Apt. 11D

The Price of Words

My buddy, Suze, is a freelance editor, so she's continually scanning the online job boards for new clients. She periodically sends me the worse job advertisements with wry notes about the downfall of civilization.  

Here's a proofreading job. They are looking for someone who will proofread health related articles. Some of these articles are written by non-English speakers, which will require serious editing. They would like someone with experience. It's a 20+ hours per week job. For all that, they will happily pay you $150 per month. 

A new blog that's devoted to healing and aspiration posts is looking for a blogger who knows HTML, WordPress, and SEO. That blogger should blog a 250-500 word post at least once a day, seven days per week. They estimate that writing that post should take you about 10 minutes per day. For all that, they'll pay you $50 per month. 

Sign up, people! 

The Chatterati

This weekend, I spent a lot of time thinking and talking with Steve about what my next move will be. 2011 was a disaster for work. Disaster. Selling the house and minding the kids was an 80 hour per week job. I did make some headway on a book, but the writing happened in bits and pieces and as a result, the writing is choppy with lots of half finished thoughts. I want to keep working on it, but I need immediate gratification projects, too. Preferably projects that also bring in a little casheroo. 

A blog is fabulous for people who only have bits and pieces of time. 20 minutes and there's a blog post. In another 20 minutes, fun comments appear. It's magical and wonderful. 

I also continue to do this blog, because sometimes you feel like you make a difference. I'm not a hundred percent sure that it makes a difference, but sometimes... maybe... perhaps. 

A few weeks ago, I noticed a small article in Business Week on Lego for girls. I threw out a very quick link to it, tweeted it, put it on Facebook, and threw a note over to my buddy who specializes in writing on these topics. Erin wrote a series of excellent posts on the topic. Her posts were noticed by bigger fish. Pretty soon, the Today Show was debating whether or not Lego for girls was a good thing. 

Did my blog post and tweets directly lead to Matt Lauer and Star Jones fighting about Lego? No. But I was one part of a larger group of people that did make that happen. I am part of a network of people that can take a topic from page 14 and make it page 1. This is very, very rewarding. 

While this blog (or any blog) should not be a career goal or a long term life plan, it is an extremely fun hobby. 

Rewards

I just met my writing goal for the day. Wahoo. A draft of Chapter One is finished. It may suck. I probably sucks. But it's done. 

I need a reward for myself. It's too early to liquid rewards, so I may have to reward myself with a burger. That's good, too.

Question of the Day: How do you reward yourself? 

Routine Busters

Last night, I wrote about my struggles to set up a good work-at-home routine around here, because of all the random urgent tasks that pop up during a day. Here are two days worth of routine busters:

Today
1. Call from Ian's school to say that Jonah's homework is in Ian's backpack. Weigh going to Ian's school and getting the homework to Jonah. But decide it's not worth a 45 minute drive. Decide to let Jonah take his lumps.

2. See Jonah's lunch box on the kitchen floor. Decide to take it to him, since he doesn't have any money on his lunch card. Can't let the kid starve. 10 minute distraction.

3. Half day at Ian's school; home at 12:20. He just got off the bus complaining of a sore throat. Add 15 minutes onto all tasks for the rest of the day. 

Yesterday

1. Call from Ian's school. He forgot his library book. They want me to bring it in, so he won't cry. We work it out on the phone and he's fine. 8 minute distraction.

2. Call from Ian's school. The therapist wants to discuss the horrible side affects of his ADHD meds. She promises to push the Speech Therapist to teach him to swallow pills, so we can try something else. 30 minute conversation with a 40 minute recovery time.

3. Go to the mall to buy a dress for a baptism this weekend. (A chore that would be unthinkable with a kid in tow. Husband doesn't get home early enough to go in the evenings.) 2 hours. (Yay! Pretty dress.)

4. Can't remember where I parked the car, so I walk around aimlessly, while pushing the panic button on the key chain over and over until I find it. 15 minutes. 

Despite all that, I did manage to write 466 (non-bloggy, non-twittery) words so far this morning. If I pop in a movie for the sick kid, I might be able to double it. 

Routines

I'm in the midst of reading Stephen King's On Writing, which was an impulse buy a few months ago. I bought it at the same time that I bought Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, but guess what? I like the Stephen King better. 

Weirdly enough, King's book doesn't have much in it about writing. He writes about meeting his wife and getting married young, about working in a factory for years after college, about his reaction when he found out that the publishers were going to pay big bucks for Carrie. There's great stuff about his nasty drug habit in the 80s and some stabs at literary critics. I should write a full review when I finish.

The best bits of the King book are about how to organize your life, so that you can do something very hard and very painful, like writing a book. King writes for five hours or so every morning until noon. Then, he knocks off and does errands and things. He writes every day, including holidays. 

I love reading about how people organize and discipline their lives. It's easy when the job does it for you. Most people will get their ass fired, if they don't punch the clock at 9:01 every morning. They have to punch out 132 widgets out of the sheet metal by 5:00 or they'll get their ass fired. Things are a lot looser around here. Which makes things tougher. Also, my first job is taking care of the kids, and it's hard to establish routines when there are school meetings, vacations, crises, sick days, and a million other unpredictable routine busters. 

Routines and disclipline are good for the obvious reason. You get stuff accomplished. They are also good, because they may make you live longer. 

I'm moving around the morning routine right now. How should I those hours when the kids are in school? What the priority? The jog, the blog, the writing project, the trip to the supermarket, lunch? 

How do you order your day? 

Taking It One Bird At a Time

I'm a little spacy right now. Not in the best blogging form, though I did take the time to release some comments that got tangled in the spam filter. I've been writing all morning, and my head is elsewhere. (There's a new excerpt hidden on this blog somewhere.)

Over the weekend, I started reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, which was kindly recommended by Julie G in a comment section.

Lamott is a fabulous writer. I gobbled up Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, when I recovered from my C-Section and nursed Jonah. When you're in the writing mode, it's really best to take the time to read great writers at the same time. Their style will leak into your yours. Like when you're talking to someone from Georgia, you suddenly find yourself dropping a lot of "y'alls." Good writing is contagious, just like a Southern accent.

In bird by bird, Lamott provides some worthy advice for dealing the monstrosity of writing of a book.

 I also remember a story that I know I've told elsewhere but that over and over helps me to get a grip: thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

... Say to yourself in the kindest possible way. Look, honey, all we're going to do for now is write a description of the river at sunrise, or the young child swimming in the pool at the club, or the first time the man sees the woman he will marry. That is all we are going to do for now. We are just going to take this bird by bird. But we are going to finish this one short assignment.

Bird by bird. I related that story to Steve this weekend, and he agreed that it was very wise. It's really the best way to undertake any huge job, not just writing.

The Pain of Writing

A couple of months ago, I finally buckled down and said that I would do what I always wanted to do. I would write a book. I put together an outline -- that was the easy part. Filling in words has been tough. 

I'm shocked that I've found writing to be so tough. After all, I can poop out five blog posts before 10:00 am. I wrote a dissertation. I'm trying to write for a popular audience, so this should be easier than a dissertation, right? I'm not using footnotes or long strings of references. I'm writing about a topic that I am intimately familiar. Shouldn't this be easy?

Well, no. It's not. Dissertations and academic writing are guided by strict rules and formal structures. Fluid writing is less important than the results of the research. Academic books are often "cut and paste" efforts based on a series of small papers written over several years. Blog posts are short, typo filled, and have the immediate rewards of comments. It's adrenaline fueled writing.

I'm tricking myself with little rewards. One paragraph equals a game of solitaire. I'm following other writers on Twitter, who announce their word count for the day. Competition is a motivator. I joined a writers' group on Meetup to create a deadline for a polished product. I'm slowing down the blogging and writing for other venues, because a person can only produce so many words in one day.

At the same time, writing is so boring that I have to break up the day with outings -- a trip to the gym and lunch with my sister. If I don't do those things, then I end up disheveled and spacy when the kids come home.

I'm not sure this project is going to work out. I may not have the talent or the fortitude to finish. My harddrive contains several other aborted efforts from the past. Well, I'm further along that I've gotten before. I'm trying to not get caught up with questions like "Does this suck?," "Will anybody care about this?," or "Does this book make my ass look big?". I'm just carrying on.

The Promise of e-Books

The New York Times will soon start to rank the sales of e-books in their Sunday Book Review section.

I've been keeping an eye on e-books, because of the potential for self-publishing. Self-published e-books could do to the publishing world what blogs did to the newspaper world.

Imagine putting your book on the Internet and not having to deal with agents and stuffy editors who let manuscripts pile up on the radiator in their office. Publishing houses haven't been properly marketing or editing books for years anyway. Authors are hiring their own publicity people, rather than relying on the overworked and underpaid publicity departments. Royalities are non-existent. Why bother with a publishing house at all?

Content Farms

For a brief point last spring, some friends and I talked about creating a online content company. We had the writer and editor friends. We had the online creds. But we abandoned the plan after doing a little research. There's basically no demand for good online content. There's lots of demand for crappy content, which will boost a website's google rank.

Because of the high demand for crappy content and the high umployment rate among liberal arts college grads, content farms have opened up. These farms spew out mediocre content for pennies per paragraph. They have been carefully created by programmers to limit human contact between writers, editors, publishers, and clients. It's the first sign of the Apocalypse as far as I'm concerned.

Read this fascinating account of life inside a content farm.

Blogging a Book

I'm home full time, and I've accepted the fact that there's little chance that the dream academic job is going to open up within a 30 minute commute from my house. I haven't yet taken the files of conference presentations and published papers from my file cabinet, but it will happen soon. I'm moving on.

So, what's next for me? I could transition to university administration or take a position at a policy think tank or a foundation. Those are the best options, if I don't want to take the PhD off my resume. Those options are fine solutions and I might do that in a year or two, when things get easier with the kids, but I don't love those ideas well enough to deal with the upheaval in the family.

It would also be terribly expensive, because I would have to hire a nanny willing to watch a kid with special needs. She would have to get here at 7:00 to get the kids to school and then work from 3 to 6 or 7. She would have to be available at all times to deal with school closings and sudden illnesses. She would have to drive Ian to social skills class and spend two hours helping him with homework. It would probably cost about $30,000 per year.

There are other options that would involve removing the PhD from the resume. I am over qualified for just about any other type of job. My friend, Margie, and I have discussed that option and rejected it. How would we explain that enormous gap of time?

I might be interested in teaching high school, but even if I overcame the revulsion of having to go back to school for two years to get my certification, I probably wouldn't even get a job. A school district would have to pay me at the top of the pay scale, and they would prefer a cheaper 21 year old.

 I am tyring to make the most out of my at-home status. After recovering from some back problems, I'm back to running at the gym. I'm doing a little volunteer work for the school. I'm taking the time to have lunch with friends. I've also been writing a lot.

I've written a lot on this blog over the years. In fact, I think I've developed a compulsive writing problem. Last month, I started looking for broad themes in my blog archives with the plan of piecing together blog posts to create a quickie book. I'm sure that many bloggers hope that their blogs could be assembled into a book. However, blogging doesn't add up to a book.

I spent a Saturday digging through the archives and doing a lot of  cutting and pasting. Without much effort, I had assembled a 60 page single spaced document. Another hour of work would have doubled the size. But the pieces didn't fit neatly together like a puzzle. There was too much text. It was redundant. Key pieces were missing. It was too hard to edit. So, I'm starting from scratch. I'll sift through the old posts later to see if there are any elegant phrases to copy, but I abandoned the 60-page behemoth.

Along with blocking out an hour at the gym, I'm now blocking out one hour at the local library for the writing. It's a good way to get out of the house and "be with the people" as my friend, Erin, says. It also takes me away from distractions.

Ian has a half day today, so I have to squeeze in my gym and library time right now. I love having a plan.