I'm Not Ignoring You

Power has been ignoring us. That Nor'easter killed us. No power. No phone. No satellite. The tree damage looked rather Katrina-like. All of my old apple trees were completely uprooted, and they hadn't even changed fall colors yet although the maples, oaks, and most of the ash have been bare awhile.

This 35 hour outage on top of our 17 hour outage over the weekend on top of the 32 hour outage three weeks ago has literally killed my business, perhaps permanently. I can't keep competitive in a situation where publishers expect 24/7 turn-around and then pay very late, kill timeliness bonuses if you're a second late (and I've never been late; I kept three books on deadline through three weeks in ICU hooked up to oxygen and on a painkiller drip) and then actually lie about the situation (I can be woefully naive; I do actually expect people to behave decently, even after the "blue dress" situation and six years of Dubya) so a middle manager pockets it. I just had someone do this without so much as letting me know it would not be paid until I waited months and asked several times, and incurred extra expenses to produce with the guarantee it would be paid.

I'm a damned good writer. Sadly, this blog isn't always a good representation of that because my "free" time is short and there's so much ground to cover but...

I do not know any other writers - and I know a lot of them in many areas- who can move in and out of styles, subjects, various media, target audience, and message etc CONCURRENTLY as I can.

I do not know any writers who are faster than I am (necessity: few tech and consumer books allow a schedule of more than two months to write and revise) or who can juggle as many concurrent projects as I can. Not so many years ago time, I've written 1,800 tutorials that eventually ended up on Lycos at the same time I was writing four books myself, ghostwriting for another author, and managing an 80 hour a week job. The last few months, I've written or co-authored five books, ghost wrote a shitload of material for a company in New Orleans that seems to have floated away with my pay, came up with PR and marketing material for a non-profit (pro bono), recorded two video instruction series (unfortunately, also for a Gulf coast company that has declared bankruptcy post Katrina), wrote two feature newspaper articles, one white paper (ghost write), and more than a dozen consumer articles that will begin appearing at an online news service.

And yet, for all that work, for the many times the copy and technical edits came in squeaky clean because I do my job, for all the times I've worked all night and stayed up by candlelight in a very cold office to keep writing on laptop, I just found out no one is going to pay me for at least another month (more than a few are past 60 days late). They all have different excuses, none of which will fly with my mortgage holder, phone company, fuel company, or others.

Yes, this is a long preamble to the next post (up).

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