I have been in the university library for half the day, and I have gotten some significant work done on a grant proposal. I had sent it off Thursday night and got very immediate and good feedback on it Friday. There was work to do, but fortunately, it is only a ten-page proposal, so you have to temper the concept by remembering that you are talking about paragraphs, not pages. I need to go over it again and make sure the phrasing is what I want, but for today, I am content to let it rest a bit. Then, I went over a manuscript I have had on my to-do list for about ten days.

I have discovered that the library is a good place to work: because I am neither student nor faculty at the university, I can’t access the internet there, except by my wee blackberry. Thus, I remain pretty non-distracted by the Work It, Mom! flickr pool, instant message, email and blogs. However, in the midst of all of this wonderful productivity, I have been taking short breaks to sneak peeks at my email on my blackberry. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.

Yesterday, I was working at the coffeeshop, when I got a very unexpected email. One of my other gigs is as a blogger at Weblog Inc.’s blog TV Squad. I have blogged there for over a year. One of the constants in my life is about 30 team emails a day. Some of them are tips, some of them are team members sharing comments, some of it is administrative. But they are almost all entertaining and so even when I am taking a break from reviewing shows, I still read nearly all of the emails. I have never met any of my TV Squad colleagues, but one of the things I have learned since I first met and fell in love with the Internet, 10 years ago, is that you don’t need to meet people in person to forge relationships with them. These email buddies, these co-workers, these colleagues become your friends who live inside your computer, and it’s amazing how much you think of them. You don’t even realize how much until you get emails like the one that stopped me cold yesterday afternoon.

The subject line was simply “Adam.” I almost didn’t read it. I almost didn’t read it closely. It was from one of our other writers, and I figured that it was something about Adam’s schedule that had come up, but since these emails tend to be funny and there were already a few responses, I read it.

Adam Finley was killed Thursday morning. He was hit by a school bus while riding his bike. He was only 30 years old.
I started gasping as I read the email, and clasped my hand over my mouth. I read it again about five times. I couldn’t believe it. I still cannot believe it.

The entire team is in shock. And for the past two days, we have been planning, via team email, how to commemorate Adam, how to remember him on TV Squad. Seventy-nine emails and counting. What strikes me the most about this situation is that when tragedies strike, we so often feel paralyzed. We feel the need to DO something, and there are few worse feelings than that there is nothing to be done. The team became immediately mobilized by the plan: We are devoting Monday on TV Squad to Adam Finley. He had blogged there from its inception, and had probably the largest number of posts. He was truly synonymous with the site, in ways that I am not. So, his longest-term friend there, Bob Sassone, will write a post about Adam, and then all of us are going through the archives and selecting our favorites, so we can post them and our memories of him. There will be no other posts on the site tomorrow. We are making changes to the header, discussing images to use in the posts, and we are also discussing his family, how to make the posts into a tribute to Adam for them.

The strangest thing about all of this is that I feel the need to grieve with someone, to talk about this with someone. Adam was wickedly funny, and he never missed a trick on TV Squad. He was always picking up on the fact that someone was duplicating a post, or that a post needed to be done. He was a constant presence– sometimes team emails can continue ad nauseum, and he would always be there chiming in. He was also very opinionated, and sometimes attacked by commenters, which I can relate to. But he was always supportive of everyone else on the team. You could count on him. He was a stand up guy. And did I mention wickedly funny? And the only other people I know who feel this grief are like me: We knew him from our email inboxes. We knew him through is posts. We knew him from his words. And we are using words to remember him and to comfort one another, to express our individual shocks and grief collectively. It feels so weird to be reading all of these emails in one specific way: I keep waiting for Adam to chime in about all of this. And he hasn’t yet. His voice is conspicuously absent. I still haven’t really figured out that he is not going to. I was actually stunned be the level of grief I feel about this. Can you mourn someone if you only knew them by their words? Yes. Yes, you can. And we are.

I can’t stop thinking about his mother. I cannot stop thinking about his mother.

We have heard that one of his parents’ fears is that Adam won’t be remembered. I was surprised by this, but then it occurred to me that maybe their fears stem from the fact that he didn’t have children, wasn’t married. He has made his mark in other ways. Last night, I bought a sympathy card to send to his family. I didn’t know your son– but I did. I sat in a crowded coffeeshop yesterday and wept when I learned of his death. His life meant something to me. I will miss him. I am so very sorry for your loss. I will remember him.

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.

But lots of other women did! Including our own CEO Nataly and The Working Closet’s Susan Wagner (and I can’t wait to hear about their trips!) If you felt like you missed out by not being there, here are some terrific places to read about other women’s experiences there, so you can peek in the window with me, face pressed against the glass.

First, Susan Mernit has several posts– so many that I just decided to link generally to her blog, and you can start reading down. Fortunately, her posts are also short and well-linked, and have pictures! Great stuff and loads of information here in brilliant, colorful bursts!

Mom 2 Amara went and discusses here why television journalists don’t blog and other topics raised at BlogHer this year.
Women in Media and News were there and asked Elizabeth Edwards about media policy reform. Click on the link to find out what Ms. Edwards said.

Cynthia DamourTru notes that there were 800 attendees this year, and recounts the two year history of BlogHer. Two years, people. Wow.

True Confessions answers the question from the Book Session of whether or not you need an agent, and so much more about getting a book deal from your blog.

And finally, my favorite: Plain Jane Mom used twitter to cover the conference sessions she attended live. It was much more immediate than live blogging. I loved it. I felt like I was there. Thank you again, Erika. Her blog coverage of the event is here.

Did you go to BlogHer? Did you work it? Don’t forget to enter our contest! (We already have an entry about an interesting autograph request asked of Amy Sedaris…) If you didn’t go to BlogHer, how did you keep up with it from where you were?

The title of this post is from a great book by Richard Russo, called Straight Man. The lead character thinks the line to himself right before he rises from a sticky, beer-covered table in a bar, and, despite being a well-respected professor in his community, despite knowing that this cannot possibly be in his best interest, hurls himself into a bar fight.

I cannot be the only one who does things that are not good for me. I just read over at LifeHacker that I could lose $1 million over the course of my lifetime by watching television instead of using that time starting my own small business from home. So, does that mean that in my case, I should start another small business from home?

What happens when, in my case, I could actually lose money week by NOT watching television? I currently write three TV show reviews per week, and get paid to do it, for a blog. And I have started to wonder whether this falls under the category of “Not good for me.” I spend an hour watching each show, so that’s three hours total, and then nearly another hour per show writing my reviews, finding images I am allowed to use in my posts, resizing the images, figuring out which number the episode is and what season in the show it is, and then creating a poll for the end of my post. So, that is about six hours a week for about less than minimum wage per hour.

And then the commenters are often nasty.

Why do I keep doing this? So I can justify having HBO for the summer? Because it’s something that I hope I can use as a portfolio sometime later? Because I like getting advance screenings of shows in the mail? Because I want the free T-shirt for the site? Does this make me feel cool? I suppose it is a combination of all of the above. It certainly isn’t because of the money. And there is usually nothing wrong with that.

But I can’t help wondering whether I would be a) making more money by working on my medical editing projects when those shows are on instead of watching them; b) making more money by working on tasks that I can do while watching TV, instead of having to watch the shows carefully for reviewing purposes; or c) more relaxed if I could just watch the shows– or just Tivo them and not have to watch them when they air and then write reviews right after. This is starting to feel like a whole lot of effort for not much gain.

What are YOU doing that isn’t good for YOU?

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 so excited to welcome our new bloggers (their blogs are being made live throughout the day today, so check back!).

We have with us:
Sheryl from Paper Napkin, who is “live blogging” the process of starting her own graphic design business with This Mouse for Hire;

Melissa Summers from Suburban Bliss and Alpha Mom (Melissa’s Buzz Off), who is writing about simple, great recipes for busy moms and organizational tips with Ordering Disorder;

Kathy Howe from Kazoofus, who is writing about thriving and surviving in the corporate world with Who Stole My Stapler?;

and early next week, we will be launching Flat Pop: Less Fizz, More Flavor, about pop culture, which will be brought to you by the letter g and Eden Kennedy from fussy.

I think you will LOVE our new bloggers and want to marry them and have their babies. Please give them a warm hello!

If you are like me, you don’t often even think about your resume (let alone update it) before you need to think about the next position. This leads to stress. You should try to make it a goal to update your resume at least once a year, maybe more. When I was a university instructor, a colleague told me to keep a folder with any relevant emails or just a quick note to myself about my significant accomplishments. That advice has served me well.

I also keep a draft of my resume readily available on my computer, and whenever I find out that a grant has been funded or that a manuscript has been accepted, I go in and quickly just leave a note on my resume, save, and then get out of the document again. I can formalize it later– but I need to remember that I have something to update. Also, sometimes my clients don’t let me know when a manuscript has been published, so every few months, I search the online databases for publications and note when manuscripts that I have edited have been published. Those citations are important for my professional reputation, so I try to be very proactive about following-up about them. Not only do I need to update my resume for new and potential clients, but I also need to update my website (which I haven’t done for almost a year, my bad!).

It’s hard to keep on top of updating your information, especially if you are not actively looking for a new position. However, I firmly believe that you never know when you are going to need an updated resume handy, so it’s important to set aside time at least once a year to dust it off.

Today, I went around the blogosphere, hunting for more resume tips for you. I found some great stuff out there.

Minnesota Public Relations Jobs Blog has some concise, short resume tips, primarily about what content you should include and in what order.

Rebecca at the Career Niche makes the excellent point that employers are looking for soft skills as well as concrete experience. So, what are your soft skills? She refers us to a blog post called How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with. Some of the soft skills employers want are drive, curiosity, and ethics. These are tricky to convey, and the sort answer is that you need to convey them in your cover letter and in your interview. Though, I have begun including a short skills paragraph at the top of my resume, based on some advice I got from a head-hunter earlier this year. The short skills section is an abstract for your resume– it summarizes you even more succinctly than the rest of your short resume does.

Calming the Chaos, a blog written by one of our readers, addresses the Mommy gap on your resume, which is a big concern for a lot of us. My gap was not nearly as nice as her one-year gap, though. Mine was eight or nine years long. So, I have had to be pretty honest about why it is there, which means disclosing the fact that I have three kids. Fortunately, I work in an industry that is pretty family friendly.

My favorite find of the day, though, is The Job Lounge. Susan Ireland is a professional resume preparer, and she has a ton of great posts, including eleven on just how to address gaps on your resume. I highly recommend spending some time at her site.

What resume tips have worked best for you?

That title is supposed to be funny. Because it is a joke.
Consultants and the self-employed don’t get vacations. And yet, here I am! On Not-A-Vacation!

All this week, I am going to be blogging (and working!) from various locations. In fact, that is one of the primary reasons I am so late with my post today. Yesterday, my husband and I kissed the children goodbye as they went off for a week with their father (yes, I am divorced and re-married), packed the car, and drove eight hours to South Bend, Indiana. We live in Northern Missouri, and my husband, a religion professor, is in the middle of a six-week seminar at Notre Dame.

Today, we have been in South Bend at his rental house, which is a little bizarre. Last night, I looked through the CDs on the headboard of his bed and felt like I was hooking up with some guy and looking through the stuff in his room for the first time. Tomorrow through Thursday, we will be in Chicago (seminars take field trips! Who knew?), then back to South Bend, and then I will drive home Friday afternoon. It’s complicated.

In the midst of all of this travel, I also have deadlines. In my life as a medical editor, I have a major deadline this week. It is a project that I have been working on every single day for the past three weeks. It is, in a word, Challenging. So, for the past three weeks, especially since my husband has been out of town and I have been flying solo not only as the boss and employee of my company but also as a single mother, I have been a little stressed out.

Last week, I went to the doctor for my yearly physical exam, and my blood pressure was high for me. I should clarify that usually my blood pressure is so low that it’s questionable whether I am even alive. But I pride myself on this. I depend on this. So, to have my blood pressure suddenly quite higher than normal was very alarming. I came home and could swear that I could feel my blood pulsing through my body. I could swear that I could feel my heart beating. This sensation persisted for… well, that was Thursday and this is Monday, and I am just now starting to calm down a little bit. A change of scenery, even with deadlines looming, has done me a world of good. I don’t have any stressors associated with this house, these rooms, these walls. So, I have been able to work and also spend a little time visiting Touch Down Jesus at Notre Dame University.

Don’t get me wrong. I would love to take a normal vacation sometime. I am wondering whether that has happened since I embarked on self-employment two years ago. Nothing comes to mind. It is part of the trade off. But it could be worse: If I weren’t a consultant and I had a deadline like this, I would be sitting in a cubicle and working through my holiday without overtime pay, and my husband would be two states away without me.

What are your vacations like? Do you actually get to have them?

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?