Category Archives: Professional

career, outward projection of you and your works

Working During Air Travel

Posted on by

Ryan Macklin is a freelance writer & editor in the hobby game industry and Creative Director for Evil Hat Productions. He’s flown over a hundred times in the last six years, with many travel hours spent working against deadline. His blog and projects can be found at RyanMacklin.com. Follow him on Twitter: @RyanMacklin.

Many of us have been there: you’re up against a tight deadline, and there’s a plane to catch. You think to yourself, “I’ll get some work done on the trip.” You think it’ll be easy, since you’ll have nothing to do for a few hours.

Truth is, it’s rough. Anyone who has traveled knows it can result in a weird fugue state, for many reasons: exhaustion due to waking up at odd hours; travel anxiety resulting in little sleep the night before; frustration with long lines while checking luggage or going through security; or that weird loneliness that happens right after conventions. But if you’re going to try it, here are a few tips.

Treat Every Hour as a Bonus Hour

You can’t predict how you’ll feel before boarding your plane, and you can’t predict exactly how much time you’ll have. And that’s nothing to say of finding a suitable place to work, with enough space, power , and wi-fi.

Then there’s the flight itself. You may not be able to work if there’s turbulence, if people in your row constantly need you to get up so they can use the bathroom, if you have to juggle a laptop and a drink on a tiny tray table, things like that.

So don’t assume you can get work done while traveling. Hope for the best, but assume travel days are a wash.

Work at a Different Gate

Your gate’s going to be crowded, with a hundred-some people waiting around for their flight. If you can’t find a good seat to work at, look around. There may be a gate nearby with plenty of seats available.

If you do this, be mindful of your own flight, particularly of any schedule or gate changes. If you’re on a flight that’s delayed, double-check every fifteen minutes or so; sometimes those delays are suddenly cleared up.

Make Friends, Bring Power

There are around a hundred at your gate, and far fewer power outlets, making getting an outlet feel like winning a jackpot. If you want to improve your odds (and make some other travelers happy), pack a small power strip. I use the Belkin Mini Surge, which has three outlets, rotates different directions.

Go cheap and go small. Cheap because you might lose it during travel, and small because you don’t want to lug around something huge in your carry-on and have something unwieldy to deal with if the TSA unpacks your bag to search it.

Don’t Plan on Wi-Fi

Many airports have wi-fi (at least the ones in the US that I’ve flown through). Some make you pay for it, and I’ve never seen the point in paying ten bucks for a 90-minute layover. Some are free, but use proxy servers that hijack your browser, putting everything in a frame that makes some browser-based software not work. For instance, I have given up trying to update entries on WordPress sites at Oakland International.

And the wi-fi will likely have two problems, especially if it’s free: it’ll be slow because of all the people using it, and it might be flaky because it’s poorly maintained. So don’t rely on wi-fi. Just as you should treat time working as bonus time, likewise treat having functional wi-fi as a bonus.

You might also be on an airplane with wi-fi. It’s just as expensive and likely to be problematic, so caveat emptor.

Cloud Storage and Potential Failure

Some people don’t worry about wi-fi because they use Dropbox or other cloud storage. If you’re one of these people, great! But just as a precaution, download local copies. Occasionally cloud storage systems glitch and overwrite your hard work with an earlier version. That happened to me once when the wi-fi went out and came back ten minutes later, and I was livid.

Choose Your Work Wisely

Once you’ve boarded your flight, focus on work that you can pick up & put away easily. Turbulence happens, forcing you to close your laptop or put away your notebook because it’s impossible to type or write. Choose work that uses the least amount of space; I don’t do graphic design or audio production on a plane, because I use a mouse for those.

Now, this might not be the work you need to do right now, depending on what you have on deadline. I’ve found I get more out of working on small things—like notes for upcoming projects, to-do lists for the next few days, and other preparation work—than I do on more intensive jobs.

Bring a Note Pad

For reasons that should be obvious by now, bring a note pad. You might not have the power or space to use a laptop. And on the plus side, flight attendants never tell you to turn off your note pad (though they will tell you to put your tray table up).

Remember That Travel Sucks For Everyone

I’ve focused on telling you ways to try to get work done and reduce some of the hassle, but it’s important to keep in mind that you’re not the only person having to deal with travel issues on this trip. If you’ve tried to work while you’re crabby, tired and frustrated, you know it’s no fun. And the folks next to you might be going through that very problem.

Moods are contagious, both good and bad. Trying to put forward a good mood is a fantastic defense against catching someone’s bad mood and losing productivity. (And as a plus, you might even make someone’s bad travel day a little better.)

 

Just because you can work doesn’t mean you should. If you’re tired or stressed, the work will be low quality, and you’ll have to do it over. And if you focus on working rather than relaxing, you may make your travel that much more stressful—which will make you worse company when you get off the plane. There’s no advantage to getting a couple hours of crap-quality work done if it’s going to make you a jerk after the flight.

You Need a Website

Posted on by

It’s true—you do need a website. We can debate what form the site takes—a static site, a blog, something else—but you need a presence on the web where people can find more information about you and your work.

If I can’t find them online, my gut reaction is that they’re not really professionals yet. This doesn’t mean you need to blog all the time…but you should at least have an online presence with a little bio and links to your published works. You can make one for free, and it’ll take you an hour. This is 2012. Get a damn website.”

~James Sutter, 9 Ways to Piss Off an Editor

And if you have a site, it should be professional. It only benefits you to make it so.

What do we mean by professional?

It should be appealing.
Perhaps even better stated: don’t turn off your visitor. Too often sites are built without any real considerations for the viewer—there’s no sense of a color scheme, of how graphics should be implemented, how to properly handle graphics, where to place content and navigation…it’s just a mess (and sometimes makes our eyes bleed). First impressions do matter. You will lose most of your viewers within a few seconds if your site looks horrible.

It should be easy to read.
Not all sites are about textual content, but as BookLifeNow.com is focused on writers we will assume your site is (we’ll tackle online portfolios and art driven sites in a later article). As such, you want people to read what you’ve written—that should be the goal of any writer—and you can help your chances by making this easy. Font choices, font sizing, color, contrast, and clarity all come into play here. If in doubt, stick to the basics: darker text on a lighter background, away from graphics, and using standard “reading” fonts—no script type, no comic sans, nothing too big or too small.

It should be easy to navigate.
If you’ve managed to get a visitor to your site you probably would like to keep them there for a while. This is where navigation comes into play—it’s what we all use to move from page to page, from one bit of content to another. Make sure your navigation is logical, well organized, and not overloaded to the point your visitor does not know where to begin.

It should look modern.
This one is a bit tricky and not one to over-stress about. You don’t have to chase after trends (rounded corners or square, drop-shadows or not) but you should keep in mind that tastes (as well as technology) change and it doesn’t take too many years before a website can look dated. Plan on refreshing your site every few years or so.

It should be modern—code wise.
As stated before technology changes and your site should reflect this. There’s a wide range of browsers out there, running on a wide range of devices, and your site should function on as many places as possible. If you put your site up when Internet Explorer 6 was all the rage, your website is a dinosaur.

We recently redesigned the BookLifeNow.com site and took all of these into consideration. Of course we wanted to rebrand the site, to put our own mark on it (while retaining a few design elements that tied back to what it was), but more importantly we wanted the site to be useable. This means high readability, navigation that’s easy to find and click-through, and taking advantage of the latest in webdev technology—all while making the site visually appealing.

Plus we had a fun time doing it.

Your website is an indispensable tool and it should be given the same amount of attention you wish from your visitors. We custom-designed our site because we have that capability, but you don’t have to—there are a myriad of solutions at your disposal, many of which are easy and accessible. Over the coming months we will revisit this topic in greater detail, as well as discussing other options you may encounter: static sites versus CMS-driven, custom design versus themes, self-built or ready-made, using friends or family versus hiring a designer/developer, search engine optimization and how to get more visitors. We won’t help you learn HTML or become a web designer, but we will provide guidance to these and other considerations—no matter your skill or experience level.

Note: both Galen Dara and Bear Weiter contributed to this article.

Liz Gorinsky on Her Hugo Nomination, Interview by Jeff VanderMeer

Posted on by

Recently, Jeff VanderMeer interviewed Liz Gorinsky about her recent Hugo nomination for Best Editor, Long Form.

Jeff VanderMeer: What does it mean to you to be up for a Hugo in the long form editor
category, given that book editors rarely get any public honors?

Liz Gorinsky: It is incredibly weird, though now that it’s happened a few times, it’s beginning to feel slightly less unreal. On one hand, editing is an odd thing to get acclaim for, given that the meat of the editorial process — as removed from the publishing process, which is considerably more public — is done in private: It’s you and the manuscript you’re deciding whether to buy, or you and the author and a pile of tracked changes, both of which are invisible to the reader if you’ve done your job right. On the other hand, once you accept that Hugo voters are interested in giving an award for that work, there are so many people who have been at it for decades longer than me that I’m amazed (and slightly baffled, and immensely grateful) that so many people thought to put my name down.

JVM: What do you think excellence in long-form editing means? In terms of what qualities must an acquiring editor who handles developmental edits have?

LG: Given the aforementioned invisibility, I have to presume that most of the Hugo nominating population is basing their selection on the merits of the books an editor has acquired, or on the editor’s public works and persona. These are both important parts of the job, but they
constitute a tiny fraction of an in-house editor’s day-to-day workload. Then there’s the actual claws-out editing of books, which is just another small section of the job, but–since it’s my favorite part — I like to pretend is what all the hubub is about. But I don’t think there’s a concrete set of qualities an editor must have. Every book is different, and every book teaches you what it needs, be it a large swath of developmental edits or a meticulous line-by-line polish. And at least half the trick of editing is knowing what to leave alone.

JVM: Are there any role models or other editors you have found particularly inspirational personally?

LG: Obviously most of my mentors are the folks I’ve worked for and with at Tor: Anna Genoese and Jim Minz, who ran the internship program that introduced me to book editing and answered countless questions; Jim Frenkel, who I assisted for six or seven years; Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who I still do; and Tom Doherty, who’s made an immeasurable diference to the way the field looks today. In terms of inspiration, though, I’d cite Juliet Ulman, whose sensibilities are eerily close to mine, and Gavin Grant and Kelly Link, whose Small Beer Press seems to me like a fantasy storybook version of what a publishing house should be.

Many thanks to Liz Gorinsky for her time, and congratulations on her well-deserved nomination!