I started this week fully intending to do what in the freelance self-help world is known as “niching down,” that is, settling once and for all on a specialty and advertising oneself accordingly. Fiction is my game and it’s time the world knew that, I said to myself.
I will back up by saying there are freelancers I know – and many more I don’t know – whose regularly updated blogs and array of downloadable guides and general brand-savviness can reliably send me into a tailspin of doubt followed by a day or two of really good intentions to neaten things up around here. Create focus. Institute a few systems. Establish a little efficiency. The reality is that I have been freelancing for seven years with no plan whatsoever other than staying afloat. And my standards in that department are also pretty flexible.
In one of these fits of good intentions the other day I set about updating my “portfolio.” This is the word I’ve settled on even though it doesn’t sit entirely right. The artiness of it appeals to me but also makes me feel fraudy. Its contents aren’t mine. I didn’t write this stuff, I just helped the authors get at what they were trying to say. As I was translating the sparse details I had in my existing spreadsheet into descriptions that might actually help my cause, ie attract some more clients, it occurred to me that it was in part the shoddiness of my record keeping that was making the task so annoying. My records are mostly kept with an eye to keeping track of finances. What did “Smith copyedit” actually mean, five years after the invoice had been paid? It was a book, surely, but I hadn’t given myself much to go on. So I decided to make a Word document that for romantic reasons I’m calling my Job Diary.
Anyway, as I spent a few hours assembling the Job Diary and running fun searches to see how much of what sorts of things I’d worked on over the years, digging out all the novels and short-story collections, it occurred to me that I have no real intention of tidying this show up. I like that I edit novels set in Newfoundland and also once proofread the definitive guide to building snug homes there. (I see you, Joe Batt’s Arm. Leading Tickles.) I like that the same publisher will ask me to do a substantive edit of a novel and proofread a history of railway hotels.
It has more or less always been this way, so I don’t know why it feels so revelatory this week. In university, for example, I majored in classics but spent most of my time, really, planning (perhaps unnecessarily elaborate) environmental campaigns with my friends. In the summers I conducted campus sustainability audits, learning about bunker oil and T4 bulbs and the silver recovery program in the Fine Arts photo lab. I wasn’t an amazing student and I’m not a dedicated activist anymore but I don’t regret either the curricular or extracurricular parts of my university time, even if literary people mostly want to know more about my degree than the sign painting I did or what I once knew about the WTO and international climate change negotiations. Likewise, even though it’s easier to talk about the novels I’m editing than explain the many RFPs I copyedited that helped my clients get the work they do, I was completely engrossed in those at the time.
I think, too, this generalism is what I like most about the occasional afternoons I put in at the bookstore. Where I get to list a stack of old tri-band Penguins and then tidy up the nautical section and then redirect a lost customer, saying into the store intercom, “Hi, Top Floor, I have a man in a Cowichan sweater coming up looking for the erotica section and books on Eisenhower.” Kid you not, and good for him.
So here, for no good reason except that I haven’t given them much air time, some other very satisfying and useful things I’ve edited while telling people that I “mostly edit fiction” but doing very little otherwise toward defining a niche for myself (with the working subtitle All My Friends Are Highly Accomplished Idealists):
–district energy plans for several suburban communities in BC and Ontario
-a guide to energy efficiency in buildings in Newfoundland & Labrador
-the websites for all the state park lodges in Ohio
-the narrative arc of a documentary about GMOs (I am in the credits of a real live movie!)
-a graphic novel about art and parenting and gentrification in Hamilton
-a doctoral dissertation on energy co-ops
-seven (7!) books about movement science
-the mother of all layman’s guides to geology in Canada
Part of editing is getting paid to read, and filling my head with the details of these other areas of expertise. I like going back down paths I more or less gave up and seeing what’s been going on since. I think I’ll leave the coherent brand strategy to other people and see what else wanders my way in the meantime.
*
Update: The title of this post, I realized an hour or so after publishing, was almost definitely inspired by Kerry Clare’s excellent post “In Praise of Messy Blogging,” which you can read over here.
