Not here, though.

For those who care about such things, I recently posted my review of Oakland Opera Theater's production of Akhnaten. I saw the show a few days before leaving California, but didn't have a chance to write about it until I got back to Seattle. The original idea was to have it published professionally somewhere. (The primary target was San Francisco Classical Voice.) When that didn't pan out, I just put it up on a new page on my old website. The result is something halfway between my usual rambling commentary and a more "professional" style.

In the course of prettying it up and posting it, I had to register my expired shareware copy of Fetch (the upload software) and brush up on my HTML skills. (It's amazing how much more "official" it seems with just some basic layout and typography....) This served to remind me that the other site is still sitting there obsolescing -- Fetch and remembering how to write HTML code having been my two pillars of procrastination there. I've barely touched the old site since starting this blog. Longer than that, actually. At least since moving from Oakland last summer.

The experience of attempting to write in a more marketable style was enlightening for me. SFCV really isn't all that restrictive, and at no time did I have an actual agreement with them or anyone else. Even so, as I started to write, I was conscious of what a piece would need to be like to be the sort of thing the editors would consider appropriate for their publication -- nothing serious, just simple matters like total word count and staying on topic -- and I found that even that was difficult for me. It's not that I can't write to someone else's spec; it's just that it takes all the fun out of it.

Probably I'm just spoiled and petty, but if that's the color of my parachute, I may as well face up to it. They say that in choosing a career, one should seek to get paid for those things that one enjoys doing anyway. I like writing when I'm saying what I have to say; when I'm not, I don't like it anymore. This review was only a tiny step in that direction, but it was enough to put a bad taste in my mouth. I can only imagine how much worse it would be as, say, a newspaper journalist. Yuck. I'd rather do accounting.

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