Set Free…Explained

There’s been a key change made to this blog.
You will note, in the sidebar, that my “day gig” is no longer linked here.
The reasons why are long and not worth going into.
The results, however, are.

Not to worry—I do still have a day gig. That in itself is no small feat, and we’ll leave it at that. But also make no mistake: that stuff about not having the “corporate gene”?
It’s still true. :-) And that is still good news.

You see, the pressure’s off now.
If you’ve read this blog over a long enough period of time, you know that not a small part of my time and energy has been devoted not only to learning a lot about the Catholic publishing world, but to trying to find a good niche for myself in it.
Trying, as the old saying goes, to get ahead.

But what was “ahead” in my sphere?

The logical next step in my progress in the halls of publishing would be to get into some variety of acquisitions or management.

Trouble is, folks, I ain’t management material. Not because I can’t do the job, but because quite frankly, I don’t care enough about contemporary modes of management to want to do it. Because management involves working with endless numbers of people, in endless situations where people have to collaborate, with all kinds of “team” nonsense and “stepping up” nonsense and “affirmation” nonsense, and…

Fuggedaboudit.

After long years of desperately trying to think and act as if those things are important, of desperately trying to “play nice with others,” I’ve finally decided it ain’t worth the trouble. As Popeye put it, I yam what I yam, and what I “yam” is not a “people person.”

I am an idea person. I am an information person. I am a creative person. I do things with words, with ideas, with materials.

With people? I don’t do so hot.

That’s no crime, in and of itself; but in our modern workplace, you’d think it was.

And for awhile, I bought into that. I bought into the whole notion that if you’re smart (which I am), and if you’re educated (which I also am), you owe it to yourself, not to mention the world at large, to eventually be in management. That’s where you’ll stretch your wings, make your mark, bake your brownies…you fill in the cliché, I’m tired of them. :-) But management—or at least high-level editorial supervision—might be called the golden calf we’re all supposed to want to cook for lunch.

(There, now, is that a mixed enough metaphor for you?)

Trouble is, like I said…this ideal of next-grade-up-aspiration ignores the fact that, I, like Lucy Van Pelt, love humanity…it’s people I can’t stand. Give me a book and a red pen, a pot of coffee, and a nice window to look out of and/or breathe air through, and you might never hear from me for days…unless you poke your head around the doorway and say hi. It isn’t because I don’t like you. It’s because when I’m working, I’m working…and when I’m socializing, I’m socializing.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t like having fun with coworkers, either. But there’s a catch to this: I am apparently the Jessica Fletcher of the workplace-friendship game. Not that people I socialize with die…but they tend to—er—lose their jobs.

I’m sure it’s not because of their being friends with me. (I hope.)

But I digress…

Anyhow, I have discovered over a long period of time that, while I can try and grunt and groan and do a lot of heavy lifting to impress people with what a good girl I am, what a conscientious team player I can be, and how worthy I’d be for management…

…none of it really plays into what I’m best at, where my heart is, and where I want to end this adventure when my number is called.

So what’s the point?

Exactly.

The breakthrough in this thought pattern actually came one day in a still, small voice that said to me, simply, “You can stop trying to make it in this business, you know. You already have.”

So I’ve been missing the point by “trying to get” to somewhere I already am.

Fact is, I’m not on the bottom rung of a ladder.
I’m way closer to the top than I realize…and it’s time to start acting like that.

Management, whatever it means in this business, may be a real boon to lots and lots of people. And it certainly would be a boon to any company I work in to have me manage anything.
But if that should happen, it’s going to have to happen on terms I can actually stomach.

If I can see the light ahead, and it’s an oncoming freight train…
…well, maybe I can just let that one pass, because it’s clearly not meant for me.

I can stop pushing so hard.
I can stop plugging things for the sake of cheerleading.
I can stop being anyone but who I am…which, in the end, never was a hotshot editorial management type; it was, and is, a storyteller.

I’m a novelist, thank you very much.

That doesn’t mean I can’t do anything else, but it does mean that I daren’t waste any more energy attempting to cultivate fields and grow crops I don’t, in my heart of hearts, care about. That way lies frustration, burnout, and madness…and I’m not taking it anymore.

I’m free.
Within my cube or outside it, wearing my editor’s hat or my freelance-writer superhero cape and wielding my red pen…I’m free at last. Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last. :-)

Thoughts?

Janny

Set Free

I need to get back into the habit of blogging when I’m home from the day gig, so’s my day gig won’t get hissy about my writing on their time (good point). But in the meantime, snatching a few moments here and there to write a few sentences—in between all the stuff I’m doing that’s technically also not part of my job, but something that’s expected anyway (!)—doesn’t seem to be totally a wrongheaded idea. I am, after all, encouraged to write in my Performance Journal about various things I accomplish, how I feel about changes in my job, etc., etc…

Suffice to say that, for now, there’s a new sense of freedom in the editorial cubes. I’ll elaborate in more detail later, but for me, the last post I did that was work-related (see the “missing genes” posts for explanation) was in itself an epiphany that has really, really helped move me into a new place in my writing career. I’ll talk more about this later…

Also in the meantime, check-in would be good. What’s everyone working on? What’s on the horizon? What’s your biggest gripe of late? Any really really nice writing achievements to brag about?

Write on!
Janny

Fear Not!

I’ve been temporarily sidetracked from extensive blogging during normal business hours (!), but I’ll be back posting regularly soon. I promise. Really. Just wanted to let you all know that I am, in fact, still alive and kicking.

(sigh)

Janny

Missing Genes, the final part

Finally, the gene that appears time and again in others, but not in me...the lack of which I’ve finally had to surrender to, once, for all, forever:

The “Corporate Maven.”
This final gap in my internal chemistry has probably cost me untold wealth (at least that’s what many executive-types will tell you) over the years; the battle to “acquire” it after the fact—or “act as if” in the meantime—is one I’ve waged for much of my adult working life. You see, I know that Proving Oneself to the Mighty Corporation is the way that leads to advancement, and advancement is always a Good Thing…right?

Well, for me, the answer to that is, “Not necessarily.”

I probably cooked my goose several times over, in different situations over the years, simply by being very upfront and honest with potential employers instead of speaking “corporatese” at the proper times. I remember interviewing for a job as a legal secretary in which I said that I didn’t see any particular reason why most legal secretarial work couldn’t be done in a normal eight-hour day. The lawyer I was interviewing with said, “Interesting,” which I took at face value…until I learned that he was probably trying not to laugh that my unbelievable naïveté. He was probably in the midst of billing a 70- or 80-hour week, more than likely had secretaries there from early in the morning until well past five, and he probably found it terribly amusing that I thought that legal work would, in the course of ordinary business, fit into a neat 40-hour-week time frame.

And yet…I had a reason for saying what I did. The law firm in question, as I recall, dealt primarily in commercial and residential real estate. Contracts. Closings. Yanno…all the things you normally do during a customary business day? As in…a nine-to-five schedule? So, while my statement may have sounded really stupid to him—I still believe at its heart, it was actually saying, “If this office learns how to use their time rather than wasting it, you can send everybody home at 5 and still get everything done that you need to do.”

I didn’t say it that way, at least not to my recollection. (Maybe I did. Maybe that’s why he thought it was interesting. :-)) All I do know is, following that interview, the placement person at the agency seemed almost angry with me…only she never really told me why. (!) Looking back on it now, I know I probably violated the laws of Corporate Speak, costing me a great job and an employer a great employee (and the agency person a great commission). I know it’s happened before that, and I know it will happen again, as long as I’m placed in the position of feeling like I need to “take a side” and “make a stand.”

Because, you see, at heart I am not corporate.
I never have been.
And, despite repeated attempts to tell myself I could be, inevitably I end up speaking or acting in a way that, while it’s very honest and straightforward, probably shoots the tips of my corporate toes off…and I can’t stop myself from doing it.

I know. I’ve tried.

So I’m in that unenviable position of discovering, indeed, that I do want advancement and recognition and promotion and the corner office, for the prestige’s (and, let’s face it, money’s) sake of them. But when the chips are down, apparently, I’m not wired to be on the management side of the desk. Not because I can’t handle people…but because I can’t handle the personal sacrifices and compromises necessary to get there.

I’m not talking about hard-work sacrifices. Those, I can do. I’ve already proven beyond the shadow of any conceivable doubt that I’m willing to work hard. So if working hard were all there was to getting ahead, heck, I’d already have the corner office of corner offices.

No, the sacrifices I’m talking about are more like enduring a zillion little paper cuts…or swallowing many bitter pills along the way of getting the presidencies or even the managerships in the corporate culture; problem is, I’ve never been able to swallow pills—literally or figuratively. They just don’t go down, and I have to find ways to punt.

This isn’t an easy thing to come to this point and realize. But it’s a true thing. It’s an honest thing. When the rubber hits the road, I side with individuals: the worker bees, the authors, writers, artists, and/or their agents. And, as an individual, I cannot, no matter how I try, countenance the notion that a company “owns” me. No one owns me but Jesus, thank you very much. But, while yes, that is a healthy psychological attitude to have, it’s not the mindset one needs in order to progress to increasingly bigger “individual” rewards in your average company. In the end, if my possible promotion will depend on the company being able to have me at their beck and call...I’ll be a worker bee forever. Because I simply can’t do otherwise. Not without paying far too high an emotional price.

I can only conclude that the many people who can do what I cannot—can look the other way when a company stiffs a friend, can compromise, can shrug their shoulders, make cynical jokes, and get on with stuff—with seemingly no ill effects at all, have a hidden (and really useful) gene that renders them able to see what’s really happening, yet ignore it; hear things they don’t like, yet give a benefit of the doubt that would choke a horse; and act “as if” they neither heard nor saw nor experienced any of the things that, bit by bit, chip away at my soul until I want to scream.

Funny thing is, in the mental health field, ignoring what you see, telling yourself you didn’t “really” hear what you actually heard, and pretending that reality is different from your actual experience, is the definition of codependency.
And that’s a bad thing…right?

But the inability to consider a company as more important than any individual leads to…no advancement, no promotions, and the wary eye of a supervisor who may end up considering you a “loose cannon.”
Also a bad thing.
(Kinda shoots the old corporate buzz-term of “win-win” right in the foot, though, doesn’t it?)

***

So, the end result of all this navel-gazing?

I’ve got some deficiencies in areas I wish I didn’t have…for the sake of just being able to live with a bit less emotional upheaval in my heart of hearts. I wish I could run around dispensing the most positive slant on everything and everyone; I’m not made that way. I wish I could be the “it” girl in an office, not worry about whom I could or couldn’t trust, willingly gossip and chatter and flatter; I simply can’t. And I do wish, and have wished, that just once I could perfectly align my values, my gut instincts, and my beliefs about how to treat people and their work with some corporate entity that would see me as the gem I am and make me the boss, as in yesterday. :-) But that ain’t gonna happen.
So what to do?

Well, there is a silver lining here. It’s called acceptance.
Real acceptance.
Not the kind that says, “Well, I’ll work on these things,” but the kind that says, “Yanno what? Working on these things is lot of hooey. It gives me a headache, and I’m at the point in my life where it’s just too dang much work to keep trying to be something I’m not.”

In short, I’m sick of trying to mold myself, improve myself, build myself or grow myself so that I fit someone else’s idea of what success looks like. I’m at the point where I need to just be myself—and let the chips fall where they may.They’re going to anyway, even if I play all the games right. Because we all know people who played every game right, all their lives…and all they ended up with was regrets in the end.

I don’t want to be there.

I don’t want to regret what I think I don’t have. I just want to enjoy, and cultivate, and start really having fun and blessing the world with what I do.

I’ve often decided this, and then gone right back to trying to remake myself. Whether I “should” or not. But I’m just too tired to do that anymore.

That, in itself, is probably a blessing in disguise, and one I will endeavor to make the most of.

So if I’m missing a few genes, oh, well. I’m a pretty resourceful woman; I’ll cope.
(I can always stop and buy another...er...pair...at K-Mart. Right?)


Thoughts?
Janny

Missing Genes, Part 2

Very few people would deny that, say, the ability to hit a golf ball like Tiger hits it is more than just “practice, man, practice.” Most of us figure there’s more than a little genetics involved in being able to cook like Child, sing like Ramey, or paint like Monet.
But, now and then, I start to wonder if there’s some degree of genetics at work in some “smaller” things…more organic things. Personal stuff. Ever wonder about that?

For example, I mentioned last time that if there were such a thing as a “tact” gene, I was definitely born without it. I will never be an instinctively tactful person; I can work at it, but it’s not going to come naturally.

But there are a lot of other “parts” that, apparently, I lack, and people I cannot be. Like:

The “Self-esteem Fairy.” This, of course, is the person who runs around sprinkling affirmations like pixie dust. This is the person who first thought that giving grades in school damages precious little egos—yeah, we can all see how great an idea that was—and was no doubt behind the institution of those colorful Participation Ribbons for kids, so that everybody gets “rewarded” with something…no matter how “average” their performance may be. (The fact that this practice rewards mediocrity, thereby diminishing the self-esteem of the kids who really do excel, apparently escapes this chick. And why is it almost always a woman?)

I do envy this person both their desire and ability to make everyone feel wonderful about themselves—something I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically lack!—and their status, since in today’s culture, their “gift” seems to be particularly valued. However, I have yet to be able to cultivate this particular talent…which leads me to think this deficiency is chemical, rather than psychological, in origin.

Another gene, apparently, I’m missing…

The “Social Butterfly.” All my life, it seems, it’s been that when it comes to social situations, I’m the one on the outside looking in. I’m not the Girl Everybody Wants to Go Out to Lunch With. (Heck, I’m not even the Girl Everybody Invites to Lunch.) I’m not The Girl Considered to Have Fun Ideas. Sometimes, I’m not even considered The Creative One, or The One Most Likely to Keep Everyone Else Loose. And I have to admit, this lack in my life hurts.

This might well be due to my personality: I do tend to sit back and listen first, and jump in with both feet later; because I do that, people may think either that I’m a snob, or that I don’t like them, or that I prefer my own company 99% of the time. From time to time, any or all of these assumptions might be true (!), depending on the person, but that doesn’t diminish the sense of loss I feel when people don’t even think to ask me if I’d like inclusion. Odds are, I would. I’m just shy enough—and I’ve just been burned by rudeness enough times—to want them to go first. My experiments, and experiences, at “insinuating” myself into groups turn out, at best, lukewarm…and I’m rarely over the feeling that I’m a sixth wheel somehow. (Yeah, sixth. As in the one that’s not even necessary in an emergency.) After you go through enough of these experiments, you get the hint: apparently, I lack a key social gene, and that’s a shame. Because there are very few things I love better than making people laugh—and I think that, should I get invited out for a few more lunches, there might be a lot more smiles in the offing for everybody.

The final gene, however, that I’ve discovered missing…well, that’s a bigger one. And that matters more. But realizing its lack has led me, finally, to a place I needed to be all along—one I actually was in all along, and just didn’t want to admit it. But this place is a place of peace, and I really, really need that kind of peace in my life at this point.
So I’ll talk about that one…next.

Thoughts?
Janny

Missing Genes

No, this isn’t scrib about the pair of pants you left in the dryer!

It’s actually wondering, which I’ve been doing a lot lately, about what seem to be key—and in some cases, embarrassingly obvious—elements in human chemistry that other people possess, yet I lack. I’m beginning to think Nature shorted me several genes in there that she gave other people, and I can’t help but wonder why.

Like…for instance…

The tact gene.

I never cease to marvel at the people I know who seem to edge into tactful behavior as naturally as breathing. While I struggle to keep my eyes from rolling into the back of my head, and bite my tongue to keep from saying the things I desperately want to say, these people find the exact right words to convey the same thing nicely.

Not that this effort doesn’t occasionally backfire, of course. If you’re trying to tell someone, prior to their going out the door, that lime-green and pomegranate together in the same outfit might cause onloookers fits of nausea, framing it in terms of their “unique use of wardrobe color” isn’t going to serve anyone. What’s worse, later on, some of these people will come back and say, “For Pete’s sake, why didn’t you tell me how awful I looked?”

But how to say it? Aye, there’s the rub.

I’ve always been in favor of “direct” as a communication style. This doesn’t mean “brutal” (we all know someone who thinks of herself as “brutally honest” when, in fact, she’s cruel and insulting); it just means, “The message I intend you to get, I don’t want you to miss.” To me, it’s way more loving to “speak slowly and use small words,” even if those words might sound brusque or harsh, than to risk the message going completely over their heads.

Yet I wonder if that’s not a weakness on my part. A way I just didn’t completely “grow up” and learn how to “talk nice.” When I see so much overwhelming evidence around me of people who seem to be able to frame “Your son is a terrorist” into “My, he truly seems absorbed in something way bigger than he is”…I wonder.

Tact’s not the only thing I figure I missed out on early in the Dishing Out Lovely Attributes department. I’ll get to a few more of them in the next post. In the meantime…

Thoughts?
Janny

…And Then There Are The Others…

It’s always great, and sometimes even moving, when you’re watching a movie or TV show or reading a book and come upon little nuggets that make the scene worthwhile—that rise above the norm, that give you more meat than the usual “Hi, how are ya” types of interchange—such as the couple of quotes we’ve mentioned from Stranger Than Fiction. Kind of renews your faith in writers and scriptwriting, at least in the broadest universal sort of sense.

Unfortunately, then there are the other lines that do the opposite.

I’m not talking about lines written for deliberate shock value, outrage, or humor, although heaven knows we’re up to our proverbial eyeballs in vulgar, lowbrow sarcasm and just plain filth that passes itself off as “humor” nowadays. (The sad thing is, it gets away with doing so because many of our kids, growing up with Simpsons and South Park [despite our best efforts!], laugh uproariously at things that, a generation earlier, were called sophomoric—and that didn’t mean they belonged in a college student’s lexicon.) On the contrary…the line I encountered this past weekend was in a movie that was aimed at an audience light-years away from the bathroom-humor crowd. Which is what made it all the more jarring.

The movie was The Holiday—not the classic Holiday with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn (one of my all time favorites) but the more recent movie, with Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz. For those of you who don’t know the story, the premise involves two women, an ocean and a lifestyle apart, whose love lives are in shambles; they each decide they need a change of scene, exchange houses for the Christmas holiday, and—naturally—in those new situations, find the loves of their lives. It’s romantic, and of course, it pushes a lot of delightful “buttons,” all the way from two adorable kids (No, really. Truly. Adorable. And I hate kids in romantic movies.) to a script that’s on the whole pretty squeaky-clean.

…except for one setup that I still haven’t forgiven the writers for, one I’m surprised Ms. Diaz was willing to do with a straight face.

The scene occurs after the house exchange has happened; at that point, Ms. Diaz’s character, Amanda, is settling in to a cottage somewhere in Surrey…and discovering that the “peace and quiet” she thought she sought is actually boring her out of her mind. Enter her hero-to-be, the original occupant’s brother, who arrives more than a little drunk and clearly expecting to crash at his sister’s place. After a few catchup explanations, Amanda invites the brother to sleep things off there, prepares to go get him a blanket and a pillow and put him on the couch—the usual things. But then, suddenly and for no real solid reason…the brother kisses her. And she likes it, and asks him to do it again.

And then the next thing out of her mouth? “Well, yanno, with this situation—I mean, we’re never going to see each other again, I’m leaving, and you’re really good-looking…I think we ought to have sex.”

To which my daughter and I said, in unison, “HUH?”

Of course, the brother’s more than willing to take her up on it—which in this age of STDs, is at best disingenuous—and they proceed to act accordingly. Not on screen, at least. We get the usual morning-after scene, we get Amanda reassuring this guy she’s not going to fall in love with him, yatta, yatta, yatta. (Considering she’s just broken up with a guy she was living with the day before, the odds are that she doesn’t know how to love anybody, period. But I digress.)

The problem was, no matter how they “salvaged” the story or kept it PG-rated at that point, the damage was already done. We went from feeling gently amused and laughing at the heroine’s crazy Type A behavior to sputtering at the screen in indignation and incredulity. Or, as my daughter put it, “What a whore!” (Which I thought said it all quite well.)

I doubt this is the reaction the writers wanted from a twenty-something who otherwise is caught up in the romance of the thing. I really doubt they wanted us muttering for the next few minutes to ourselves about women who are too stupid to live. Nowhere else in the movie do they stoop to pandering; so one has to ask oneself, why then? Why there? Why that dialogue/scene at all?

It may come down to the simple fact that Hollywood doesn’t know how to express attraction, romantic sparks, or a carefree attitude toward life except by having their characters engage in free and easy sex. It may have been a temporary brain spasm on the part of the writers. It may be that they literally didn’t know how else to bond these people on screen, so they took the cheap shortcut.

What it does mean, sadly, is that no one had the good sense, the talent, or the taste to step back from the script for a moment and say, “Whoa, wait a minute, this is not going to work!” Which baffles me, since in the context of the rest of the screenplay, the writers hit home run after home run. So why did they let that major-league fly ball just drop through their hands in favor of the cheap injection of sex?

I don’t know. I still don’t know. But for all the world, I want to write those screenwriters and say to them, “Look, you don’t have to do things this way to prove you’re not religious-right nutjobs. This was just plain stupid in any context, even yours. Next time, use the red pencil God gave you and make yourselves do something more creative.”

The only reassuring thing about that scene, I suppose, was my daughter’s reaction to it. Not moral outrage. Not tsk-tsk. Not wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Just plain irritation and disgust at a character who threw herself around so cheaply. Which, in reflection, is a good thing for a twenty-something to be thinking about thoughtless sex with a stranger: “Not on my watch, thank you very much.”

If that was the lesson these screenwriters were trying to teach…they succeeded. But somehow, I doubt their motives were anything near that lofty. And that’s too bad. Because romantic, lighthearted, positive, and uplifting movies deserve better than heroines written in at any part of the story as little more than whores. It’s time someone in the entertainment business learned to trust their audiences enough to leave some things out that ought not to be there in the first place. We’ll still enjoy the story. Some of us will enjoy it more for that restraint, and we’ll keep coming back to those people for more stories…

…which I always thought was the whole idea.
Isn’t it?

Thoughts?
Janny

Words to Live By, Part II

Last time, I touched on a great line from Stranger Than Fiction about “making the world better…with cookies.” Seems to me that about captures a lot of our lives, and indeed, it was meant to—as evidenced by the rather ham-handed emphasis on the Point Of The Movie at the end. Which you already caught onto, if you’d been at all attentive for the 100 or so minutes of the film that came before it…

But there’s one more great line. And I think it’s a great line to start out a new week with.

At one point in the movie, our hero is staying with an acquaintance from work, and they’re talking about what he would do if he found out he was dying “in the near future.” After much wheedling, talking about superpowers (!), and the like, when the rubber meets the road, the character finally blurts it out:

“I’d go to Space Camp.”

Our hero is astonished. Isn’t Space Camp just for kids?
“Oh, no,” his friend assures him. “You’re never too old for Space Camp.”

I think if there’s any banner a writer, especially a novelist, can fly over her particular ship, it ought to be something like that.

Interestingly enough, it turns out you never are too old for Space Camp.
As, in reality, you’re truly never too old for a lot of things. (Just ask Susan Boyle.)
But most of us forget this. To our peril.
Some of us…remember in time. Many of us don’t.

Let’s us, this week, be among the people who remember it.

You’re never too old for Space Camp. But you can wait too long for it.
So, whatever your Space Camp is, stop waiting for it. Start now. Do it this week.
And then come back here and tell us all about it.

Thoughts?
Janny