Creative Producer
I don’t really believe in careers, so when I came across this tweet from Michael Oswell I had to do some thinking:
To borrow from Andrea Long Chu, I want to have absolute commitment to the bit. My working life isn't a planned career. It's not a coherent practice, nor can it be. The least I can do is to try and make visible the rather bizarre set of social relations we find ourselves in.
— michael elysium (@_MichaelOswell_) July 30, 2020
When people ask me what I do, I hesitate a little; I’m working two part time jobs and I was a freelance graphic designer but now I’m also a game designer, I guess? When you’re freelancing, I think personal branding is a Very Important Necessary Evil. I’m not a brand! But I do need a way of quickly communicating what it is I do and, unfortunately, there’s not really a quick way of saying graphic-designer-operations-manager-union-organiser. I also often think that if you’re trying to score creative work, you have to show yourself to be creative. There’s nothing more offputting (to me, snobbishly, personally) than a creative with a boring, characterless website/portfolio/business card. After some thought I landed on a term I have a love-hate relationship with:
✨ Creative Producer ✨
I think “storying” is part of a greater Oral Tradition which shapes how people perceive you, both professionally and socially. It’s fun to arrange the disparate parts of my life into a connected whole. “Creative Producer”, then, makes for a good story: a tongue-in-cheek contraction of an odd anti-career. If we’re talking books, I’ve handled writing, editing, art direction, graphic design, pre-press, and accessibility remediation. I’ve also handled the logistics of getting pallets of books across borders, of EU tax rates, and mixed VAT-rated fulfilment. Holistically, I have both created and produced. If we know each other through the TTRPG scene, you’ve most likely done the same.
I hate the label because it’s vague and betrays an inadequacy I don’t see as a problem (considering I mostly work freelance): being a jack of all trades but master of none.
This is the result of the first chat I had with Josh Cable about Milk Bar’s flagship adventure. I wanted to use Mausritter’s Honey in the Rafters as an example structure for a location rife for exploration.
My mum stayed at the hospital last week and she shared a room with two fellas, both of whom had one broken leg each. One really needed to go for a piss so the other (also with a broken leg) offered to help (??). She said the way both of them went tit over arse was majestic and the doctor turned on his heel and walk straight out when he saw what had unfolded.
Unfortunately, both had broken their other, healthy leg.
Sontag would’ve written Notes on Camp on her tumblr and gotten roasted so hard for it
I think I should do it too
Traveling: Part 1
Whenever people talk about traveling my gut instinct is to brush it off as middle-class extravagance and I just want to make it very clear that this is not that. I worked a silly number of hours at a shitty retail job to make it happen (and I still went into my overdraft lol). I’ve had a few people assume I was from London recently and I feel like I have to make my working class background very clear.
A few years ago, after a breakup from my first-ever long term relationship, I went traveling on my own. I ended the trip in Cologne and stayed at an Airbnb with some friends so we could go to Gamescom. I can’t really remember anything special about Gamescom itself, except from briefly meeting the American Truck Simulator devs. They asked if I could name every expansion to Euro Truck Simulator 2 in exchange for a t-shirt and… I’ve still got that t-shirt to this day. My friends and I got drunk on cheap white wine and pulled an all-nighter on the night before our flight.