The email goes like this:

Dear Jen,

After four months of waiting for you to return my manuscript to me, I can only conclude that you are not planning to get back to me on this. Before I contacted you, my colleagues assured me that you were wonderful to work with. They told me about the wonderful rapport you establish with your clients, and I found that to be true. However, I have come to learn that you are good only at establishing the initial rapport to rope your clients in. After that, you are all talk and no action. I am retracting my project from you. Not only that, but my two colleagues who recommended you are also withdrawing their business from you.

Sincerely,

Pissed off client

Hours after I woke up, I could still see that email in my mind’s eye. It preyed on all of my own insecurities, which is unsurprising because my mind drafted it. I think it was also unbelievably cruel of my own mind to do that to me. I lay in bed wracking my mind for who that email could have been from. It was both a relief and a slap to find out that it was from me.

The night before that, I dreamt that I was responsible for disposing of these dead mice that were the size of cats because they had swallowed other mice whole. I can’t remember who told me to dispose of them, but I know that I didn’t think much of that person, because my solution was to put the mice down the garbage disposal and turn it on. The disposal hurled mouse blood at me, and it hit me in the face and got on my teeth. I turned off the disposal and left the mice half in and half out of the drain, and ran to look in the bathroom mirror, frantic about having mouse blood on my teeth, but unable to stop my tongue from running over it and tasting it.

When I woke up, I was half tempted to go look in the sink and see if the mice were still there.

The grant I am working on is due on Saturday at 5 p.m. They need ten hard copies of the grant, so I would like to have it done by Thursday night, so Friday the client can print it, copy it, and bind it nicely. Yesterday, after school, I had to buy shoes for two kids, jeans for two other kids, groceries, we had dinner with friends, homework, bed time, and 37 urgent emails, all of which cut into the grant-writing time.

Today, my husband called me because he left a book at home, so I walked it over to the college classroom where he was teaching. I was on my way home with two hours left before time to pick up the kids, when I ran into my neighbor. “I am on my way home,” he told me, “because the kids have an early out today.”

Perfect.

This post is indicative of that fact that a) everything is conspiring against my finishing my grant deadline this week and b) apparently, I will do anything to avoid working on it.

Do you ever have anxiety dreams like these? I think I liked mine better when they involved forgetting my chemistry class for an entire semester…

What do you do when your own resume reveals something about you that could make a potential client not want to work with you?

When I began my medical editing business, I had on my resume, against my husband’s advice, an article I had published in Salon several years ago. He advised me to take it off because the article was about the fact that I smoked, and I was trying to get clients who were physicians, and who were most decidedly anti-smoking. I scoffed: “I’ll be sure to tell them I put the cigarette down long enough to make their edits.” I didn’t even smoke very much, and that is part of what my article was about. But still.

I was in conversations with a client who headed up a tobacco prevention program, though I did not fully understand this at the time he requested my resume. He looked at it and then emailed me back asking me whether I still smoked, because he had never hired someone who smoked before. I sat before the computer in shock. I was stunned. I could not believe my own hubris, my own stupidity. I thought the publication in Salon would outweigh the content. And here I was, about to lose a gig because of it. What to do? I suppose I could have written back that I didn’t smoke anymore. How would he have known? But deep inside, I knew that he would know. It was bad enough to have the habit. I wasn’t going to lie on top of it. At heart, I am a geeky, honest person.

I wrote back briefly that I did still smoke, still in the same small quantities as I had written about in the article, and that I hoped this wouldn’t be a barrier to our working together. As I hit send, my heart sank because I really wanted the chance to work with this client, and I was quite sure that I had blown it before I began. He wrote back that he suspected my attachment to smoking was more emotional than physical, and thanked me for my honesty. I got the gig. What was most important to him was that I respected him enough to tell him the truth. And that day I learned that a lot of people can edit, and there are probably many people who can do my job. But perhaps my ability to do my work had a bit more to do with who I actually was in addition to my abilities than I had previously ever suspected.

Author’s note: Today my husband sent me a link to an article from Salon called “Let us now praise editors,” which supports many of the points I made here! Check it out!

Reading Sheryl’s blog often has me reaching for my pen these days to jot down responses. I actually have another response to another one of her posts drafted, but this one is more immediate, so I’m doing this one first. In a post she did last week, she wrote about having to make revisions to designs that her clients have commissioned from her. (She is a graphic designer). She wrote about how sometimes the revisions the clients want are not necessarily the artistic choices that she would make– but she is in business to make the client happy, so off she goes and makes the revisions. And then, there is always the situation everybody loves: You do something exactly to client specifications, and then they hate it, and then they blame you.

I have a slightly different situation, as an editor. Editing someone’s work is actually a very personal, intimate act. Even if it is an article for a medical journal. I am still editing someone’s words, something someone thought. Last fall, I recruited a team of women to work with me, and the most common question I got was: How much editing can we do? They were worried about sparing the clients’ feelings. I ordered them not to worry about the clients’ feelings and to do the editing that needed to be done.

As it would happen, it was at this time that for the first time, I had a client who received quite a shock at the document we returned to him. He had thought the document was nearly ready for submission, and he got back, instead, a manuscript that was barely recognizable as his own. He emailed me and asked if we could set up a time to chat the next day so I could explain to him some of my thought processes. I wrote back immediately and said that he was the author and that if he did not agree with the changes, we could change things. And that is absolutely the truth. But what I didn’t tell him was that if he tried to reject any of my changes, I would argue with him.

We spoke the next day. He explained that he hadn’t been angry with me. He had been embarrassed at sending a document that he had thought was in better shape, and he wanted to understand how to give me a better document the next time. We spoke for over an hour, going over the manuscript paragraph by paragraph. And I explained to him that I knew it was harsh to see a manuscript with so many changes, especially with the track changes feature on. However, I told him, I would rather have a reputation for being tough and for getting him published than for him to tell people, “Gosh, she was really nice and spared my feelings in the editorial process. We haven’t gotten anything published yet, but she was really nice.”

The client ego is a fact of life. And I have found that not only do I have to be aware of it, but it is also providential that I work remotely, so people don’t have to look me in the eye the day after I edit their stuff– and vice versa. I wonder if I could do my job so effectively if I knew I would run into people on the way to the bathroom.

Another time, I was visiting a client site after I had made some edits to a manuscript. As I was setting up my laptop, an author said to me, “Those edits were rather harsh, Creer.” I started blushing and hemming and hawing, but she lifted a hand to stop me. “And you were absolutely right,” she told me. “Thank you.”

Sometimes you have to bend to what the client wants you to do. Or, in my case, you have to do what is in the client’s best interest even though it might not make you very popular. I think the key is understanding, which only comes with experience, when to do what.

I am not, by the title, just referring to women who work in home-based businesses. I think being a working woman is a lonely business anyway. When I worked in a more corporate environment (meaning I had the big fancy office with the window), I was friendly with the women in my office, but only up to a point. We had the occasional lunches together, we knew each other’s children’s names. But we certainly weren’t what you called “friends.” And I certainly didn’t feel that I could trust them enough to tell them about anything I found unsatisfactory at work

I have friends in real life, thank goodness, but I still think that being a working woman is a lonely business. My time with my friends is limited, and unfortunately, my friends don’t necessarily understand what I do (or want to hear about it if they do). This is a dilemma, because when I go out to Tuesday night karaoke, it makes conversations somewhat awkward. I am still thinking full throttle about what strategies I am engaging to attract new clients, about my current deadlines, about the professional conference proposal I am putting together, and I don’t know how to talk about any of these things over a beer in a noisy bar. So, we naturally end up talking about the kids, and when they ask me what I’ve been up to, invariably, I say, “Same old, same old.”

The people that I seek advice from are usually people I have never met in person. They live inside my computer. Those are the people who understand what I do, and also who are as interested in strategizing as I am. These are the people I tell when a new manuscript has been accepted for publication, when I discover that a grant has been funded, or when I am concerned because nobody has contacted me with a new project for a few days.

Who are your friends? Who do you talk to about what you do? Do you have people you trust in the workplace? Or do you talk to your family? Do your friends understand what you do?

Are you lonely too?

What is your job title? We all have one. I have been a student worker, a telemarketer (yes, yes, I know I’m going to Hell, but I’m saving seats for some of my best friends!), a special ed teacher, a graduate student research and teaching assistant (GTRA), and an instructor. And now, I’m… stumped. Well, okay, I am the Managing Editor here at Work It, Mom! However, I am still a contractor, a freelancer.

When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I am a medical editor. A consultant. A grant writer. A writing consultant. In addition to these things (which are all the same thing, because it is just one person– me– doing all of them), I am also the owner of my own business. I have a Limited Liability Company. An LLC. (And oh yes, I will be doing an article about why you need to have one too, yes indeed). I am also the sole proprieter of this business, and when people do work for me, they are also independent contractors, consultants, grant writers, and medical editors. Otherwise known as freelancers.

I consider myself to be more of a consultant than a freelancer though. I have had repeat clients for the entire time I have been consulting (three years; two years exclusively). Even though there are occasional slow periods, I don’t often wonder where my next project is coming from. I understand what it is that I do– I am not under any misconceptions about that. And you could even say that I have a certain amount of confidence that I am good at it. But I still don’t know definitively what to call it, or what to call myself.

Am I a CEO? A Director? A President? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each of these titles? I think of a CEO as someone who runs a company that is expanding and growing. A CEO manages and oversees the growth of the company and hires other people to conduct a lot of the work that the company accomplishes (i.e., the CEO of Spring doesn’t sell cell phones in the store). However, I did not feel comfortable calling myself a CEO. Part of this is because what I am doing– editing other people’s writing– is quite intimate in many ways. Also, I am personally doing 99% of the work, and my title needs to convey that. There is a large amount of trust involved in giving someone your words to re-work. And so it is very important to me that I have a very personal relationship with my clients. My clients refer to me as “our editor” or “our writer,” or “Jen.” If I were a CEO or a President, I think that would formalize things in a way that is de-personalizing or distancing, and that might make people less comfortable allowing me access to their projects, their words, their ideas, their heads.

I studied creative writing in college and graduate school. I am, by first trade, a poet. I am a woman in love with language. I love the mouthfeel of words: Consultant has a lot of hard consonants, which are professional, but the “s” in the middle of the word softens it. Founder is another good word: I found it, I own it, I’ll keep it– and it has a soft “f” and lots of nice, round vowels in the middle. Nothing threatens people if I say, “Founder.”

But lately, I have been using as my signature on my emails (which is really the only place where having a title really seems to matter– I take contracts to get them notarized quite often, but the contracts list me as Jennifer Creer, Edit Rx, LLC. I am synonymous with my company, as I should be): Medical Editing and Writing Consultation, which sidesteps the title altogether. I hadn’t even realized before I just went and looked at my email settings that I had done that.

Before I sat down to write this, I was a little worried about my lack of a definitive title. I didn’t know for sure what that meant. However, I know think it simply means that I don’t want to be boxed in by a title. I want the fluidity to grow and assume new challenges and responsibilities.

Even though I may not think of my company as a corporation that is going to grow in terms of employees, my ultimate goal is very clear: I want my name to by synonymous with excellence. I want to be the absolute best there is in my field. Do you think I can start using that as my title?

Nothing gives me as much pleasure, however, as when my clients introduce me to others as “Ours.”

What is your title? And what does it mean to you?