of an emotional rollercoaster. I hated that job but I couldn't bring myself to quit (since other jobs in this field would almost certainly either be either the same or worse), so it was only a matter of time.