The Next Big Thing (For Me, At Least)

One of the most significant of those changes is that I no longer having to maintain any sort of breakneck work pace which living in a high energy place like Toronto seems to demand of you.

Instead, it has provided me with more time to simply reflect.

I was talking to my sister about this a week or so ago, and she said that the same thing was happening in her life. She has been on her own for the past year and half or so since her husband Bob passed away.

Needless to say her life changed dramatically after that, and threw her for a bit of a loop for a while. But now she finds herself in more or less the same situation as me.

So there’s a whole lot of reflecting going on in the Murray family.

One of the things I have been reflecting on is what I want to do next as a major writing project in my life.

I’m not talking about writing for money here, which I still do a fair bit of. This is personal and it’s not about the money, but simply the brain dump and the joy of driving the dump truck.

I have more or less always had one of those projects going on. Something I enjoyed doing and felt strongly about committing to in a longer term sense.

Mostly this amounted to experimentation with different kinds of writing: poetry, lyrics, screenplays, entertainment criticism...etc.

During this period of reflection, however, which has lasted a couple years now, while I have adjusted to a different lifestyle and schedule, I thought about a lot of different things. Mostly expressing themselves in a longer format piece of one kind or another.

I thought about writing a thriller, in the vein of some of the authors I like best like Lee Child and John Sandford. But I’m simply not emotionally equipped to do all the research required to create the level of authenticity I would need.

I thought about doing a book on marketing, but who the hell needs another one of those, and besides, once you read David Ogilvy and Bob Hoffman, you pretty much have both sides of the coin and you can hang up your own shingle and go to town.

Finally I thought about an autobiography. And that particular thought has been rattling around in my head and making the most noise.

I’m Not Famous, So Why Would I Do That?

Well, I’ll tell you.

One of the things I was fortunate enough to figure out very early on in life (thanks to some of the very wise adults I met along the way) was that the real trick of living a happy life was to let the thing you wanted to do with your life find you, and then, once it did, figure out a way to turn it into your business.

That way you would be able to support yourself, a family and a lifestyle and at the same time, look forward to getting up every day, because you loved what you were doing.

It doesn’t make for a very remarkable life, but it does help you live your life with considerably less pressure and angst than anybody out there who is trying to conquer the world and live out some Lifestyles Of The Rich & Famous fantasy.

The more I think about the idea of being able to chronicle this, the more it appeals to me.

I still have a lot of thinking to do about this. Because it’s one thing to have an idea, and I have been in the idea business all of my adult life, but it’s quite another to have a plan in place to be able to dimensionalize, block out and eventually execute this idea with the aim of it being both interesting and useful to people.

Because without all of that, it’s just some guy wearing out his fingers on a keyboard in a beautiful little city on the quiet side of the lake.

And while that doesn’t sound all that bad, I think I could probably bulk it up a bit, really have some fun and create the weirdest self-help book you can imagine. We shall see.

Jim lives in St Catharines Ontario (AKA The Quiet Side Of The Lake)

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