Reading: IIS6 Administrator’s Guide, The Middle East, Man’s Rage For Chaos, Oath of Fealty, The Great Anti-War Cartoons
Listening: Crime In Stereo, Mark Lanegan, Lostprophets, Florence And The Machine, Motherlovebone, Kill Hannah, Mariachi El Bronx
This quarter marks 1 year since I went back to school, under Washington’s Worker Retraining program, to get a degree in Web Development/Design. I’m not actually sure where the degree falls, since there’s a fair amount of emphasis on creating web pages, and on art, but there’s also a fair bit of what’s typically the domain of development – Visual Basic, Access, and SQL Server, at least for me.
Now, of course, I find myself studying Network Administration as well, because a lot of the credits I “need” in the Web Media program aren’t being offered, but other Computer Tech credits are, and they look interesting, if rather more abstruse than I’m really prepared for. I use a Mac. I don’t know what a kernel is, or I didn’t until Friday.
I’ve been tutoring for a few quarters now – mostly in the computer department, some in English and Math – and I run an open lab every Friday for beginning Web Development. I was asked by the head of the Computer Tech department to do an internship with her, working with a couple of sites she maintains that need major overhauls. I’m looking forward to that – they can’t be static pages, so I’m evaluating my options on how best to fit what she needs, while keeping the sites easy to maintain and use, and while considering as well what I know.
I’ve been building a portfolio, too. A couple of contract web sites, a few art pieces – two of which are in a student show at school this month – a little bit of this and that.
All of this is a fancy way of saying one thing: I’m not an editor any more. And for a long time, I didn’t want to be one. I did a job search activity last year where I had two people come up to me after the class and ask me for advice on writing. One person seemed to vacillate between wanting advice on that to wanting an editor for a book she’d already written to wanting a cowriter for the book she’d already written in the 70s.
And all I could think was “Thank god neither of them are going to call me back.” Because I did the polite networking thing, and I gave them cards, and I talked to them for a while, and I watched them walk away, and I felt cold dread at the thought that they might ask me for more help.
When I was laid off, I took it a little more personally than I ever really said, or ever actually felt. It’s become obvious in the last few weeks that I did take it that personally, though. It was, at least to my subconscious mind, very much that I’d been told that I wasn’t any good at editing, which was why I didn’t have a job and people I’d considered lifelong friends were no longer speaking to me. We’d “grown apart”, according to them.
We hadn’t grown apart. I wasn’t working with them any more. Clearly, they could see my failure, even if I couldn’t.
But let’s face it: I’ve always said there’s more than one thing that I want to do. If someone will, someday, pay me to be a pony-wrangler ballerina on Mars, I’ll go. I want to do so many things in my life – one lifetime isn’t enough time. It was just hard for the people I knew and cared about to see that it’s possible to be two things, apparently – it wasn’t okay, in their eyes, for me to no longer be an editor, and to be happy about having been laid off. Later, to be happy about going back to school to study something unrelated to editing.
That shot my confidence to hell. I started casually sabotaging people I knew in a writing context – nothing so drastic as to actually mis-edit them, but avoiding them, failing to respond to their emails for weeks – if I ever did – and just severing ties. Because I wasn’t an editor, and I had some experience telling me that people only saw me as one thing and wanted me to be that one thing.
I had to realise all this, though. I agreed to edit an online anthology of short stories. I think they’re going to be good – the authors have good ideas and know the ropes of the business, and I can edit the heck out of their writing. But first I had to realise that I’d decided I wasn’t an editor any more, and why.
Part of it was that I don’t want to be. I will always be an editor – the talent for that is, frankly, not teachable – but I don’t want to be An Editor any more. Another part of it was that other people wanted me to be something that they didn’t see me trying to leave.
I like writing code. I like it a lot. I like the process of turning concept into reality as much as I ever did when I was contracting books. This is what I want to do with my life right now, and it’s not where I’m going to stop, either.
I can be an editor and a codemonkey at the same time – as soon as I stop thinking that people want me to be one thing and won’t let me be the other, that I need new friends for new careers, that I have to amputate part of myself to move on in life.
“Everything you’ve done, everything you’ve seen, everything you’ve become, remains. You never can go back, only forward, and if you don’t bring the whole of yourself with you, you’ll never see the sun again.”
- Michael Marshall Smith, Only Forward
