Category Archives: General Musing

Freelancing, General Musing

Fear Not the Drear

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Here in Toronto, it’s the time of year I like to call the drear–that period in late autumn when the leaves are off the trees but the snow has not yet begun to fly. The drear feels like a limbo state between autumn and winter and is characterized by days and days of unrelenting overcast skies, rain, and mud. Last year’s drear was mercifully short because the snow arrived early, but this year, we’ve been subjected to what seems like an extraordinarily long drear–long enough to test the fortitude of even the most diehard optimist.

One thing I should say before I continue is that drear is actually a literary adjective that dates to 1629. It’s the sort of word that makes me think of a 19th-century poet wandering lonely o’er a dank and drear moor pining for his lady love, who has either spurned the poor poet or succumbed to consumption. Drear has Gothic literary connotations for me. Editors could legitimately take issue with my use of it as a noun, since the Canadian Oxford Dictionary regards it as an adjective only.

Noun or adjective, drear captures both the prevailing weather and how it affects me perfectly. As a freelancer who works at home, I find the drear particularly difficult to cope with. As far as I know, I don’t suffer from seasonal affective disorder (SAD), yet if I allow it to, the drear will sneak into my home office, robbing me of energy and taking energy’s close relatives, motivation and inspiration, with it as it flies out the door (I imagine it uttering a diabolical laugh as it flees). Perhaps if you work at home and spend many hours alone writing, editing, or doing whatever else you do, you’re finding that the drear is affecting you too. What to do?

I’m not normally the sort of person who needs to give myself rewards to motivate myself to get a job done unless that job is so challenging that it’s threatening my sanity. However, I do find that rewarding myself helps me combat the drear. My accomplishments needn’t be immense and the corresponding rewards needn’t be elaborate–something modest like “When I finish editing this chapter, I’ll get up and have a cup of tea (something fruity and caffeinated like blackcurrant) and some dark chocolate (70 percent)” works just fine for me. Of course, finishing an entire project is cause for celebration, meaning a much splashier reward awaits. Keeping that reward on the front burner of my mind as I’m working certainly keeps my momentum going. If I intend to splurge on a sweater, I keep looking at it online to remind me that it will be my present to myself for both achieving my goal and surviving the drear.

Exercise and fresh air are also essential to coping with the drear. Fortunately, I have the 50-pound mutt to take me out for walks every day, usually just when I desperately need to stretch my limbs and get the oxygen flowing to my brain so the synapses will start doing what they’re supposed to again. The daily dog walk has many benefits, both physical and psychological. Watching my dog wrestle with her best friend (an Airedale) and fly around the park–outrunning most of the other dogs with superlative ease and grace, I might add–lifts my spirits and makes me smile. And there are inevitably other dog owners to talk to. When you spend much of your day in front of a computer screen, the joy of talking to human beings face to face should never be underestimated. After an outing to the dog park, the score is once again in my favour: Caroline 1, Drear 0.

Dangling rewards before myself and doing the mutt promenade are two things I do when the drear threatens to turn me into an unproductive, useless lump. But I have to ask: What do you do to fight the drear?

 

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General Musing, Networking

Opportunities Lost and Found

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The idea of attending networking events used to seem about as appealing to me as the thought of having all my teeth extracted. I always envisioned standing around morosely eating chips and dip and listening to the chattier people do most of the talking.

Then I actually started going to networking meetings. My decision to network formally happened when I joined a writers’ group. Once a month, at an ungodly hour on a Saturday morning, I haul myself over to the subway station and travel to the extreme west end of the city, where I eat a buffet breakfast at 9:00 a.m. with a table full of strangers while I am still only semi-conscious.

Before I went to the first meeting, I assumed the experience would be utterly nerve-wracking. Wouldn’t I be required to impress the hell out of my fellow writers and editors and get work to boot? Oh, the pressure! But it turned out that my semi-conscious state worked to my advantage. Honestly, I wasn’t that worked up about impressing anyone. I was too tired and undercaffeinated to care, which meant that I didn’t try to be the extroverted person I thought I should be for such occasions; I was just my normal self. And because of that, I met lots of nice people with whom I exchanged business cards and with whom I’ve chatted at subsequent meetings. Isn’t that exactly what’s supposed to happen?

Not trying too hard is definitely a plus when you’re attending networking meetings, but not trying when opportunity is handed to you on a silver platter is really not recommended. At one meeting I attended, I was sitting with a woman who got up from the table to surreptitiously place copies of her book on a table at the front of the room that was reserved for member books and flyers. When she came back, I said that I’d noticed her book and asked her what it was about.

“It’s creative non-fiction,” she said, without even a glimmer of enthusiasm. And she clearly thought that identifying the genre of the book was sufficient. Suffering from a bad back, she went on to describe her pain with considerably more energy than she’d had for her book, and a gloomy silence swept over our table of strangers.

It was an example of what’s not supposed to happen at these meetings, and furthermore, it was an opportunity lost for the author. Where was her elevator speech, the one that would make me feel that her book had something unique to offer me and was worthy of my attention? And her lack of curiosity about what I do for a living didn’t win her any points, either.

I contrast her approach (or rather, her non-approach) with that of another woman I met at the meeting, who as soon as she heard I was an editor, excitedly asked me about my work. When I asked her about her writing, she gave me the gist of her young adult novel. We exchanged cards, and she also handed me a glossy flyer featuring her book. It was an equal exchange and a satisfying one. Guess who I’ll want to speak with at future meetings? It won’t be the woman who was complaining about her back.

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