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Quit the Day Job? How’s about PART of the Day Job?

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The two-year small-business development program for which I’ve applied—and it now looks like we have a fair chance of acceptance—has a four-month “boot camp” period in the fall, requiring a once-weekly meeting that conflicts with one of my afternoon courses. Adjunct teaching can’t be called a “day job” by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s the closest thing to it that I have on my plate just now. Of the three enterprises at which I labor, the part-time teaching job brings in the most cash on a quasi-regular basis.

We will not know until just before the semester starts whether the AAAME program will accept The Copyeditor’s Desk. If we don’t get in, I sure don’t want to forego that munificent $2,400 paid over four months. 🙄 However, I didn’t feel I could wait until the day before class begins to tell the departmental chair, who has been very generous with me, that I’m walking out on a section.

So, I made up my mind to quit part of the day job: to drop the afternoon class that would overlap the AAAME meetings. It’s not like I don’t have $2,400 in my long-term survival savings account, after all.

Actually, over the past couple of months, enough work has come in to The Copyeditor’s Desk that the business could pay me that much next fall without doing itself any harm. Matter of fact, it owes me a little over $3,000 in the form of a loan for start-up capitalization, made way back in two thousand and aught-ten. So I could simply withdraw the equivalent of my net pay, which doesn’t come anywhere near $2,400, as a tax-free loan repayment.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Well. When I went to meet with the chair, he suggested that instead of dropping the third course altogether, I pick up an early-morning Tuesday-Thursday section. That would hedge my bets, and I wouldn’t have to draw down funds from the business to cover base living expenses.

Unenthusiastically, I agreed to this; then realized that at 7:30 every Thursday morning, I’m supposed to be in Scottsdale! It would be counterproductive to enroll in a business development program that’s supposed to be showing you how to market your company while, at the same time, dropping out of one’s main networking group, eh?

So he countered that I should take on a Monday-Wednesday section, at the same ungodly hour.

Ugh. I sure don’t relish traipsing to campus at 6:45 in the morning. Nor do I especially welcome a “full” course load (which it ain’t , but it’s the most the junior college district will allow adjuncts to teach) while I’m devoting a minimum of 16 hours a week to the AAAME project and hustling business and, with any luck at all, actually doing business.

On the other hand…

We do not know that we will continue to get the kind of work we’ve seen this summer. It’s a never-rains-but-it-pours sort of business: you can go for months without seeing a single assignment, and then all of a sudden a bevy of nice jobs lands on your desk. There’s no guarantee that we’ll get any work this fall, to say nothing of enough to keep the wolf from the door.

And, if we do get enough work that I actually could pay myself a little salary and take a little dividend…think of that! Another three to five thousand dollars of income would mean I could live almost like a normal human being!

That would be refreshing.

Even the unholy hour presents an advantage: it will force me to get up, get dressed, leave the house, and meet some live human beings before the real workday starts. Right now, the weekly Scottsdale Business Association meeting is the only thing that makes me do that. Since I routinely get up at 4 or 5 a.m., I often roll out of the sack, walk the two steps across the hall, and plop into a chair in front of the computer. There I will sit, all. day. long, often without getting up to so much as bathe and brush my teeth. I’m getting so little exercise that my back and hips have started to hurt from sitting in a desk chair for hours on end without moving.

Later in the semester, when the mornings cool off a bit, I could throw my hiking boots in the car and stop by the mountain preserve on the way home, getting in a mile of walking before parking myself in front of the monitor. This would help a great deal with the aching joints and the avoirdupois.

As unpleasant as it sounds, having to get up and get going at that hour will actually be a good thing.

Sooo…. Now I’m scheduled to teach a 101 section at 7:30 in the morning Mondays & Wednesdays, a 102 section at noon Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the magazine-writing course online in the second half of the semester. It’s far from ideal—my dream is to quit the “day job” (such as it is) altogether—but it has some things to recommend it.

I guess.

🙁

 

The Gift Not Given

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Do you have something around the house that reminds you vividly of another person, possibly someone who’s not in your life anymore? I have this odd little thing:

It’s a stoneware sauce or gravy server (I guess), about 4½ inches in diameter. On the surface, it’s fairly useless…but in fact, it’s absolutely perfect for melting butter. And that’s how I use it, with some frequency.

Quite a few years ago, when I was in graduate school, one of the students who was  a cohort ahead of me announced he was getting married. He invited me and my husband to his wedding. Nordley, his name was.

Well, this was a shade flummoxing. I hardly knew the man; had never sat in a classroom with him, and I’d never even heard of the prospective fiancée, much less met her. I had exactly zero idea what to get for a wedding gift, but clearly a wedding gift was expected and required. They were not registered, as far as I could tell. And I didn’t have a clue to their taste.

I wandered in to an upscale gift shop where all the young lawyers’ wives obtained their stylishly upscale stoneware, stuff with names like Heath and Dansk and Arabia. Nothing seemed appropriate. Nothing. Went into a jewelry store that carried crystal and silver tchochkies, the sort of useless dustcatchers people gave me as wedding gifts. Not an inspiration in sight. Stumbled through the department stores. Niente. Finally I went back to the gift shop, resigned to having to buy something stupidly expensive for people I didn’t know and who I suspected issued  invitations to passing acquaintances for the sole purpose of furnishing a household with wedding gifts. Since this search took half the afternoon, I began to resent the whole thing.

There in the gift shop, my eye fell on this little bowl. Perfect: unusual enough to please academics and cheap enough to fit my mood. Grabbed it, had it gift-wrapped, and went on my way.

I think it cost about ten bucks, which in those days would buy a week’s worth of groceries. So, for what it was, it was kind of expensive. But it wouldn’t break the bank. And it was different.

A couple of weeks later, along came a new announcement: the wedding was off!

No explanation was given, or if it was, it wasn’t offered to those of us who barely knew Nordley and didn’t know the prospective wife at all. I took the thing off the shelf to return it to the store. But…

On second thought, I kind of liked it. And in those days I was averse to asking for money back. So I unwrapped it, stuck it in the kitchen cabinet, and there it resided.

It’s resided in a number of kitchen cabinets over the years. It seems to be unbreakable, and it comes in very handy whenever I want to melt butter or heat some small amount of something, whether in a microwave or on the stove. Occasionally I’ve used it to serve some fancy sauce to guests.

Every time I use that thing, I think about Nordley. He was the sort of guy we’d call a nerd today: kind of small and slender, balding, probably a little older than the rest of us. ABD, he was treading water in one of those exploitive jobs universities call “instructorships”: at the Great Desert University, these were low-paid full-time positions that you could hold until you finished the dissertation. As soon as you completed the degree, though, you were out of a job. Some people hung on in limbo like that for years, until the university established a deadline for completing the Ph.D.

Nordley  managed to escape, though. He got a job at a community college in Monterey, California.

If you have to teach freshman comp for the rest of your life, you could find lots worse places to do it. 🙂

Don’t know what became of him.  A while ago, after the Internet made it easy to stalk people, I looked him up and did find a mention. Now there’s no trace of him on the Web, anywhere. Presumably he’s retired or died. Or both.

Nordley lives on, though, in the gift that I never gave him.

Reference Works

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My good old Random House fake-Webster’s Dictionary, dating back to some time before the end of the Paleolithic, has just flat worn out. And my Chicago Manual…yes, I’m afraid it’s still the 15th edition. I’ve dawdled on getting a new one, because the current rules can be found online, with some hassling around, and because I’m stone-lazy and flint-cheap. Characteristics, I suppose, that are appropriate to a survivor of the Stone Age. I need new reference works! In honor of our latest client, whose project we’re very enthusiastic about doing and who uses Chicago, I decided to get brand-new hard copies of both these key tools.

And I wanted them now, not three or four days from now.

So drove over to the nearest Barnes & Noble, situated in a decrepit shopping center on the Interstate 17. And yes, they do have Chicago 16. But… If you want to buy it in their brick-&-mortar store, you pay a 10% surcharge unless you cough up private information and get a goddamn “member card!” Order it online, and they don’t extort the personal factoids…but of course you have to give them your name, phone, number, and address to get them to ship the stuff to you. I said I thought not.

Momentarily considered driving to the Great Desert University’s westside campus, but then remembered how the bookstores at that grand institution gouge the customers, and so decided to go home and do what I should’ve done in the first place: order it from Amazon. Better one monolithic corporation than two should snarf up my personal information

Got Chicago for the same price and Oxford New American Dictionary for $5 less than B&N charges. Good enough for government work.

For day-to-day use, I really prefer a hard-copy to a digital reference work. There’s a number of reasons for that.

Chicago’s online site, which is very good, takes you right straight to the answer to your question (assuming you’ve framed the question right). And that’s nice. But sometimes I’m better served by being able to browse the closely or tangentially related sections that appear either close by the relevant section in the text or under the main heading in the index. If nothing else, understanding ancillary issues adds to my expertise. And sometimes I discover that in fact, I’ve asked  the wrong question, and there’s a better solution to what Author needs to do.

As for the dictionary… I have yet to find an online dictionary that suffices for professional work. Maybe one is out there, but it hasn’t come to my attention. The iPad apps I’ve seen leave a great deal to be desired. Web-based dictionaries are OK if all you need is the probable spelling and a brief definition. But if you want to know something about a word? Look it up. On paper.

Then we have the locale factor. I don’t do all of my work perched on an uncomfortable chair in front of an eye-glazing computer screen. Sometimes I read copy on the sofa. And as for copyediting those wonderful detective novels: they’re bed-time reading. When, come midnight, I’m comfortably hunkered under the sheets with the dog snuggled by my side, the last thing I want to do is get up and trudge into my office and turn on the computer to look up some word or style matter. This will require me to lift the awakened dog off the bed and let her outside (for she will demand to go out), and the whole process will consume ten minutes…to accomplish a task that could have happened in 10 seconds if I’d had a real dictionary sitting on the nightstand.

Online reference works have their uses. But real ones still can’t be beat.

Image: Title page of A Dictionary of the English Language, written by Noah Webster.  Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Public Domain.

Dust in the Air, Dust in the Gears…

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Peeked out the window at 5 this morning. The air was (and still is) so dirty it looks foggy out there. Ugh. Nice Valley fever weather.

Oh well. At this time of morning it’s cool enough to walk the dog, so we took a stroll through the rich folks’ neighborhood. And the pool water is perfect for a post-doggywalk dip.

The pool is sooooo much easier to take care of now that the devil-pod tree is gone! It’s practically trouble-free. Yesterday I had a new guy from a new company come over to clean out the filter, which he did quickly and for less than Leslie’s charges. The last CSR encounter with Leslie’s pretty much tore it for me. Went over to Angie’s List and started calling A-rated companies till I found one that considers a central Phoenix house to be in its “area.” Liked the guy: he was quiet and efficient. And now the pool is humming along merrily.

Meanwhile, my computer seems have gotten a little fog-making dust in its innards. Yesterday Word crashed (again). I think the Word for Mac on the desktop has corrupted. It’s emitting those “Word had to quit unexpectedly. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this has caused” messages. What this means is that you’ve lost everything since your last autosave, and possibly then some.

The other day when that happened, I rebooted and it started opening scores and scores of old files!

At first I thought, holy sh!t, no wonder it crashed if I had that many files sitting open! Because I do get in the habit, sometimes, of leaving way too many files open in various programs. But soon (as in instantly) it became apparent that no one could have that many files open at once.

Force-quit.

Start over.

Does it again!

Force-quit.

Start over.

Does it again!!!

So I just sat there and let it open and open and open…thought it was going to open all the files on the disk, which would be about 2700. But no, it finally stopped after 30 or 40.

So now I had to close each one manually. And no, they were definitely not things I’d been working on. Some dated back to 2008! Hadn’t been opened in years!

As nothing, though, compared to yesterday’s adventures. I’d been working on a client’s book; spent about three hours on the current chunk of copy the previous day and expected to finish  in about an hour and a half. It’s difficult, arcane, and tiring to read. Goin’ along fine for about a half-hour, and

“Word had to quit unexpectedly”

Damn.

Reboot. Open the file.

Take a look… It has lost ALL of the work I’d done the day before!!!!!!!!!

WTF? How is that possible? I know I hit save before I went to bed, and besides, the thing is set to save every ten minutes. It should have saved almost all the edits I’d entered. Thrash around and thrash around: nope! No backups, no nothin’!

Weirdly, it had saved stuff I’d done near the end, in the past half-hour or so. But  none of the stuff I’d done the previous day!

So I was mightily screwed. I had to redo three hours of work before I could get on to the hour and a half worth that remained. Set the thing to autosave every three minutes. Typing and typing and wrestling and wrestling, and damned if it doesn’t crash AGAIN! This time it saved all but about two pages of edits. E-mailed it to myself and downloaded onto the laptop. Used the Macbook to finish editing the chapter. Took hours and hours and hours. All that work I’d done the day before was down the toilet, reducing my pay from $45/hour (academic rate) to about $22.50/hour.

More annoyingly, I’d planned to give myself a little break yesterday afternoon. In the Darwin Award department, I’ve hurt my back by sitting too long in front of the computer with my feet propped on the desk—gave myself a roaring case of sciatica. Just sitting in a desk chair hurts, and I’m so spavined I can barely limp to my favorite venue, the refrigerator.

Welp, I’d bought some nice fabric with which to  make some new drapes for the bedroom, and I figured, what with Charley staying at M’hijito’s house for the nonce, that I could spread the stuff out on the floor, trim it up, and get started on sewing the hems. Having to reach and stretch like that would surely loosen up the kinked muscles and pinched nerve.

That didn’t happen. It was after 5 p.m. before I finished. Then I had to race to wash up and get to class, skipping dinner to get there on time.

Today I have about three hours to do on another two chapters of this author’s work. It will have to be done on the laptop, obviously. While it’s possible that the Japanese characters in the copy are overtaxing Word, I kinda doubt it. I’m pretty sure the desktop’s program has corrupted. Oh well. At least I can sit on the sofa to work. If I can finish by noon, maybe I’ll still get a chance to make curtains.

And so, to work…

Readings

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What I’m reading this morning:

Revanche of A Gai Shan Life received a very creepy series of telephone calls. Fortunately, she’s bright enough to recognize a scam, even when it’s posed as an alarming threat and associated with the name of an outfit  accredited by the Better Business Bureau. The levels to which crooks will go…amazing! It’s important to know about this one, and always to remember never to share any information with anyone who calls on the phone and tries to wheedle or extort it from you.

Rachel Adams over at The New Yorker cranks a ridiculous number of words on a ridiculous topic.  Just to show how WT old Funny really is, at heart…I crave what’s in the picture—for breakfast! Yum!

At The Atlantic‘s website, Derek Thompson and his readers hold forth on the cost of bringing up baby. Thompson publishes a pair of pie charts that compare the cost of parenthood in 1960 with today’s costs. Having been around and fully sentient in 1960, I commented on the article as Melete, my incarnation as proprietor of Adjunctorium:

In 1960 most women stayed home and took care of the kids, and decent public schools were the rule, not the exception. Today women must work to help keep the staggeringly expensive roof over the family’s head, and so the kids are warehoused in day care facilities that may consume half or more of the woman’s salary. Today public schools are institutions of social work, not education, and so people who care about their kids’ learning put them in private or parochial schools — again necessitating that their parents leave them in an expensive shelter while Mom and Dad work 8 to 10 hours a day.

With both parents trudging to the office every day, owning two cars is no longer an option. In 1960, many families had only one car, especially if they lived in regions that had viable public transit.

Housing, cars, gasoline, and healthcare cost much more relative to income than they did in 1960. Clothing manufacture has been offshored, taking away Americans’ jobs but giving us acres and acres of cheap clothing.

The cost of child-rearing is thus interwoven with many of the other costs on the chart: Higher costs of housing and health care (not to mention social pressures) push both parents into the workplace, and this drives up the cost of caring for the kids. Education costs more because without a SAHP in most households, middle- and upper-income families are less engaged with the public schools, the quality of the schools continues to fall, and so those parents shell out to put their kids in private schools.

Not all these factors are necessarily bad — few of us want to return to the good old days when most women couldn’t get a decently paying job because they weren’t welcome in the boys’ club that was the workplace. But…the cost of providing women career opportunities and cutting the chain to the stove obviously is going to be higher child care costs and higher transportation costs.

LOL! Speaking of the cost of education, I was amazed to learn what the school where we sent our son is charging today. If we had to educate a child today, we could not begin to send him there on what my husband earned as a corporate lawyer. We’d both have to be corporate lawyers to put the kid in that school! Instead, we would have had to move to the suburbs (DXH strongly disliked commuting, and so we lived in an upscale central-city enclave) in hopes of finding a halfway decent public school, pushing up the cost of transportation and day care.

 

A Few Twinkles of Hope in the Money Department

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…or is it “all that glisters is not gold?” Not sure, but lately we’ve seen some hopeful signs that The Copyeditor’s Desk, the little editorial business my associate editor and I started together when we were canned from the Great Desert University, just might manage to make enough to support one or (preferably) both of us. Whence this shining image? And is it a mirage?

Well, first off, we decided that we needed to seek a different kind of clientele. We’d been networking with local publishers and authors. Nothing wrong with that, except that Arizona, renowned as a cultural backwater, is about as far from a hub of the publishing industry as you can get, this side of the Sahara desert. With a few notable exceptions (such as Pearson, Poisoned Pen Press, and the University of Arizona Press), publishing companies here tend to be DIY operations staffed by a Would-Be Author with a desktop computer, whose raison d’être is to print and, with any luck, sell a few copies of the W.B.A.’s magnum opus. To the extent that these entrepreneurs recognize their need for an editor, they’re willing to pay just a shade more than minimum wage. They’re running on a shoestring themselves, and they expect to get shoestring contractors. A number of vanity presses serve those who aren’t quite techie enough or just don’t want to invest the time to create camera-ready or Kindle-ready copy; these outfits, too, expect the hired help to earn less than a good cleaning lady commands.

Much of the material we saw from this set would be unpublishable in the mainstream market because it tends to the woo-woo: full of theories about space aliens, strange diets, and life on the other side of the veil. A great deal of it is painful to read.

Late last year we realized that other kinds of businesses—the client in hand was a plumbing and HVAC company—would actually pay a living wage. In fact, they expect to pay a living wage. And by that, they mean about six times what we’ve been charging.

If you offer to contract to these folks for the wages we’ve been asking, they think you’re an amateur. However, if you ask for $60 an hour—a number that looks stratospheric in our limited view—they don’t even blink.

As a matter of fact, if you take time to do some fairly extensive research on what people like us earn, you discover that sixty bucks an hour is on the low side. That is to say…what we think is an extravagant figure is actually competitive.

So, lately we’ve been seeking business clients, and we’ve been practicing the art of uttering “sixty dollars an hour” with a straight face.

And y’know what? It’s working!

In the past two months, we’ve landed four clients who hardly even gagged when we said the magic words. For one academic, we agreed to drop the fee to $45,  knowing what it means to be a tenure-seeking academic. For the others, we’ve acted like we believed what we were saying. In two months, we will gross more than half what we normally make in an entire year. And the content of what we’re reading is great: working documents for two excellent nonprofits, a new book for a handsomely published up-and-coming author, and an interesting academic study that’s already been accepted for publication.

Not a word of woo-woo among these folks.

Next, we’re taking some steps to encourage a steady flow of this kind of work. We hope. We’ve applied for a two-year business development program called AAAME, backed by the Small Business Association and Arizona Public Service, a large regional utility. You get mentoring, workshops, and project-based training with an emphasis on marketing (exactly what we need the most!), with regular meetings and opportunities to meet hordes of business owners and community leaders who could use our services. And amazingly, it’s free.

No guarantee that we’ll get accepted, of course—only about a dozen small businesses make the cut every couple of years. However, just writing a new, more formal business plan has already generated a few insights. We’ve begun to build a database of contacts and created a newsletter, the first issue of which we distributed to 57 past clients and current friends. I have a vague idea about how to market…what’s needed is some understanding of how to apply it to finding our client base and selling our service to it.

At any rate, just in the past month and a half, The Copyeditor’s Desk has found enough paying work to free me from teaching not one but two classes.

I came up with a spreadsheet to express our revenue goals for the next two years. If I earned $15,000, it would replace my teaching income with something to spare. Twenty grand would not only spring me free of the classroom but pay all the bills, and a similar drawdown would free Tina from waiting tables, allowing us both to earn our living at what we do best. Twice that much, and we’d both be living like queens. Why? Because I have about $12,000 worth of Social Security coming in, and Tina earns significantly more than that as managing editor of a large scholarly journal.

Interestingly, even two salaries of $40,000 plus enough to cover overhead would not require us to generate an unreasonable number of billable hours. At least, I think not: truth to tell, I don’t yet know what to expect as “reasonable.”

For each set of projected goals over the next two years, I calculated a bare minimum we would need to earn, what I think is probably within reason, and a figure that would make us do a wild dance of joy. Check out the Year 2 figures:

The amazing thing about this is the number of hours we would (or rather, wouldn’t) have to work to meet the goals. To earn enough to pay ourselves $40,000, between us we would only have to bill about 29 hours a week. You see…that’s 15 hours of work apiece. Assuming, of course, that we can get our $60/hour rate—which apparently we can.

Presumably work will not come in steadily. Right now it never rains but it pours, and we have no reason to think that will change. So I asked how many weeks we would have to work in year 2 to meet our revenue goals.

Welp, even if we’re still dorking around in classrooms and restaurants, we could make our goal by working half-time, because that 71.79 hours represents our combined workload. With two of us sharing the work equally, we’d each work about 36 weeks to earn enough for the corporation to cover its overhead and to pay us each 40 grand. If we bestirred ourselves to work at it 40 hours a week, it would take 35.9 full-time work weeks—18 work-weeks apiece—to make our goal.

LOL! Well, of course, we know all this glamorous work isn’t going to find its way in the door by itself. So I calculated the number of hours that would be left after finishing the paid work to spend on marketing. If I did all the work (which I won’t, because Tina will be handling some of it), I’d still have 11+ hours left in a 40-hour week or, in my more usual 60-hour week, 31 hours to devote to marketing activities.

This could work.

As long as we’re baking pie in the sky, I say to Tina, “how much would you like to earn from the editorial business?” Says she, “Well, my real goal is to someday earn $100,000.”

Holy moley. This could require us to quit carrying plates of chicken mole out to restaurant patrons. But…what would that actually look like? Could it be done?

In this scenario, I figure I don’t need any more than 40 grand, so there’s no point in my drawing any more than that out of the business:

Hmmm… We’d both be reduced to working at least 40 hours a week. However, remember that we’re sharing those hours, so instead of 60.9 forty-hour weeks, the actually load of billable hours would be more like 30.45 full-time weeks. And we also would be farming work out to print and Web designers, proofreaders, and the like, from whom we would engross a 25% cut. Still…the negative balance in the hours available for marketing doesn’t look good…possibly what would need to be farmed out is the marketing work!

Well, we’re not going to earn any of that unless I get back to reading some copy. And so…to work!

Image: Stars in the Sky (LH 95 star-forming region of the Large Magellanic Cloud). European Space Agency. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.