I started a new career today!

Over the two decades of this blog's existence there have been times when I've landed a new job.  Sometimes, like the TV master control operator and the vocational instructor and the mental health peer support specialist, I've shared about here.  Guess I couldn't resist holding back on the good news.  Other jobs (like the part-time one I had recently that... nah, nevermind) were quietly not mentioned.  That part-time job was mostly supplemental to being an artificial intelligence trainer: something I really enjoyed doing but the work had petered out more or less.

So for the past several months I've been hanging on by my fingernails.

But today, there is cause for rejoicing.  There has been a change in fortune.  God is being very good to me lately and I need to share that thankfulness.  Today I started training for something that I think is going to be a real career.

What is it?  I am now a behavior professional at a place that works with autistic young people.  I'm going to be guiding them toward how to better communicate with others.

It's going to be a very challenging position.  But also very rewarding, personally and otherwise.  I'm going to get to use my training and experiences as a mental health professional, along with what I've gained along the way as a teacher, especially my training in college.  It's the most technological job I'll have ever had.  Among other things today at orientation they issued us each a new iPad.  They're on lanyards to wear around our necks!  I look like I'm wearing official Apple bling.  But that iPad is going to see some heavy use, maybe even more than my personal iPad Pro.

I can't fully describe how wog-boggled I am by this.  In a good way.

I may make a post every so often about it.  I can't talk about much, given various regulations like HIPAA compliance.  But a general sense of where I am and how far I'm going (hopefully far) will be befitting this blog's mission of chronicling the human condition, just as it has for the past more twenty-one years.

I'm so excited!!  Things are really turning around.  And I'll be able to continue writing too.  Maybe at odder hours but that's okay.  I don't think this job is going to be as draining as the past few I've had since leaving the mental health department over two years ago.  Some of those nearly killed me.

This new job is going to be different.  It's going to lift me up.  It's going to be the kind of challenge that makes me a better person.  And I am very thankful for that.

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Status of the book, December 2022

Three months ago I posted here that I had begun work anew on the book that has been percolating in my gray matter since 2014.  That was when Dad told me I should write about my struggles with bipolar disorder.  He thought it could be inspirational to others.

And then of course, Dad passed and that knocked me off my feet.  And since then a lot has happened: the journey across America, new career and then changing career (and now, again), new town and new faces... all of this the backdrop against an ever-evolving saga of my mental health.  The book then, in whatever form it was going to take, is radically different from the project now before me.

I am happy to report that after a few false starts with how to open the book, that it is now well on track.  Late last night I finished the first draft of the new prologue.  It no longer opens with me in handcuffs, being taken away to a psychiatric facility.  The prologue now is one page of Microsoft Word that comes barreling at ya at 90 miles an hour, literally.  The preface was completed a week and a half ago.  Yesterday I finished chapter one and it's now in the hands of a few faithful friends who I'm awaiting feedback from.  The chapter about the school board run is also done.  There exist a few incomplete chapters, which I will be getting to as the Muse leads (wow, haven't mentioned "the Muse" in quite many years, I think).

I want this book to be a thorough chronicle of my life not only in spite of bipolar disorder but also much other traumatic experience, that have only been addressed in recent years (another reason why I'm glad I'm working on this now instead of trying to publish it then).  I also need for it to be a homage to everyone who has entered my life and helped me along the way.  I hope this will reach out to some of them.

And the title?  I've had about a dozen ideas for that.  Last week it was called "American Manic".  But this book is going to be about so much more than manic depression.  It needs a title that reflects a deeper life story.

For the past three days I've been fighting a nasty bug that at one point had my temperature reaching 104 Fahrenheit (or 40 centigrade for our metric friends).  During the delirium and convulsions I came to a spiritual place of peace that I had been praying to reach for most of my life.  And accompanying that, arrived an idea for a title.

(I think I underwent what my Native American brethren refer to as a sweat lodge, whether I wanted it or not.  I was perspiring like a pig as the fever broke.)

And now, I think it does have a title.  A good one.  Beautiful, even.  That doesn't refer to mental illness at all.  But instead could be interpreted as being about my entire journey, from the moment I was born on through young life and into adulthood.

I hope my high school freshman English teacher gets to read this.  She owns that preface!

I've read a number of autobiographies by people with bipolar disorder over the years.  Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind and Terri Cheney's Manic were two of them.  I am currently reading Electroboy by Andy Behrman (as high energy a jolt of a book as I've ever come across).  It doesn't hurt to study those who have gone before.  But I like to think that my own humble contribution to literature about life with mental illness will have a style all its own.  If it can carve out some small niche which readers will discover and be led to think about and even be entertained by, that would make me very happy indeed.

So, work is well underway.  Maybe it will come out before The Winds of Winter (come on Martin, what's KEEPING you??!).  I am looking forward to the next few weeks and months as it develops further.

Next up: chapter two.  Which begins in Washington, D.C.  Or maybe not.

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Achivement Unlocked: Fiction Writer!

The biggest regret I've had as a writer, for all of this time, is that I've never been able to compose real narrative fiction.  Screenplays for film projects?  Those have been no problem to sit down and churn out.  But for something even so rudimentary as a short story?

That has eluded me.  It has been sealed away behind a concrete wall and I've been pounding away at it for decades, trying to grasp that arrow to place in my quiver.  And the wall wasn't yielding a centimeter.

Why wasn't it possible?  Nonfiction has never been an issue.  I've always been in my element in regard to exploring ideas and articulating musings upon them.  Fiction however...

I've some thoughts about why that has been.  And it correlates with the bipolar disorder I've had since at least 2000, and with some other matters that only in recent months have come to light.

So maybe that I was able to write my first ever short story two weeks ago is not just a threshold moment in my life, it is a benchmark for an even greater progress.  For how far I have come in the two years since I packed up the car and headed out into America with my dog.  But especially for the better part of this past year.  And there have been some remarkable people who have helped me along, to get to this place I hadn't thought possible.  And I'm hoping sooner than later that can be a tale to be shared.

A few friends have read the first short story.  Two of them said that the ending of it brought them to tears.  Some have suggested that I've been writing fiction all along and had never told anyone.  As if!

In the past few weeks I've begun writing a second short story.  And a one-act play.  And have had ideas for other works of fiction.  No, not a novel.  Not yet.  Let's take small steps toward the bigger stuff.  But they are coming.  And then I'll have to figure out what to do with them.  The play is something that would be neat to see produced on stage.  The notion of making a short film of it has crossed my mind but this... seems more suited for a live performance.  Or maybe I'll make the film after its stage debut.

So anyhoo, that is why I've been a bit slack in blogging lately.  The wall has been toppled and the arrow seized, and I've been spending time getting a feel for it.  Like a fledgling taking first flight.  And time will tell how far I can fly with this.  I'm praying that it might be very far, indeed.

Incidentally, for those wondering: neither the finished story nor the pieces in the works are in the genres of science-fiction or fantasy.  So far these are entirely within the scope of our real world.  And I don't know if I ever will try science-fiction.  Good sci-fi is a tough genre to write.  And the ones I would most be inspired by are the masters like Robert A. Heinlein and Philip Jose Farmer.  Writers who used their work to delve into ideas, and not project ideology.  Too much of the science-fiction in recent decades has been driven by agendas... and that's not my style.  But to use science-fiction as a vehicle for conveying ideas and concepts of the human condition?  That would be not just another arrow, but a silver one.

So if there are periods during which I seem absent or negligent about The Knight Shift: take heart!  I am merely exploring a new area of my abilities, and I'm looking forward to sharing those also in the fullness of time.

Until then, I will share one piece of new fiction with all two of my faithful readers!  And yes it is a work of fantasy and not only that but it's a Star Wars short story!  I doubt that Lucasfilm will be adding it to the official body of lore however.  But do consider this to be my small and humble attempt to bridge the gap between the Expanded Universe fans and the adherents of the new canon.  Because as the song says, "Why can't we be friends?"

Here it is.  A teaser of what's to come.  Or perhaps a grim harbinger.  Click to embiggen and enjoy(?)...

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Back from the break

I needed to unplug from some things for the past couple of weeks. Including this blog.

Nothing traumatic or crazy happened. 'Cept I chose to focus on a few things and getting other things re-focused that had been lingering too much for too long.

This blog has been around for nine years now (wow!). In that time it has become quite a chronicle, a collection of documentation, about the evolution and development of that strange and bizarre creature that God created in Robert Christopher Knight. And that's what it will continue to be, until whatever point if and when I decide that it's time to retire from blogging.

But sometimes, that evolution and development appreciates the time to rest and reflect. And I'm still reflecting now. There might not be the frequency of posts that many readers (gauging from the amount of e-mails that came in) seem to enjoy, at least not off the bat.

In terms of Doctor Who, I'm regenerating. Becoming a different person.

But then, aren't we all? Isn't that what every one of us has been doing since the day each of us came into this world?

And besides, my girlfriend thinks it's time to write some more here. She has me well trained already. So I'd better get to work :-)

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