Did you know that September is "Be Kind to Editors and Writers Month"?
Humor writer Angie Brennan has blogged about six ways writers' friends and families can observe the season. Oddly, she has no suggestions for how to honor editors. Perhaps this is telling us something about the relationship between writers and editors...
The Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop in Dayton, Ohio, attracts quite a few repeat attendees. I attended the 2006 workshop and found out why.
So when I got email Monday saying registration for 2008 was open, I signed up. And it was fortunately I moved quickly...the conference, with headliner Garrison Keillor, sold out in 77 hours.
It's encouraging when tickets to a writing conference go as fast as ones to a rock concert!
A few years back, talking with someone using a mobile phone was generally annoying. Calls were dropped, voices were delayed, and often it sounded as though the conversation were being conducted in the depths of an industrial popcornmaker.
Now that the quality of our mobile phones has improved, we've found a new piece of phone technology that screws up not only our wireless phones, but our land lines as well.
It's the headset.
You may be using the latest Bluetooth earbud or an ancient AT&T headset, but chances are, either you hate it, or the person talking with you does.
In the past two days, I've had the following phone "conversations" with people wearing headsets:
• "Hi, whoever this is, you'll have to call me back on my other line because I can't hear you. I can't get the headset on this phone to work."
• "Sorry, I'm having trouble hearing those numbers. It's this headset. Could you repeat them again?"
• "Sorry about that; I'm back. My headset fell off there."
• "Wait a minute. Let me change headsets." (horrible crackling sounds)
• "Do you hear an annoying noise? Do you hear it now? (Pause.) I think I need a new headset."
• "Hi. I'm just calling to test my new headset. How does this sound?"
Annoying.
I don't use a headset (after several tries) but I'm interested an another technological advance that's supposedly just on the horizon. It's an advanced form of Caller ID that can detect callers using headsets...and route them immediately to voicemail.
Much of my web content writing is done on a contract basis, with the number of hours I work per month somewhat variable. The workflow from one of my clients slowed markedly in August, so I'll be billing them for only a couple of hours of work this month.
Imagine my surprise when a check arrived from that client today representing 10 hours of work. I didn't remember billing them for that, so went back and checked my records. No clue. Then I looked closely at the memo line on the check. It said, simply: "Bonus."
Tears came to my eyes. I felt incredibly valued. Will I work my tail off for them in September? Oh yes, you bet!
There's a perceptible slow-down in the blogosphere in late August.
People are off the grid on vacation, at Burning Man, or just out enjoying the last days of summer (and taking advantage of the absence of bosses, collegues and clients to do so).
Enjoy!
The Name Inspector nibbles appreciatively at the TrenchMice site and the story of how TrenchMice got its distinctive name.
On the freelance writing lists I frequent, and at the indie business site, Biznik, there is much talk about pricing your services, billing clients, and collecting from clients who are slow to pay. But no one ever says beep about their own bill-paying habits.
I bring this up because today I met with a new accountant, one who comes highly recommended and who was (like several other accountants I've talked with in the past year or so) noticeably reluctant to take on a new small business client. Now I know why.
We spent more than an hour going over some fairly gnarly tax issues involved in my transition from salaried work to sole-proprietor contracting business. His insights were impressive. At the end of it all, I reached for my checkbook. He looked astonished.
I asked his hourly rate for consultations, and again, he looked surprised. Apparently, accountants put consultations on your tab and add them to the charges for your annual tax filings in the following year. Yet many people who come in for a consultation don't end up using that accountant, and thus the accountant is out the hour of work. I said I thought that was weird, and I wanted to pay up front (even though I have every intention of asking him to do the filing for us next year).
We chatted a bit, and he remarked that his elderly clients from the area like to pay, just as I did, by check at the end of the meeting. The majority of his clients he bills after they pick up their taxes -- but now he is starting to re-think that policy. Looking rather embarrassed, he told me that recently he has been having difficulty with new clients, people who have been moving into the fancy condominiums in our area and opening new businesses locally. Some of them pick up their taxes from him, file them, and then ignore his bills. This year, he had to file in small claims court against two small business clients. (They paid up, immediately, when they received notice of the court filings.)
I'm as astonished and appalled to hear these stories as I would be if I saw someone sneak out of the local fish-and-chips place without paying. What's going on here?
No, even jet-lagged as I am, I'm not entertaining ideas about becoming a screenwriter. But I do want to blog a bit about one of television's foremost screenwriters, Dorothy Fontana. (You're more likely to recognize her under her gender-neutral professional name, D.C. Fontana.) I heard her speak at the Las Vegas Star Trek convention this past weekend in what was apparently a rare appearance.
Fontana started her career as the production secretary for the original Star Trek series in 1964, and rapidly moved to the position of story editor. She's credited with writing much of the back story for Star Trek's Spock character, and for introducing Deep Space Nine's Jadzia Dax character. She's written for Babylon 5, Dallas, Streets of San Francisco, and Kung Fu, and teaches screenwriting at the American Film Institute.
Fontana is anything but a flashy or dramatic person, and her plain-spoken accounts of scripts rejected, scripts rewritten, and projects gone astray made it very, very clear that for every script of hers that made it to filming a pile of others were ruined or jettisoned.
After watching some of the enormously entertaining Star Trek actors hamming it up onstage at the convention (Walter Koenig, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, Kate Mulgrew, and Wil Wheaton), it was sobering to realize that their memorable roles began with writers scribbling away under the distinctly unglamorous circumstances Fontana describes.
Interestingly, several of the actors talked about their own writing experiences. Koenig said that, despairing of finding work after the initial Star Trek ended, he wrote a novel; Mulgrew, currently on Broadway in Iphigenia 2.0, is writing her memoirs; and Wheaton, an accomplished essayist and performer in the style of Garrison Keillor, was there promoting his latest book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives. (We bought a copy of the limited edition chapbook from Monolith Press; I suspect you'll have to follow Wheaton's blog to find out when the official version becomes available.)
I came away wondering if it ever goes the other way 'round -- with a screenwriter taking up acting...
