I just found these two grouse websites, Brazen Careerist and Location Independent Professionals. I’ve been thinking of mobilising Paine Management for some time, and it’s been great to bump into a bunch of like-minded souls: people who want to be financially (and locationally?) independent. Each of them have great blogs – in fact, Brazen Careerist has many, somehow linked to members’ sites.

I even found a post called ‘Putting Together A Portable Office That You Can Take With You Anywhere You Go In The World’.

The first time I thought of myself as the sort of guy who might use a portable office was when I was interviewed by David Prater for Cordite. He described the man bag I carried at the time as a ‘portmanteau’. I’m pretty sure Orwell’s listless Gordon uses a ‘portmanteau’ in Keep the Aspidistra Flying as well.

What I’m talking about is not a ‘portmanteau’. It’s just a portable office. I always thought ‘portmanteau’ meant, specifically, ‘portable office’. It doesn’t.

But the thing with Gordon would be the second time I bumped into the notion.

It’s difficult to articulate how excited it makes me when I discover  whole groups of disparate people doing similar things with their life that I’d like to do. When it gets as specific as building a portable office, it gets kind of boggling.

Combine all this with my principle of Three Degrees of Uncoordination and a decision pops out: I’m going to create a portable office. If I do, I might need to do what this guy (presumably) did, and ditch all my stuff. Getting rid of my books is proving to require a few more than three collisions of colluding ideas, however.

I had started creating something other than a portmanteau before I found these websites, and I had begun to break it down into items I would be able to transport with me, and items I would need to buy at each location. Ideally I could have a bike wherever I go, but transporting one each time I move is simply impracticle, so that’s an item I’d need to have in my ‘Purchase Onsite’ category. Bike pants, on the other hand, would go in the ‘Transport’ category, of course.

I bought a mini stapler today, to replace my clunker, which had run out of staples anyway.

Now I will never be late again!

I’m excited about Brazen Careerist because, as a testimonial run from FastCompany said, they ‘decided to turn existing traditional online career management tools on their ear’ by merging the best of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, in a way that might practically advance your career. Basically it seems like a fun version of LinkedIn, which is a weird schmoozy site of the most boring variety, until you have hundreds in your network, which is not where you’re going to be if you’re interested in things like Brazen Careerist. A good stopgap, then, between Facebook and Linked in, via Twitter.

As you read and write around the site, your updates and comments are published in your personal feed, which is called Ideas. In the tab next to that you have your resume, so that if people like what you’re thinking, they might check out your resume to see if you’re good for a job they know about, or an opportunity coming up. That’s how I imagine the site to work, anyway – I’m still new to it.

I never cease to be amazed by what I find on the internet created by like-minded young people.

I’ve set up my profile on Brazen Careerist¹ and joined the Ning group for Location Independent Professionals, the Clubhouse. If you’re in Melbourne and this sounds like your sort of thing, it’d be great to see you there because I feel like the real value of these new mediums is found when they intersect somewhat with your physical world.

1. which, although it’s irrelevant, my fingers insist on typing as Brazeen Carerist – watch out for that one!

There’s a really good agent blog coming out of Sydney, called Call My Agent! The anonymous blogger, Agent Sydney, posts and answers fictional queries based on what are, presumably, emails that an agent might receive, in a pithy and sometimes scathing manner.

In a post about competitions and rights, Agent Sydney dishes out such pithy advice as ‘don’t sign away your subsidiary rights’, and challenges publishing houses’ acquisitions of world-exclusive rights from the runners-up of prizes around the nation. Agent Sydney puts it best about Allen & Unwin’s acquisitions:

The Vogel Award, for example, is not an award for One Really Good Novel and Four Close Calls. It’s an award for one novel alone. Once the winner is announced, the others should either be set free immediately or given a (short) time frame within which the publisher has exclusivity.

This blog is in the business of answering stupid questions about publishing, with (mostly) kind and clever answers. Compare this with my dad, who used to answer silly questions with ‘pumpkin’ and then get a rise out of saying, ‘Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.’

Pumpkin!

Pumpkin!

For what it’s worth, I have become highly skeptical of literary prizes, and will be advising clients at Paine Management to seriously consider their motives for entering. Various factors of competition culture appear to be geared against the long-term interests of writers, and Agent Sydney’s is one good example: being shortlisted for a prize might even compromise your chances of getting picked up – if a house is holding onto your second-place MS, you can’t send it elsewhere. Something to think about.

Even if you win, your book comes out among annually regurgitated hype and is presented to the public as an award-winning book. When I read this books I am invariably disappointed: they are award-winning manuscripts; often, at best, they are marginally publishable novels.

This is why so many manuscript-award-winning novelists are one-hit wonders. Sorry if that sounds harsh – it should be no more abrasive than saying Kris Kross were one-hit wonders.

Jump!

I’m excited that Andre Dao is blogging at A Portrait of the Peach as a Young Lawyer.

I have known Andre since we employed him as the Voiceworks Production Intern at Express Media. He helped me produce a production manual for future Voiceworks editors – actually, I helped him, as he did most of the leg work.

He is an absolute gun. Since then, Andre has joined the Voiceworks Editorial Committee as Columns Editor, taken over the reins of Right Now, a human rights journal, helps to run Spill Collective and their beyond-epic warehouse parties and squeeze in a wee Arts/Law degree.

He’s the sort of guy who reapplies for internships two years after he was unsuccessful, gets the gig and then proceeds to demonstrate why you should have employed him way back then.

His musings on A Portrait are lyrical and expansive, about everything from a hat that’s not his girlfriend’s to the communal ruse of warehouse parties and some mythbusting on behalf of the yoof.

A very cool and inspiring guy – one of his own Remarkable People – check him out.