In Which She Muses About Freelancing And Self-Promotion

Sell yourself, don’t sell yourself short.

A lady whose opinion means a lot to me said this to me yesterday as we talked about my move into the freelance world, and this editorial position on the magazine staff. The work world is changing, and my generation seems to be the one that, as usual, has to strike a balance of some kind between the world of our parents’ generation and the world that the people fifteen years behind us will take for granted. In this case, it’s the realisation that we have to market our skills to a variety of places simultaneously, because our skills are theoretically valuable. They’re not valuable enough to build an entire job position around, however.

Hence the rather catchy phrase. As a freelancer, you do indeed have to sell yourself. And I’m terrible at that. I ‘m innately shy, and usually the last thing I want is to be noticed. When you’re seeking freelance work, however, that’s precisely the opposite of what you’re trying to do.

My strengths, of course, lie in the copy-editing and proof-reading areas. Areas which, amusingly enough, many tech writers and copy-writers I’ve met absolutely detest. It’s second-nature for me; sometimes I joke that I was born with a red pen in my hand. It’s an ideal situation, actually; the writers hand their work off to me with a sigh of relief, and I get work that I enjoy and that I do well.

In January, I’ll be polishing up my C.V. and passing it along to a bunch of people and places. I’ll agonise over a confident and clearly communicative cover letter (I hate cover letters) that announces my brilliant capability with style.

And, damn it, I’m going to publish. I have two and a half novels written since July alone, and over seventy single-spaced pages of notes on an esoteric non-fic reference book.

That lady whose opinion means a lot to me is right. I sell myself short. Most of us do. I think it comes from a combination of things, not the least of which was growing up in a world where you were polite, and never boasted, or said you were better than someone else, a world which taught us that if we were good, things would come to us on their own. Now, things have changed: the world has taught us that we have to shout louder than the next person in order to be heard, we have to show off in order to move ahead. Is it any wonder that people around thirty or thirty-five are so confused, and are one of the highest age demographics of the unemployed?

There are times when your mother tells you you’re special, and you think she’s saying it just because she’s your mother. And then, there are the times where she says it as one person to another, and you hear it in an entirely different way. I am talented. And I am special.

Thanks, Mum.

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Bake, bake, bake. Write. Bake. Chat with my mother. Bake. Write.

Piles of baked goods. Yummy-smelling house. Happy, happy Autumn.

Time comes for dinner. I take out the tourtiere we picked up at Loblaws this morning, the box claiming that it’s Made from a traditional Quebecois recipe. My mother used to create an amazing home-made tourtiere that was our traditional Christmas Eve dinner. I proceed to get nostalgic. Open box, pop tourtiere in the oven.

Idly turn over box. Read ingredients.

Pork, beef, veal; water, onions, textured soy protein, potatoes –

Whoa. Jus’ whoa.

Textured soy protein?

I’m fairly certain that traditional Quebecois recipes for tourtiere do not include textured soy protein.

Don’t get me wrong – I like TSP when I’ve had it, especially in vegetable stir-fries.

It’s just… odd.

At least there’s no swarms of poly-syllabic chemical-preservative-like things lurking in this tourtiere. The ingredient list goes on to read: toasted wheat crumbs, salt, spice, dextrose, onion powder, garlic powder. Pastry: enriched wheat flour, lard, water, salt, calcium propionate. Glaze: water, enriched wheat flour, dextrose, milk ingredients, canola oil.

I know what all of that is. That’s rare, when I read ingredient lists. It usually depresses me. (Okay, the calcium propionate is a preservative, but it’s used in most bread products, and that’s just the pastry in this tourtiere. I’m amazed. I’m truly amazed.)

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I have such an exciting life.

We went grocery shopping this morning at the new Loblaws in the neighbourhood. We took a tour through it before, a couple of weeks ago when it opened, but it was extremely crowded and we didn’t get a sense of much other than it was huge and had lots of food on the shelves. This morning (who goes grocery shopping at nine AM on a Friday? – except us, apparently) it was nice and empty, and we got a much better look at it. Apparently I have no life, because it was much too enjoyable. Exploring a new grocery store shouldn�t be this thrilling.

Finding a bag of half a dozen chicken legs for under two dollars shouldn�t be that exciting either. Sigh.

Neither should putting up a shelf in the kitchen so that I can move my teapot and basket of tea off the counter.

The second half of the two-part workshop I gave went rather well last night, to my relief. The last week of teaching has been horrible all around; let�s hope this signals a change for the better. I know everyone�s been tense, and as the holiday season approaches tension will only increase, but perhaps with a little more awareness of everyone�s limits, we can all get along, and survive until the end of December.

My back is better, thanks to an emergency trip to an athletic therapist while my osteopath is on vacation� just in time for the pain in my right wrist to flare up. Honestly, it feels like a conspiracy. This wrist pain was triggered by nothing I can think of, since it began to ache at Ceri�s birthday celebration on Wednesday night, and has proceeded to get more and more painful until I�m at the point where I can�t carry things in my hand, or open doors with it. My husband keeps telling me to stretch it, which hurts, so I resist doing it. When I do stretch, though, at least I gain mobility, and lessen the overall ache. I can type, oddly enough, if I make sure I don�t throw my hand too severely to the right to hit number keys or make too abrupt a mouse movement. Being able to type is a good thing since I have a half-complete newsletter to finish today. I wanted to get a new article done, too.

Stuart McLean tonight! Hurrah!

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So Garak went to New York City last weekend, and he took some phenomenal photographs while he was there. My favourite from the set was the shot of old buildings reflected in a body of water, complete with a few strands of willow framing it. In Central Park, though, he took a photo just for me, which absolutely must make an appearance in the Owlyblog:

Thank you, Garak!

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Happy birthday, Ceri, only one day late! (Although I think I can be excused for the lateness of the blog entry, seeing how I was with her in person for most of the day, yesterday…)

Stellar proof of Ceri’s generosity: she gave my husband and I tickets to go see Stuart McLean tomorrow night. On her own birthday, she gave these plums to us.

She rocks.

And she now has ass-kicking boots. Like a combination of something space-age, and something out of The Matrix. Fear her.

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There are snickers coming from the bedroom. My husband is reading my NaNo novel.

“I finished The Philosopher’s Stone,” he said, walking into the living room just past twelve o’clock. “Can I… would you mind if I read your novel?”

“Ah…” I said. “No?”

He looked at me anxiously.

“If you want to edit it or rewrite it first -”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I meant, no, I don’t mind. I think.”

He’s been reading it all afternoon. Every once in a while I hear a chuckle.

Me. The author of choice in my household right after J.K. Rowling. Before, possibly, since he had the choice between picking up the next book in her series, or my book.

It bodes well.

Memorial Concert Review

Well, wasn’t I wrong about last night’s concert.

At the NaNo meet yesterday afternoon, a friend told me that he regretfully wouldn’t be able to make it to that evening’s memorial concert for my orchestra’s conductor Andres Gutmanis, who died in an accident three months ago. “That’s okay,” I said without thinking about my words, “no one else is going.” My words had a visible effect; he looked chagrined. I attempted a casual explanation including the weather, the travel time to the West Island (which is usually an issue to which I am ruthlessly unsympathetic; I lived there for years, and it is, in fact, ridiculously easy to get there, and not as time-consuming as people seem to think), and the fact that I myself wasn’t very hyped for it. So, if there were a concert of mine to miss, this would be the one.

I was very, very wrong.

Two of my friends showed up after all, one who I had known was going to try to make it, another who was a very pleasant surprise. (You have my heartfelt thanks, Nika and MLG, and coffeeing afterwards was lovely too!) They were treated to an absolutely phenomenal evening of music, an evening which surprised even me.

We opened with the Albinoni Adagio, which I usually find maudlin in any recording and unmoving when we play it, but which was so perfect in last night’s performance that it moved me to tears. (It takes two hands to play the cello; wiping tears away is difficult.) There was a guest trio which played selections from Stravinsky�s Pulcinella suite, and they were incredibly talented. Then we played the Mendelssohn, and glory be, we sounded good; I almost enjoyed it. There were more guests performing single songs, vocalists and violinists and George Doxas, Andres’ fellow music teacher from LPHS. To draw the first half to a close we then played the terribly, terribly dramatic Handel Prelude and Fugue, and again, we were impressed ourselves by the precision and the sweeping drama of it all.

After the intermission — oh, this was part of the treat. George Doxas had brought along his twenty-five piece big band, and they proceeded to play swing and jazz for half an hour. It changed the mood and galvanized the orchestra, sitting in the first couple of rows of the audience, into a very correct, dead-on rendition of the old-world folk song The Lonely Maiden, played in Andres’ own arrangement. It’s a slightly creepy traditional Eastern European melody, and utilises a particularly odd technique called col legno, which means hitting the string with the stick of the bow instead of drawing the rosined hair across it to produce vibration. The result is a muted, clipped, percussive sound that most people have never heard. The problem with it is that it’s practically impossible to get thirty people to hit the string simultaneously, to achieve a clear unified note. Last night, we did it.

And the finale was an encore presentation of the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 1, which was our most successful piece performed at the Canada Day concert last July. Under Nancy’s direction, we had refined it to a precise yet wild machine that couldn’t be stopped once it had begun. Again, it was the best performance we had given of the work to date.

So we began with a show-stopping number, and we ended with one as well, which, as I have been taught in essay-writing and speech-giving, is the best way to ensure that your audience will remember you. My husband tells me that it has been the best show we’ve done so far, and he’s been to all four I’ve played with this group. So evidently I was wrong when I said that this would be the concert to miss. It was, in fact, one of the best presentations of musicians from all over the island of Montreal.

I don’t know what our conductor-status is at the moment, but if Nancy were to remain as our leader, I would be more than happy. She’s fantastic in rehearsals, and she was clear and focused during performance. It would be a shame to pull her out of the viola section – the gods know violists are in short supply, and good violists are even harder to find! – but she’s terrific up there on the podium. I won’t know for another two weeks; I have the next two Wednesdays nights off. That’s nice, but after such a successful concert I’m even more enthusiastic about orchestra than usual, and almost three weeks is an awfully long time to wait to get back into the swing of things. And even then, it’s only for one night before we break for Christmas. Ah well. I shall go to Archambault to purchase new music to keep me busy during the time off.