The first step?

Today I’m celebrating. Maybe prematurely – we’ll see – but I need to note the fact that this morning I sent a draft of an article to a local publisher, for inclusion in their magazine.

This article was … well, if I say “commissioned” that makes it sound very grand and official, when in actual fact I was working in the publishers’ office proofreading a recent publication when the editor started moaning about not having enough content for next month’s magazine. He glanced at me and asked if I could write, I said yes, we bounced a few ideas around and the upshot is the village history piece I’ve just sent him.

Now, at 1400 words the draft is 400 words too long, so it may end up being hacked about beyond recognition or indeed rejected out of hand – which is why I wonder whether celebrations are premature. However, I’ve written it – me, doing my own research, interviewing people (well, talking to the head of the village school) and putting together a coherent narrative. And if it’s published I’ll get paid for it – not a huge amount, but enough to make it worthwhile. It’s not great literature, but it’s well put together, well researched and reasonably well written. If I do say so myself.

The magazine is delivered to homes across three counties, so lots of people will see my name, attached to my words. They might even read the article. It’s a free ad-mag-type publication, so hardly Vanity Fair, but it’s glossy, well produced and highly thought-of in the local area. As the context for my first piece of paid writing, it could be worse. If the editor likes it I know he has ideas for other pieces he’d like to include in future issues, so there’s the distinct possibility of more work as well.

Having proofread previous issues of the same magazine I know the quality of the articles that find their way in, and I feel reasonably confident that I won’t be humiliated by my own humble scribblings. One or two of the pieces that almost made it to print in previous issues were so bad that I had to practically rewrite them in sections during the proofing process – at the risk of setting myself up for a fall when my draft comes back with the equivalent of “Must try harder” scrawled over it, my stuff is miles better.

So, next time someone asks me what I do, I’m not going to say “I’m at home with the kids” (although I am). I’m not going to say “I’m a freelance proofreader and copy-editor” (although I am). I’m not even going to say “I’m a teaching assistant at a special needs college” (although I will be next week).

I’m going to say, with honesty, great pride, and a quiet rush of joy, “I’m a writer.”

Motivation and change

Some people need change to focus, motivate and re-energise them. Undone jobs, unfulfilled dreams, unmet expectations can all be thrown into stark relief by sudden and seismic changes in circumstances, but even a small alteration can shift perceptions. Change can force a person to reassess their situation, rework their priorities and forge ahead in a new direction. Witness T’s recent redundancy, during which he decided he would rather return to academia than get another job in programming. (At which point he .. er .. got another job in programming. Ok, crap example.)

This is not me, however. My source of renewed energy is, perhaps counter-intuitively, getting things done. If I have a list of jobs, I can sit and stare at it for (literally) weeks, putting things off, engaging in displacement activity and generally sticking my head in the sand until the jobs have become pressing issues and/or have accumulated so that they require a titanic effort to tackle them. This applies to paying bills, work, domestic stuff, correspondence – you name it. Believe me, I can put anything off.

But then, at some point, I wake up and think – no, I really have to do that. I can’t put it off any longer. So I take a deep breath and do whaever it is I’ve been avoiding for so long. And it takes a little while, and a little effort, but I get it done – whether it’s putting away a pile of clean washing, weeding a patch of garden, paying a bill, or writing an article for a local magazine.

And once it’s done, I look around and realise it wasn’t so hard. Then I berate myself for putting it off for so long, and remember the other things I’ve also been putting off. And I do one of those. In this way I build up a head of steam, under which I often manage to whirl through most of the things which have been accumulating. I rush round in a frenzy of activity, congratulating myself all the time on my efficiency and effectiveness and conveniently forgetting that had I been a little more efficient and organised in the first place, there would be no need for such a hurricane of urgent and frenetic sorting out.

Then, of course, the energy runs out and I slow down. I can normally make the self-congratulation last a couple of days until another job arrives which I have to put off, at which point the avoidance cycle starts again. I’ve been doing this for years – it’s not a great way to work, and I wish I could just deal with things as they arrive, but that doesn’t seem to be the way my head works.

A few moments…

…snatched while T is out at a networking event (on his way home, actually, so I may get cut off in full flow) and the kids are having ten minutes vegetating in front of the TV after swimming/dance classes/homework and before bed. I swear, they do more stuff than I do – which wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t have to drive them everywhere.

So, news from here is that T has a job. Well, we hope so. He has been offered a programming/research role at a bluesky technology company, with some possible crossover into games if he wants to go that way. He’s not entirely delighted – the four months’ redundancy has made him consider his options in all sorts of ways, and he now wants to restart his career in academia. He left a university lectureship to go into industry twelve years ago because the money was terrible and he hated all the students, and I’ve reminded him of this until I’m blue in the face, but I fear that the grass will always be greener.

However, he has accepted the programming job, with the personal caveat that he’s going to carry on forging contacts in academia and trying to develop research interests with the long-term aim of applying for suitable lecturing jobs as and when they come up. Obviously he hasn’t told his new employers that, but frankly I don’t give a hoot what he’s doing as long as he brings some money in.

We’re not celebrating the daylight at the end of our long dark tunnel just yet – I’ll crack open the champagne when he gets home on the first day (June 1st), because we’ve been here before. Over the last four months he has been offered two other jobs, accepted them, and then they were canned, cancelled or otherwise fell through at the last minute – so we’re not counting any chickens until they’re hatched, fattened, plucked and roasting nicely in the Aga. (Don’t know why I wrote that – I’m a vegetarian, ffs. The things I’ll do for a good line.)

I’m still working steadily on ESL theses and waiting on a big project for a well-known European scientific institute – if this one comes off I could be in line for lots of repeat work, and it’s fairly high profile so it would look great on the CV, but the project is stuck somewhere in the funding allocation process and may or may not come off. I’ve also received copies of two books which are the first ones to credit me as editor, so I’m quietly chuffed about that.

So it’s mostly good. When T goes back to work I hope to be able to blog more regularly, so I may be hanging around here a bit more. Until then – manana, chums.

ESL editing – the way forward?

Oh God. Copy-editing a PhD thesis on corporate governance legislation, written by a Chinese student with commendable command of spoken English (I know, because I’ve spoken to him on the phone) but execrable sentence construction on the page. He knows exactly what he means. I, on the other hand, have only the barest grasp of corporate economics, and have to read each poorly constructed sentence three times before I can even begin to grasp his meaning, much less reconstruct his words into proper English.

The thing is with these English-as-a-second-language manuscripts, they pay well (international students are usually loaded) and there’s a steady supply of work, but the editing is a nightmare. Bad enough working on someone’s precious PhD thesis when you know the area and it’s written in the author’s native tongue. Imagine doing one in a completely impenetrable area, about which you know nothing and care even less, and which is written in English which is idiosyncratic to the point of incomprehensibility…

Been at it all afternoon while T is out entertaining the kids (nice role reversal; let’s see how he likes it. Welcome to my world, sucker). Half way through chapter 1; only six and half more to go. Head spinning. Must … lie … down …

One other thing

I have discovered Twitter. On the occasions when I can’t find the time to put together a blog post (or go to the loo, or make a cup of tea) I find I can sit down and write a one-liner about where my head’s at. I also use it to keep up with family and friends (far busier and more successful than I) who update there regularly, I receive local and national news in bitesized chunks, and I get vicarious celeb thrills by spying on famous people who interest me (Stephen Fry is following my tweets! I’m not worthy…).

Five minutes scrolling down through the day’s tweets, often in between activities like putting another layer on a papier mache pig and peeling potatoes for dinner (just two of the things I’m doing today, fact fans) seems to intrude less on my day than writing a long blog post, especially since I tweet under my given name so I don’t have to worry about keeping it out of sight. It does mean I have to be a bit circumspect about what I write – no ranting about how I WISH T WOULD GET OFF HIS ARSE AND FIND A JOB, but that’s not really the point of Twitter. And anyway, I come here for that.