When I Grow Up

One of the classic childhood questions is “What do you want to be when you grow up?“. It’s something I still ask myself with depressing regularity.
As it is, I’m fortunate enough to be in a role I actually enjoy – by which I mean the website writing, database guff etc., rather than ‘the role/company I’m in is the one I’m going to stay with forever’ – and which I do in my spare time as well as in a full-time job. Yes, I would prefer to be chainging it slightly, and be working more for myself instead of in the more corporate environs, but that’s something I’ll work on now that other parts of life are rather more settled.
But there are other things hovering on the periphery, too.
In many ways I would love to be a writer – I think that’s probably the same for most bloggers, to be honest – although d4d™ would never get a book deal. I’m at least vaguely realistic on that – d4d™ is too scattered, it doesn’t really have a defined theme. I’m not knocking those bloggers who have managed to get book deals (well, except for Belle Du Jour, but I never read that one in the first place, and never really understood the hype around it, if I’m honest) and I think people like Scary, Reynolds, Girl, and Waiter Rant absolutely deserve to get those deals. But they all have a theme, and I know d4d™ doesn’t. Then again, it was never intended to. And in many ways it actually emulates my head far too accurately.
All the same, yes, being a writer is something of a dream. It’s something I’m going to work on and attempt to get back into- years ago I wrote two novel-length things, both of which I still have copies of (and, to some degree, cringe now when I re-read them) but they worked. They were more catharsis, and dealing with shit that was in my head and life at the time, and since they’ve been completed, a lot of those issues have been dealt with, so over recent years there just hasn’t been that need to write in the same way. Well, I say that – but then I look at d4d™, and wonder if actually what I need is to take a break from that, and channel the writing energy that goes into d4d™ into something else for a while. But that’s a while off yet – there’s other things in the mental flightplan first.
The other real thing that keeps coming back to me, though, is photography. I’d love to be a photographer, to be able to make a living from that. Again, I need to work on it a lot, and to develop some themes that I can build on. Again, the ideas are there, and in this case the projects I’m thinking of would be longer-term ideas, projects with a theme that would also (I think) be commercially viable.
There’s a couple of others that’d be nice to do to, but that rely on skills I simply don’t have – I’d love to be an artist, or something of that ilk, but absolutely lack the ability to draw anything – but when all’s said and done, it comes down to three or four things, or any combination of them, really. And really in no particular order.

1. Properly Self-employed
2. Photographer
3. Writer
4. Web Developer