It's Seeming Closer

Leaving my job has pulled up all sorts of thoughts from the depths, it seems. My job is one where you can get a new job and then have to wait for months to leave your old one. If you leave at the end of July, you have to wait until September to start the new one. This can all mean that other people, people who have somehow not got friends and relatives in the same career as me, but rather in the tiny number of jobs which operate on the system of working a few weeks notice and then going to the next job almost at once, assume I must have changed jobs about three times by the time I can actually tell them I have started at the new place.

A side-effect of this is that you can get a new job, then come to view it all as some sort of waking-dream. It is not real. Not really real. It is just something you did one day (We also accept jobs on the same day as the interview - good system all round and not at all odd in any way. At all.) and then you went back to your existing job and got on with it.

It came as something of a surprise the other day to actually hand in my keys, and my key-fob for getting through the electrically controlled doors (as opposed to the many non-electrically controlled doors you could just use instead), and my laptop. Still with a disc in which belonged to someone else, it turned out, but the joys of email and still having my work account (though who knows when it will suddenly be pulled?) meant I could at least email and tell someone. A large part of me still does not believe I have left.

A friend who has left her place of work twice now says she still feels she works there. Then again, my mum has often said she still keeps thinking she is not a grown-up and that she can't understand how she has two kids in their 30s, so it is not just a phenomenon related to leaving jobs.

The point is, we can wait for some things for so long that they seem as though they are never going to arrive, as though they are not real.

Happily, one event I have been waiting for now has a date, so I can work on making myself believe in it as a thing which will occupy space-time.

I have mentioned before the upcoming anthology combining the efforts and insanity of the RASSSA group. We've been working away at it for months and now we have a release date. The 7th August. Not too far off. Not far off, at all.

To add a little extra to the news, one of my fellow writers, Martin J Gilbert, is offering a free teaser story on the RASSSA website. Pop over and check it out.

Perhaps don't try to persuade yourself that the people in his story are really real, though, or else you may end up in trouble.