What changes may come

Can’t say that Ang and I will be drinking huckleberry milkshakes every day, but much more time together will be welcome.

As I begin writing this, it’s 12:27 in the morning. I’ve just come off my regular night shift at the newspaper, one of six remaining in my long career—it would have been 25 years in November—as a full-time journalist.

You see, aside from a fill-in shift here or there, I’m leaving the only line of work I ever thought I’d do. The reasons are myriad—personal, professional, perhaps even foolhardy. I always hoped I’d know when it was time to go, and it turns out that I did. So there’s that.

What will I do from now on?

Well, first, I’ll write a lot more novels and stories. When you have a full-time job and a family and, you know, all the many elements that constitute a life, writing time is the first thing that gets crunched. That can’t happen anymore. I’ve managed to write and publish four books these past few years, but increasingly, my available time to go deep into my imagination had begun to erode. So, too, had my energy. I had to make a choice. The only way I’m going to do the things I wish to do with the remainder of my life is by making the conscious decision to put them first. I should have done it a long time ago.

Given the distinct challenges faced by newspaper companies, and by the publishing sector in general, I’ve read the parting words of plenty of colleagues who’ve said that they didn’t quit journalism, but rather that journalism quit them. I’d love to hide behind that reasoning, but it would be a lie. Without a doubt, the workaday life of a production editor at a daily newspaper has become increasingly difficult in recent years, with staffing stripped to the bone, a news environment that values quickness rather than curation and the seeming inability of corporate overlords to deal with technology that has simultaneously made their product more widely available and less reliable at delivering the revenue required to support a large newsgathering operation. To work on the inside of most newspapers these days is to be wracked with uncertainty about what the future holds.

And yet, that’s not why I’m quitting.

Some profound things happened between the age of 18, when I first settled into a newsroom chair, and 43, as I prepare to take my fat ass out of one for good. Where once I looked for excuses to be in the newsroom and took every extra assignment (and every bit of extra pay) offered, in more recent years I’ve valued nothing above my time away from the job. Workweeks seem excruciatingly longer with each passing year, and days off, once they finally arrive, seem ever shorter. I’ve found that my tolerance for top-down management, ridiculous canards like “do more with less” and a creeping acceptance of mediocrity were turning me into the sort of bitter soul the younger version of me would have avoided (or mocked). I don’t want to be that guy. I’m not gonna be that guy. And as much as I’ve liked the actual work—and I have, right up to the end—I realize I have to kill the old me to let who I am now run free.

The other big development in my working life has been an entrepreneurial spirit I didn’t know I had and a rekindling of my love affair with work, this time unbound by the whims of newspaper company stockholders and quarterly reports. When I was 39, my first novel was published. Now, at 43, I have three novels in print, a fourth being written and a short-story collection knocking around. I’ve won some awards, built an international readership, found a publisher who loves what I do and is willing to let me do it freely, and at long last I’m making enough money at it that I can step from one career to another and continue on happily.

Let’s be clear: I’m not retiring. In some ways, the hardest work of my life is yet to come, as I try to be more ambitious in my writing and fill in the margins with the occasional bit of freelance work. I’m going to design a quarterly magazine. Lead some writing workshops. Do some manuscript editing and book design. And, yes, write fiction. It’s all hard, honest work. The important part is that what I do from here on out will happen on my terms, by my choices, and in the service of my life and the lives of those I love.

There are things I’ll undoubtedly miss. There’s no place quite like a newsroom on a big news night, and no group of people quite as whip-smart and funny as a bunch of newspaper hacks. The work I do now will be more solitary, less collaborative, quieter, more contemplative. And that won’t necessarily be easy for a big, bombastic guy like me.

But somehow—when I’m able to linger over dinner with my wife (something I never get to do on a night I work), or take an impromptu vacation, or say “the hell with it” and retire to a baseball game for the afternoon—I think I’ll manage to warm up to this new life I’m building.

Thanks for riding along.