Month: February 2011

The Daring Independent Life of the Editor

So it has come to this. If you are an editor, you are probably either looking for a job or will soon be. And the prospects are uniformly grim, even for a world-famous author like yrs trly. The work is gone. Well, that’s not quite right. The full-time, health-insurance kind of work is gone– but that doesn’t mean that editorial labors are forever vanished, to Bangalore or the archives of obsolescence.

Nope, text still needs someone to futz with it, and people still need editors. Sometimes. They have discovered that they don’t really need to keep them around all the time, though– where’s the immediate profit in that?– and so the field has largely become contract work. As someone who may have little other career skills to her name besides editing, you may be thinking dark thoughts at this point. Stable employment is a sweet thing, only truly appreciated (like most sweet things) when lost.

Oh, but be cheery, my literate friend! The life of the freelancer is ultimately the life of an adventurer. Once you pick up the right entrepreneurial tricks, you will discover that being a free agent has its perks. Sure, you won’t be able to afford to get that molar crowned anytime soon, but you are free to seek competing bids for your time and talent. You are effectively building a small business with little overhead, as the product emanates directly from that shapely brain of yours. (Such ridges!)

Eventually, as positive word of your brand spreads, you’ll be able to take work more in alignment with your interests, rather than just the work that will keep the lights on and keep the PBR stocked in your fridge. And you may just end up with better opportunities than if you’d stayed chained at the copyediting desk of HVAC Monthly for several more years.

We are being shoved out into the cold plains of competition and commerce, my friends. Might as well have some fun with it. And as far as the health insurance goes… Psst, you can sign on with Mediabistro and then get a shitty plan for as low as a hundred-spot a month. The teeth will go, and forget about prescriptions, but death and dismemberment can at least be forestalled.

Talking to Other Humans

I’ve been back in New Hampshire longer now than I was out on the road for the book tour; it’s been more than three months. And the distance from that adventuring time keenly manifests itself now in my interactions with other people. The other week, I attended a gathering of strangers and lost the nerve to talk to people, even in the interest of brazen self-promotion, which was the concern of most everyone else. At an early opportunity, I fled. O regard him, the man who gave hundreds of interviews, including at least a dozen on TV, who faced Al the Mad Roker, and who coolly deflected dick jokes from Australians and spoke in radio-friendly bites and learned to smile into a dark lens– ridiculous! Where was that calibrated persona now?

I’ve seen flashes of him in recent job interviews, perhaps because they more closely resemble media appearances than do ordinary conversations. Questions like “What was a recent work-related challenge and how did you overcome it?” are begging for a canned response and a shit-eating grin, wouldn’t you say? (Though occasionally there is the temptation to go off-script and say something like, “Hmm, in five years I see myself swaying gently beneath an oak branch.”) So now the goal is to take that glib bastard and apply him to more informal scenarios, where humans tend to meet and converse, the world somewhere outside the frosted windows of my Portsmouth apartment.

It’s been a womb of sorts, or perhaps a tomb. New England winter and cold tongues outside, while inside we have warmth and writing and my books and games, and Jane returning regularly to warm things still further (though not over this particular, particularly long weekend). Too easy to stay inside and let the Skill of relating fall dormant, while other Skills wax.

No more, friends! (I address this to the furry, stuffed friends lounging on the blankets.) To the outer realms once more I go, to re-remember what it’s like to be a certified member of the human race. I’ll gather my threadbare clothes about me, and name myself Writer, and I will be interesting and congenial and I will share stories and listen to those of others and occasionally steal them for later.

By the way, the bloom is off the rose for this WordPress app. Why should link pasting be so effing difficile?

Bamboo
One of the furry friends

Scribing on the Go

Since so much of my writing mind has been fixed lately on a tale involving the wondrous future of mobile devices, maybe it’s only fitting that I now scrawl this on a webOS WordPress app, hoping against hope that these words will not capriciously vanish into the ether, the Cloud, or the Plane of Phlogiston.

Maybe this is the future, reclining on the red couch in my office (our office, Jane would hasten to add), for what could be less intimidating than to peck on a few keys as I lie under a fleece blanket? Certainly feels surmountable, in comparison to the dread that my perfectly innocent desk and chair setup evoke sometimes (the dread increases the longer I’ve been away from my task). All the resources of the internet are right here if I need them. For example, a few lines back my brain went dead at the thought of what the word was for the material of this blanket, so I just opened up the browser app and typed in “blanket material.” And of course, the intimacy of this phone-based textual format cannot be denied; I might otherwise be embarrassed to admit that I’d forgotten a word like fleece!

Linking and images also promise to be straightforward. Here is your dossier on the fine product of sheep. And here is an unrelated picture:

Super Bowl Nachos

…OK, so that took a little while. And I would prefer that the Super Bowl nachos were horizontal rather than vertical. But hey, that’s still kind of like magic.

Obviously working on a phone is unsuitable for any kind of in-depth editing or long-form writing. Typing is rather slow going, or at least it is with the tiny keys of my Pre. But for a quick blog post to let the world know that you’re still alive and still care, this seems like just the ticket. And getting back to the theme of writer’s dread, which we all have to face sooner or later (save perhaps that tiny minority of loathsome, never-blocked authors whose output stacks higher than the Andes), maybe this format is ideal for the crappy first draft of a scene or chapter that you just can’t get down to otherwise. Just don’t accidentally publish your tender, early story draft as a blog post!