Two Careers Converge

I don’t often talk about my second career.

Yes, I’m an author and a publisher, but I’ve never been just a writer or a storyteller. In the beginning, like many creatives, I struggled to make ends meet. Early on I took a financial aid temp job at a training institute to make rent while I worked on my novel.

What followed was a full-blown accidental career in finance, regulatory, compliance, and project management. What was supposed to be a three-month part-time job to pay bills became a full-time seventeen-year scenic route through the brambles of business management, office automation, planning and development, before finally establishing my own firm to become a consultant.

While I’ve worked odd jobs between large corporate contracts, the truth is, I have never been paid sufficiently enough by my writing to be able to let go of other gigs. The most powerful statement I can make to that end is that I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

There is beauty and efficiency in the balance of the financial world, and it actually supports and blends well with the chaos and raw molten innovation of my creative world.

Do I love finance? No. But I like that it keeps my left brain balanced, which boosts my creative right brained whoosh. I think of it as the mandatory gym time for my brainpan so that I can then go gorge myself on delectables of the creative world without consequences. I also like that it means I can take risks with my creativity and build with greater imagination knowing my base is covered and I’m not desperate enough to have to sell writing to a meatgrinder.

Having a dual career means I’m often tired, which impacts my creative energy.

As much as I resented the financial world for not being creative, and the creative world for not being more profitable—what I learned about them both is core sustainability. A balance of measured temperament gives the proper nutrients and soil for uncanny seeds to sprout in magical and unpredictable ways.

So, what I’m about to explain next could not have happened were it not for almost twenty years of toiling through business management and finance whilst also building my writing catalog and studying story worlds as though the salvation of my soul depended on it—because it did.

We’ve reached the point in my business plans where it’s time to sell SAFEs and put in a permanent business management structure for Elder Glade Publishing. This is a huge step. Honestly, I thought it would be a couple more years out if we lasted that long. As it is, we came pretty close to shutting the doors this year.

The turning point came when I was forced to make a decision about moving forward in Hollywood or cutting off that financial drain. Let’s be perfectly clear—that is exactly what adaptation development is at this point. A financial drain with a sliver of hope for financial and creative windfalls on the other side.

While the writing and adaptation process feeds my soul, lights my creative fires, and puts me in a jovial mood—it is a costly endeavor. One that should not be allowed to negatively impact the overall financial health of the company, or my life in general.

That said, the possibilities of success are decent, and the learning is priceless. So, I’ve agreed in principle to move forward with a new development team and see what they are capable of producing. In the meantime, I’m focusing my energy on bringing in my first round of investors and building new skills around Hollywood film financing.

Because, ironically, that is what nearly twenty years in finance has ultimately been building up to. Who knew? I certainly didn’t. I just thought it was a jobber for the bills. Turns out, everything I learned as a Director of Finance, and a conglomerate commercial loan auditor also applies to film financing and production.

Spreadsheets are spreadsheets. Budgets are budgets. The industries and terms change, but the bottom line is always a bottom line.

The point of all this is to say that sometimes those fucking annoying detours pay dividends, literally. Sometimes those irritating necessary jobs and corporate side-jaunts, side hustles, gigs, and random contracts end up building a foundation you could not have anticipated early on. Then unexpectedly, that foundation becomes the pathway leading to your greatest ambitions, granting a paved, supported portal to your longtime dream. My heart’s greatest desire is being fulfilled because of this tandem, wonky route I would not have chosen if I’d had any other survival alternative at the time.

Every job I ever took in finance, business automation, project management and regulatory work was ALWAYS to pay for my life so I could write. There was never another reason to do that work. If I had not been a writer, I’d have done something else with my careers. That said, the path I ended up falling into during that temp-job-turned-permanent all those years ago has landed me right here with the tools I actually needed in order to have a very slim chance at success in a business that’s a hybrid beast: the body of a boring finance major, with the head of a creative magical dragon that breathes fire into an industry in need of a warmup.

I tell ya. Life is weird. Onward, my friends. Onward.

Stay tuned.