Okay, this has been a wonderful adventure and all, but now that it’s finally over, it’s time to reconsider what to do with the remainder of my life.
During the late ongoing drama, I’ve pretty much stopped working altogether, except for my client novelist’s copy. We’ve been in semester break, so no students have been rattling around in their usual Brownian motion. I’ve ignored the other client’s much harder stuff. I’ve let my own projects go by the wayside.
This is the first time in more years than I can reckon that I’ve passed whole days without working. Day after day without working. Yes.
And you know what? I’m finding it very hard to contemplate having to go back.
It occurs to me that I might want to drop at least one of my endeavors: either the teaching or the editorial business.
Which would that be, if either?
I famously hate teaching. So that seems like the likeliest candidate, hm?
However, the teaching is my most reliable income source, after Social Security. It allows me to make ends meet without having to pull a huge amount out of savings. And although it can be annoying, it’s not very hard, especially when courses are all online. So…one thinks twice about abandoning something like that.
Although editorial work can be significantly more interesting and less futile than teaching, at times it can be every bit as tedious. Maybe even more so. The other day a client decided that his table of contents needed to include subheads all the way down to level 4 heads! Utterly pointless, just ridiculous, and not something I managed to discourage. The manuscript was 275 single-spaced pages! So I had to sift through all of that chaff searching for sub-sub-subheads and typing them into the TofC. Like I had nothing else to do with my time?
True, he pays my top rate. But that does not make me feel good about it. To the contrary. I feel like I’m ripping him off to charge him sixty bucks an hour for mindless menial work.
Then there are the indexing jobs: painfully mind-numbing work that falls way, way short of even my mid-range hourly rate. I expect a scholarly index, if you follow it all the way into page proofs (as you most surely should), pays $10 an hour or less.
It’s occurred to me that I could farm out the menial drudgery to minimum-wage workers. Or to workers overseas for whom US minimum wage looks like a living wage.
But I’d still have to go over it all and check it carefully. That brain-banging TofC would require almost as much work to proof as to write: you’d have to track down every subhead on every page and be sure it appeared in the table. If some of them didn’t, you could end up doing the whole damn thing over yourself. Checking an index would demand a similar level of attention. And believe me: I have farmed out indexes that came back as slumgullion, requiring me to throw out the work I’d paid for and compile a whole new index right up against the deadline. That, I have no desire to do again.
I don’t know how you’d find anyone who would be good enough and trustworthy enough to do the job, especially on scholarly and technical books, without having to pay them the entire fee the client is paying. There’s no profit in that, obviously.
I want to write a book about the choices involved in getting a mastectomy — many confront any woman in that predicament, no matter what her circumstances. I know it would sell, I know I could sell it to a mainline publisher, and I know I can make money on it. But…to do it, I need time. When I’m running two enterprises — teaching and The Copyeditor’s Desk — I don’t have a lot of time. If I let the editorial work go for, say, a year (though I think I can do the mastectomy book in four to six months, working on it full-time), I’ll lose clients and lose opportunities to land new clients.
Which way to jump? If jump at all?
