It’s taken two days to prune the computer kudzu out of this little machine. Ever notice that? Files grow like horror-movie vines, shedding endlessly reproducing directories and subdirectories. After awhile you can’t find anything, because whatever it is that you need (right this minute, dammit!) is hidden under impenetrable mounds of digital debris.
Hour after hour of hacking and shoveling left just 12 main directories.
Who’d have thunk it? Two years of nonstop work occupying seven days a week boil down to 12 little computer folders.
…And 52 subdirectories with 118 sub-subdirectories… Ugh.
That doesn’t count the ones I threw out, the ones in the “Archive” folder, the ones in “Dropbox,” the junk that’s settled on the Desktop, and all the mystery files in “Microsoft User Data,” for which I disclaim responsibility. 😀
But the depressing part surfaced in a folder containing a bunch of projects I’d started and imagined working on after quitting the damn teaching job. An elaborate sequel to Fire-Rider involving a tribe of cryptids…a crime novel I drafted in graduate school, unearthed a couple years ago, dreamed up a new plot line for, and had begun revising…a corgi book…several books on nonfiction writing technique…a personal finance book…a science fiction story with an alarmingly clunky opener (gotta write that thing over!)…a book to be titled, creatively enough, I Hate Cats…Notes for the proposed (and long-defunct) boob book, complete with a full-blown proposal including two chapters, two appendices, and an introduction….
Ohhh well.
Really. If I’m going to do this publishing gig for nothing — actually, right now I’m doing it for considerably less than nothing, since the $34 I earned last month hardly comes under the heading of “profit” — then I might as well amuse myself by writing unpublishable books and stories, instead of working my buns off formatting, publishing, and marketing the unsalable. LOL!
In fact, if I pulled down revenue from The Copyeditor’s Desk, an ordinary year’s occasional income would come to just about what adjunct teaching pays for a course load equivalent to a full-time load with honest pay and benefits at the Great Desert University. It ain’t much, but it’s better than nothing. Thirty-four bucks a month makes adjunct teaching look good. Matter of fact, it makes reading Chinese dissertations and math treatises look good.
Editorial work doesn’t exactly overtax one’s skills or time. It would leave plenty of opportunity to write whatever drivel I feel like posting.
Or even to have a life. Can you imagine?
I was actually trying to figure out from this post if you regretted giving up teaching. Yes, no, undecided?
No, not really. I regret the loss of income…sort of. But the amount was SO little that really, not having it make almost no difference. It’s frustrating that much, MUCH more work of a fairly skilled variety makes even less than adjunct teaching pays.
In fact, in most years I earn about the same at copyediting as I did at teaching. If I charged the going rate for editors with my experience and degrees, I’d make twice as much…and that would be for working only a few hours a year.