The feast/famine misnomer

Freelance journalists often talk about the feast or famine work cycle. (When I say “talk”, I mean “complain”, of course.) I’d like to find a better metaphor, though, one that conveys the reality of the experience. The word “feast” conveys leisurely eating, but the feast periods in my freelancing life are all about the opposite: frantic production as opposed to relaxed consumption.

“Famine” doesn’t work as a metaphor either. If I’ve decided to do something positive with the enforced idleness of a work-free spell, you’ll probably find me in the kitchen trying out a new recipe or baking something tasty. If I’m taking a gloomier view of things, you’ll probably find me whining between mouthfuls of SuperNoodles about how I may never work again. Either way, my feast periods involve frantic running around and my famine periods involve eating more than usual, so the metaphor falls down on both sides.

This is all by way of explaining why I haven’t posted anything to my blog for ages: I’ve been working on an exciting new project and it’s been taking a lot of my time. The project is a new community newspaper for East Oxford. The paper is so new that it doesn’t even have a name yet; we’re planning to get the community involved in naming the paper by running a poll in the pilot issue. The initial funding is coming from the city council’s East Area Parliament, but after that we need to look at new ways of keeping the paper up and running.

I’ve never helped to set up a newspaper before, so I’m on a steep learning curve and I don’t think I’ve reached the top yet. I’m hoping to blog a lot more, feast or no so-called feast, about the process of getting a community newspaper up and running.