The Four Important Questions

Possibly not the ones you're thinking of. Kitty and I took it into our heads to translate a certain set of questions, and I give you the results of the languages I speak! In order from most to least fluent; you can find the rest of the languages over here.

Qui êtes vous? Qu'est-ce que vous voulez? Où allez vous? Pourquoi êtes vous ici?
¿Quién es Ud.? ¿Qué quiere Ud.? ¿Dónde va Ud? ¿Por qué está Ud. aquí?
Wer sind Sie? Wie wollen Sie? Wo gehen Sie? Warum sind Sie hier?

It's possible you've correctly identified them by now (and yes, normally in Spanish I'd cut out the Ud. but the sequence it comes from is highly formal), but just in case: Who are you? What do you want? Where are you going? Why are you here?

We may be B5 nerds around here, but I take those questions about as seriously as I do anything. Because they're important. Singing Meatloaf at the top of my lungs and bopping around the living aside, you could argue they're the only important questions. It helps that I imprinted on B5, not when it first came out, but instead at a vulnerable transition stage of my life. (Namely, college.) Babylon 5 was made for watching when you're hanging out, being liminal, as many transitions and changes are contained within its story arc.

I don't talk about it much, because frankly I have asked and answered these questions more times than I care to count, and it gets more personal and less intended for public consumption each time. But I go through it as a process somewhere between every week and every year. You should be able to look at my actions and see the answer, between this and Twitter and personal journal, but I and a few friends started up a group to support each other just over four years ago. (We called it Courtesan School, because we're like that.) I don't think any of us realized it at the time, but what it's done at least for me is give me a weekly to monthly point at which I check back with a small group that knows me well, and see if I'm staying true to those answers. 

Oh, it's more structured and less wibbly-wobbly New Age talk than it sounds. Am I remembering to exercise? Am I doing my languages? Am I making progress, however miniscule on my various stated goals and projects? Have I developed new ones? Have I run into roadblocks? Having a group to sit down and hash these things out in front of is really useful, even if people are busy and stressed and not up for much input. The simple act of public accountability works. Pretty soon I'm going to be taking that to a wider scale, which is, I think, part of what scares me shitless about it, wondering what if I fail in front of a bunch of people who don't know me nearly as well as my girls. (This is silly. I know the answer: pick up and do it again. Try again, fail better.) More to the point, the act of setting aside some time to reflect lets me match actions to self-image and see where I'm doing well and where I'm falling down.

That's one of the sneaky things about the questions. They don't just demand words, they demand that you act on those words, or you're doing nothing but lying to yourself. And it doesn't much matter if it turns out that you have high standards, your brain chemistry is fucked, or both: this is hard fucking work. Unending, as it turns out. But I didn't sign up for easy. I signed up for worthwhile. I just hope someone out there's going to agree with my definition of worthwhile.

Sometimes, though, it's just good to dork out and remember certain truths.

"The universe speaks in many languages, but only one voice." -G'Kar

In Which I'm Skewed (But We Knew That)

Last night I was sitting around with the husband and L, watching Return of the King. Like you do when you're giant nerds who don't quite have the time to pull an all-weekend marathon of the trilogy, so you spread it out over about a month.

Says I on Twitter, I don't need to annoy people by picking up my fiddle to learn the Rohan theme. Says Eric, but you will anyway! Then Kiki tagged in, and I was pretty well doomed. I didn't right then, but when we broke for dinner I hauled it out, swore at Spotify until it gave me the right track, and proceeded to learn it off by ear in about two minutes flat.

Put like that, it sounds really impressive. I know that C and L's jaws dropped a fair ways, and I tried to blow it off. Oh, it's an easy key. (It is.) Oh, it's basically a fiddle tune, it's beautiful but not complex. (Also true.) Oh, I've been working on this for awhile. (Most true.) But I simply couldn't view it as anything special. That's just what I do now; I hear something playing that I want to learn, I pick my instrument up, I figure out what key it's in. Once I get that part settled, the rest is easy, or at least easier.

It'd be nice to say that this just happened, that it's some kind of inherent skill. That'd be easy, right? Just one of those things that I just so happen to be good at. The truth is a lot murkier and a lot more fraught with false starts, with delays and confusion and declarations that I'm not actually any good at this and I should give up.

You see, I learned to read music about the same time I learned to read English. Maybe a year or two later, but still well within the normal developmental stage you'd expect a toddler to be able to read. (I was a precocious little shit. That may be the wrong verb tense.) At any rate, due to all kinds of factors including under-exposure to non-classical music, I never ended up developing my ear. This is a fatal flaw, so far as any traditional fiddle community is concerned, so when I decided I was going to shift over a couple years ago it became crucial to figure out how to fix it.

Figuring it out took awhile, and a couple attempts at forming bands, and finally a chance meeting drove me to find a site for ear training. (Specifically, an ex's now-ex-boyfriend. Out of such small things are new goals made and met.) I've been using Teoria for a good six months now, through PT for carpal tunnel and through lessons that got me using Audacity to pick apart sound files so that I could learn new tunes. Twice a day, five days a week, for no more than half an hour at a stretch. I use it as a break between longer stretches of work, frankly, and don't think about it too hard.

So: somewhere in there, even though I didn't believe I was taking it seriously, I learned. I learned to pick out melodies and rhythms and key signatures by ear, and that's pretty fucking awesome. I listen to a lot of music, too, and I'm sure that helps. But I've been hiding it away, doing it all on my own and not even showing my awesome to my husband, and it's about time I stopped that shit. This week, I'm going to work on learning some Martin Hayes, work on the various LotR fiddle tunes when I need a break, and try not to be antsy about getting my recording equipment in and set up. (Though the fact that I'm alternating impatience with terror might help balance that last out.) In the meantime, I did perform a week ago, and I have the recording uploaded right here.

Second Verse

Hey, look! I have a blog. Another blog, since technically I've been running Unspooling Fiction for the better part of six months with my co-conspirator, braintwin, sister-in-arms, whatever you want to call her. I have no idea where that time went, nor how that became as successful as it did, but since I'm endeavoring to be a real grown-up professional something or another, I got my very own blog.

If you want to get really specific, I had a blog over on WordPress that I just killed, because I'd rather work with the Blogger interface and, frankly, the handle I was using was too restrictive. I don't want to pretend like I'm not doing half a dozen things at once at all times. Unlike Kitty, I'm not engaging in the unspoken authorial contract of Having A Blog; instead I'm engaging in the unspoken very busy person contract of maintaining an online presence. But my path to get here has been long, twisty, arduous, and I in no way promise that here will be the same place tomorrow that it is as I type. I rather hope it won't.

Going back some ways, I went to college and got an English degree, and now everyone is either laughing or nodding in sympathy. I didn't get it because I expected to make money off it; I got it because I loved the subject. I adore ripping texts apart and understanding them in new ways. (If you want to see me fall over laughing, just tell me with a straight face that I'm interrogating the text from the wrong perspective.) This did not lead to work in my field. You're all very surprised, I can tell. I have a jar with a surprised face for that; I keep it on my desk.

What it led to was a short series of jobs in fairly dead-end occupations, followed by the loss of my last "real" job a week before the market crashed in '08. (For "real," see 9-5 with benefits. There are reasons I put scare quotes around the term.) I did what I was supposed to for a good year, eighteen months after that. I applied for unemployment, then I applied for jobs. Job after job after job, looking for temp work or temp to hire or anything at all that wanted an over-educated liberal arts major. Eventually, I applied for state healthcare and foodstamps. Throughout it all, I was very lucky to have both savings and a partner who was working in a more lucrative field. But several things kept niggling at the back of my mind as I did this: crafts, writing, and music. I hated the process of applying for two jobs every week even if they were crap jobs or ones I was patently unqualified for, just to fulfill the unemployment requirements. I hated not being able to dive into freelancing as seriously as I might have, because too much and all my benefits would disappear and I'd have to start the whole process again. I loathed having to devote hours every month to ensuring that the benefits were there, since they were one of the few things keeping us from falling back on parental handouts.

Once I eliminated all the piles of bureaucratic bullshit from my life, I got a chance to start again. I spent awhile looking into Etsy and cross stitch, only to determine that the kind of cross stitch I did would be undercut by cheap knockoffs that flood the site. I sat down and wrote a novel, at least half to prove I could, and dropped the second one when I realized that I don't love writing. I love talking about writing, and I love analyzing other people's writing, but that's not the same thing. (Some people find this weird. I find them weird, so it all works out.) Then I fell back in love with music, and I haven't looked back since.

Right now I pay the bills through some arcane conglomeration of proofreading, editing, and translation on the rare occasions I can get it. It's not my first love, but I know the chances of making money off music, and I know I've got another year or more of work to build up enough of a fiddle repertoire to make a go with that. Which you all get to watch me sweat through! I have no idea what's going to happen or where I'm going from here, but I'm looking forward to finding out.

In Which I Blather About Process

It's been pointed out that I should maybe, possibly, talk a little about how I do what I do as far as editing goes. The short version is, I've been reading other people's writing for a very long time now, and I have a good idea about two things: what I like, and what works. I even know how to separate the two, though it's always nice when I get to work with the former. That's not a talent most people have. I can also sit down with something that's not working and list 3-5 ways to fix it, which is generally more helpful than "here's my one true way." The chances that you're coming to me for fiction editing are pretty high. There is no One True Way. There's ways that work, ways that don't, ways that lead you to a story that's not the one you thought you were writing, and ways that may be beyond your current technical skill level. Just for a few.

How I edit is, in at least one sense, very much like how I write and translate. Though it's possible for me to work on the laptop (in fact, I'm doing so right now), I prefer to do the bulk of my work at the desktop. As you can see, I've got most things to hand, and in the event that I need my foreign language dictionaries they're a hop away in the filing cabinet. (Yes, I have a filing cabinet full of language and music books. What? This isn't normal? I ran out of bookshelf space.) Squirt bottle of chastisement for when the cat decides attacking his reflection is the best way to break my concentration, assorted musical instruments when I'm chewing over a knotty problem, various things to keep warm with, external hard drive, and all the ibuprofen and Tums you can shake a stick at. I try to keep it warm enough that I'm not shivering, cool enough that I'm not sweating, and the music at a volume suitable to my mood. I take micro-breaks where I surf the internet, reply to chats or emails, and so on at completely unpredictable intervals. Longer breaks come around once every hour or two, where I make sure to stand up and stretch and do a couple rounds of PT exercises.

I usually work best in one hour blocks of time anyway, spaced out throughout the day and swapping one set of tasks for another. Ideally, I swap editing/writing/translating for something physical, be it music practice or eating a meal or doing some quick housework. Unlike a lot of people, I don't have specific times of the day I am "most" productive. My most productive times are when I plant my ass in the chair and declare I'm accomplishing something, and I do that at least twice a day, five days a week. Because breaks and regular meals are important too! Because I'm a musician by training, I tend to think of this as 'playing the rests.' Editing work occupies my analytical brain and gives my body a chance to rest; music occupies my body and my instincts (and, sometimes, a different side of analysis). Translation calls on both instincts and analysis, especially if I'm not going for a word-for-word but a more freeform translation, making it arguably the most difficult of the three. Regardless of what I'm doing, the important part is that I get to engage all my faculties each day, as well as taking short knitting or cross stitch or reading breaks, depending on what part of me feels most depleted.

Whenever I get a new work, I do an initial read-through in reader-brain. This is markedly different from editor brain, and it lets me figure out if the writer has succeeded in whatever they set out to do. Am I entertained? Am I informed? Am I moved? I make a note of it, usually for my own personal use, and go on to the second read-through. Assuming I'm doing a full round of edits on it, I start by addressing the overall structure. Weak points get shored up, places where I feel the writing has strayed get marked off, and I make a quick sketch of the outline of the piece for the benefit of the writer. (If the writer worked from an outline, it's always fascinating to know how closely these match.) For fiction, I will take special note of guns on the mantel. Then I send it all back to the writer and we get to engage in either real time or asynchronous discussion of the edits. Once the structure is hammered into something closer to a final draft, I work on grammar fixes, typos, and line edits. Sometimes a line edit will lead to revisiting the structural edits, but more often they sand the rough edges off an author's natural voice, playing to their strengths. For example, Kitty has a very noir, spare writing style for a great deal of her work. This makes finding the exact word tricky but ultimately more rewarding than using five words where one would do.

Over the years, I've read lots and lots and many blog posts over How To Be Self-Employed, but the one thing that the most successful people have in common is that they show up. Whatever it is that I'm aiming to do, I have to be there for it, and being there can be as simple as walking away from the computer and picking up my instrument or as complex as sitting and working on edits while using of the internet/books to fact-check things and not getting distracted. It's a tricky balance, to be sure, and there are days when I absolutely don't wanna. Those are the days I curl up with hot cocoa or promise myself a cold beer after finishing a certain amount of work. It's not just a good idea to reward yourself, it's vital when you're self-employed. But that's a whole other blog post.