Every Stone a Story

About a year ago, external forces suddenly hurled me onto the rollercoaster of one of those huge, unexpected events that effectively ends the life you have been living and starts a new one. I knew then that the next few years would be rough. Boy, was I right. But we've made it through the first year, always the worst, and signs look promising for surviving the next few.

So. Hanging in there. Healing from betrayals. Building healthier relationships.

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Somewhere along the way, for whatever reason or complex of reasons, I feel like I've come alive again -- in a way I haven't felt alive in years. The result is a flood of new ideas, some for new projects, some for old ones, and energy and will enough to actually do something about those ideas. Watch this space.

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My temp job is coming to an end in 3 weeks or so. It has been good, but I am about ready to move on. Since July I've been celebrating Discardia at work: sorting, clearing, and consolidating old files for a publishing company. It's been a tour of my own past (the files date back to the early 1980s, when I was working in publishing) and the recent history of communications media: I've tossed out carbon copies, cassette tapes, CDs and DVDs, pink phone message slips, printouts of emails, faxes, and typescript on half a dozen grades of paper. Documents produced by pencil, ink, typewriter (using black, red, even blue ribbons) dot-matrix printer, daisy-wheel printer (distinguishable from typescript by microperforations for the tractor-feed paper), inkjet, laser. I've updated my editorial vocabulary and run across a few old friends in the files: copyeditors I used to use, an author I worked with in my first editorial job 30 years ago.

What a pleasure to be in the warm, intelligent, congenial atmosphere of a publishing company. I started out as an editor, and it's still my first love (after writing). And everyone has been grateful to me, because nobody there has time to handle the mammoth task of sorting the files while also doing their regular jobs plus doing other preparation for the move.

And I owe much gratitude to wild_irises, who hired me. The old boys network is powerful, but the friends of wild_irises are blessed.

This job ends 10/28, and then I'll probably be taking a week off to spend time with abostick59. The usual pattern: he plays poker, I stay locked in the hotel, writing. Works for us.

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An insight from work: old rubber bands get disgusting before they finally turn brittle. Also, there are some weirdly shaped paper clips out there.


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Do cats get new personalities for each of their nine lives? After mostly avoiding me for the past 8 years or so, Ivan the Scarable has recently decided that my chair is where he wants to nap, and he's quite happy to sit on my lap (and even be petted!). Meanwhile, Gabriel has suddenly noticed that the hall bathroom has a greenhouse window, and she spends a lot of time sleeping there or in housepet's room.

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We're celebrating Discardia at home, too. gramina has a great new job whose only flaw is a brutal commute. So we're preparing for a possible move by trimming down, sorting old stuff, selling unwanted or duplicate books, donating excess clothes and dishes and so on, and tossing out detritus. Discardia!

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I am looking for work again. As editor, writer (copywriter, social media, customer-facing materials), researcher, whatever. If you have any openings (freelance, full-time, or part-time), do let me know.

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How are you? What have you been up to lately?