That time thing

My editor at the Charlotte Observer called the other day. She said she knew I must be busy because she checked my blog and nothing new had been posted since Jan. 27. Yep. Burning the candles at both ends lately. Just not the blog candle. This is going to be one of those rare personal posts…

For starters, we relocated from the Piedmont of North Carolina to the western mountains a few days after Science Online 2011. This move was harder than any other move I’ve made. It came at the tail-end of a month of travel — literally a month — where I was home for maybe six out of 31 days. So the move itself was jarring. I was frazzled before we even taped the first box shut. The house we now live in was a mess. It required days of cleaning. Last night, when we tried to change the air filter we discovered it had not been moved in a very, very, long time. Maybe it had been changed once upon a time… but not within at least the past two years. It was so bloated with dust and filth that we had to forcibly tear it out of the HVAC unit. After the cleaning, it required days of painting. Seems the previous tenants owned three dogs (and never vacummed) and had painted right over dog hair on several of the walls. They also painted over light-switch plates and curtain rod holders and felt that turquoise and smokey purple were admirable wall colors.

Next there was the box elder beetle problem. Seems the previous tenant didn’t mind the 1/2-inch gap between the kitchen door and the exterior threshhold, but a resident population of box elder beetles that are hibernating beneath our wooden lapboard siding discovered this portal to warmth. Many crawled into the house, probably convinced by the electric heater that spring had arrived. So until we got the door repaired, my morning routine consisted of waking up (dressing in the bathroom because we had no window coverings in any of the rooms, they just yawned open to the street), and picking beetles up off the floor while the coffee brewed.

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A freelancer’s dilemma

Last week, I tweeted that I felt like roadkill on the freelancing highway. Not words I would use lightly.  I’m still cooling off over what happened, and my blood pressure rises when I think about how these events played out. (You’ve probably never seen me upset here before because, frankly, it rarely happens.) Basically, I pitched a national magazine about a conservation story for an eastern bird population. The editor responded that he liked the idea and wanted me to write it, but that the magazine did not sign contracts with writers until the whole story was accepted. Nor did they pay until the story was published. (Should have been my first warning signs to walk.)

That was in April of 2009. He gave me a due date of July 2010.  I talked to the main sources and opted to do the interviewing work in late May and early June 2010, so that we could capture the spring 2010 seasonal data. Despite the main source’s mother dying right when I was trying to interview him, and despite being in a horrific car accident myself right around the deadline, I wrote it and turned it in. The initial response was “Nice work,” with a note that they’d send more detailed comments in a few weeks. On Wednesday, I received the detailed comments tearing the piece apart and questioning basic elements that were included in the initial pitch. (Which, you know, ought to have been dealt with a year ago when the pitch was reviewed. Just sayin’.) But the worst part was that instead of asking for it to be re-worked, the editor wrote that it could not be published “as is,” that they had removed it from the scheduled issue, and that I had the option to re-submit it but that there were no guarantees they would publish it and no kill fees. But that despite all that, they still really wanted a story on this bird species. What? How is it that they can so evade the industry’s professional standards?

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