So what's your book about?

Joygantic came over last night after taking Sara out for drinks and dinner, and he gave me a gentle nudge about my lack of blog efforts. He's right. I haven't been feeling the blog lately. I suppose my lack of motivation is a mixture of my ongoing efforts to mentally reconfigure the purpose of this blog now that we're no longer in Denmark, as well as a general demotivation caused by my generally uninteresting life right now. Most days are spent reading e-mail, poking about the Web, and watching television. Which points to a larger issue. When I was an active, motivated scholar, I constantly wished I had more time to research and write. Now, I have nothing but time, and what am I doing with it? Hanging out on Metafilter.

This lack of forward movement seems to me pretty clearly a symptom of my growing apathy toward academia in general. Bottom line, I just don't want to do that anymore. Maybe I would feel differently if the Denmark position were a more positive experience, but I suspect not. When I think about it, I've had misgivings about academia stretching back to when I was an undergrad, but I think I got caught so caught up in the competitive spirit of graduate school that I failed to notice the difference between the motivation of being good at something and the motivation of actually wanting to do that thing.

So I'm trying to pull every string I have in order to find something that will take me out of academia and keep us in Seattle. Unfortunately, the job I mentioned with the major videogame company didn't pan out. There are a few other leads I'm working on, so hopefully something will come of them. Sara keeps having dreams (okay, we'll go ahead and call them nightmares) that I have to go back to Denmark for another year. I don't think it will come to that, but I'm doing my best to insure that it doesn't.

In the meantime, I am continuing to work on my book. Hopefully, I will get more motivated in that direction in the coming weeks. I need to do a bunch of interviews with various game developers as well as do some more digging about the independent videogame industry. If you hear of any jobs, let me know.