40 Books in 40 Weeks

Hi.

Erm. Yes, hello. Yes, this thing is still on. Good.

Sorry for the absence. I went on maternity leave . . . and now my son is approaching his first birthday. My how time flies, and other platitudes.

Now, I find myself with very little free time, yet facing an unwieldy to-read pile and craving a reason to restart this blog. So let's kill two birds with one stone, and other sayings. Besides, everybody likes a good challenge!

Here's the plan: I'm going to read one book a week from now until the end of the year. (Conveniently, that's forty weeks. How pleasing.) I'll write a reaction post when I finish each book. It should be fun. I've got a lot of good books I've been meaning to read. Now I will!

A few notes to the public, since I happen to be writing in a public place:

• All books will be ones I already own. They're literally in piles on the floor next to my bookshelves. Suggestions are welcome, but will ultimately be ignored. (Until next year.)
• The posts will not be reviews, at least not in any traditional sense. Maybe I'll talk about the whole book, maybe I'll rant about two sentences on page 72. Maybe I'll give a synopsis, maybe I'll rewrite the ending. There will probably be a lot of emotions. Who knows? I'm also not setting any sort of minimum length -- I can barely keep up with producing enough words for my translations, as it is.
• This is just to keep me accountable. I'm only reading for myself. But if you find all of it interesting, then, well, welcome to my brain. You'll like it here.

First post will come next week, once I finish one of the books sitting partially read next to my bed . . .

Want to read along? First up: Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs, by Lina Wolff, tr. Frank Perry

Real Life Gets in the Way

It does. It's not "if," it's "when." Life interferes with EVERYTHING from time to time.

For example, I was planning on writing so many things on this blog for the past month. And then we had to move, kind of suddenly, to a temporary apartment on the third floor of a friend's parents' house in the suburbs, and the two-day move stretched into five days, and Mr. S got an interview in Rhode Island, and Labor Day weekend family visits happened, and now here we are, just over two weeks from the ALTA Conference in Rochester, and I've just finished my to-do list to prepare for the conference, and we're trying to figure out which boxes we should be unpacking so we can actually live a normal life and which we should just leave in storage. And yet, through all of that, I've been working. I've taken my paying jobs, and I've done some volunteer work for my favorite NGO in Switzerland, and I've even started a new pet project (it's a French comic book about an awesome cross-dressing heroine who can win knife and gun fights on a merchant ship in the late 18th century, thank you for asking). The conference is coming up so quickly, and I'm so excited about it -- I've even got a meeting lined up with the adviser for the University of Rochester's MA in Literary Translation program, which may be my next destination.

Life gets in the way, and pushes you forward at the same time. But only if you work at it.

Just Say No

Drugs are harmful to your body.  Just say "no" when offered them.  It's as simple as that.  Or so all elementary-aged American children were told in the 80s and 90s.  Simple?  Maybe.  Peer pressure builds up, though. Now, we're older.  Some of us are freelancers.  Sometimes, we get offered jobs -- or offered the possibility of jobs -- that we know we shouldn't take.  Why?  We'll have to deal with demeaning project managers.  The work is mindless.  We'd be translating very poorly written copy from the source language.  We'll lose an entire night's sleep to get the job done.  It's harmful to our bodies, and to our sanity, and especially to our happiness.

Even so, when a new agency approached me with the offer of possibly working together, we haggled on rates a bit, I listed my specializations (at their request, which is important for later), and I agreed to do a small test for them.  I stipulated that, since the test would be unpaid, I'd only do a small one, less than 250 words.  A reasonable amount of work for a test.

They then sent me three tests to choose from (nice!).  But wait...all the tests were over 500 words, and none of them fell even remotely within my specializations.

Enter the psychological pressure: "I'd really like the work."  The brain rushes through countless excuses for why I should just buckle down and slog through the test, but they all boil down to "I'd really like the work."

Let's be clear.  I don't know if I'd get any work, or if I'd be at all qualified for the work I'd receive (based on these tests), or if I'd enjoy the work that I was qualified for.  But still, brain goes, "I'd really like the work."

Fortunately, I have an Other Half.  He reminds me that I can, in fact, overrule my worried brain with logic.  What's the point of doing a long, unpaid test that may lead to work that's most likely not in my area that I probably wouldn't enjoy for a lower rate than I normally charge?  None.  There's no point at all.

Just say no.

(Do so respectfully, of course.  But just say no.)

Here we go again!

New adventure: translation.

I took a course in translation as an undergrad at NYU, and immediately was hooked.  I spent a couple psych lectures that semester working on a particularly finicky translation.  (It's not the lecture's fault that it directly followed my translation class!)  Ever since then, I've been translating something, at least once every week or two.  But it's always been on the side.  And I've never gotten paid for a single word.

Now it's career-building time.  Back in Brooklyn, ready to learn a ton and figure this out.  How does one build a freelance translation career, anyway?  I've hit the blogs, the American Translators Association website, the monthly meetings of the New York Circle of Translators.  I've started talking to people who do this for a living.  I took a job as a proofreader (and occasional project manager) at one of the largest translation agencies in the world, to get experience from the other side.

But the biggest "first" step I'm about to take?  I'll be attending the ATA's Annual Conference at the end of the month.  What a learning experience I will have, if I can overcome the learning curve.

My fears (of course they exist, and they are indeed plentiful) for the moment center on the conference.  What if, what if, what if?  What if nobody talks to me?  What if I don't learn a single thing?  What if this is just too hard?  It's like the first day of school all over again.

But any hurdle demands pogo stick, or a horse, or possibly a helicopter.  My current pogo sticks include:

• creating a modest website
• ordering business cards
• sprucing up my resume
• physically writing out a list of questions to ask people while chatting or networking

And my helicopter?  I'll be staying with a good friend of mine from high school who lives in Boston now.  Lifeline: procured.

(To be fair, I was considering staying in the conference hotel, which would have been a better professional option.  At the moment, though, my income is a bit too modest to warrant such extravagance.)