Last Week’s Hitch in Our (Online) Gitalong

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WARNING: Long, technology-related post ahead!

The love of my website life. (Image courtesy of Flickr user Phil Oakly, via CC license)

As you may or may not have noticed last week, Green Ink Edits went offline for about 48 hours. I’m in charge of our technical needs, and I had been thinking for some time of switching our website format over to a WordPress-powered self-hosted site. Our previous website was perfectly functional, but it was a pain to update, and it was stored in a totally different location from the Green Ink blog. I wanted a site that would be easy to update and would contain both our regular site information and our business blog in one place.

When we first got started in 2008, I chose to go with a Microsoft Office Live Small Business website because it was super-cheap ($15/year) and super-easy to set up. Unfortunately, I realized the limitations pretty quickly – I couldn’t change much of anything about their templates. I could add my logo as the header, but it looked a little goofy, and I couldn’t add any HTML on my own – I just wanted to code the header image so that if you clicked it, it would take you to the home page. I couldn’t do that – there was nowhere I could edit the HTML of the site. This also meant that whenever there was weird formatting as a result of the built-in WYSIWYG editor, I couldn’t go in and try to strip it out of the HTML. And the template itself looked just a smidge dated at the time. But for the price, I was willing to make it work, and we lived with that website until May or June 2011.

By 2011, the template looked more than a smidge dated, but there were no newer templates to choose from. I found out that Microsoft was planning to discontinue the entire Office Live Small Business enterprise soon – though they’d continue to support the customers they already had for a few months before changing to Office 365, it was clear they weren’t looking to offer anything new and improved. I started to look into ways of creating a website with outside software, and I stumbled across a really good deal for WebEasy 8 Professional – half-off the already pretty reasonable price. I snapped it up. I worked on a website for days before I uploaded it, trying to get everything just right. I figured out how to disable the website based on the Microsoft template and upload our own web files instead (that by itself took about 4 hours). I finally finished and uploaded it, and it just…looked kind of fuzzy and small to me. Plus it was a huge pain to update the text, and we never did figure out how to update SEO keywords and tags. I wanted something better, but I didn’t want to hire a web designer and I was afraid of changing things myself.

WordPress seemed like the right answer. I use WordPress.com for my personal blog, and Dave has used it for blogs in the past, so we are both familiar with the interface. I like that it’s easy to use but provides a lot of control for advanced users. I had never done anything with a self-hosted WordPress site before, though, and I was a little nervous about it. I was pretty sure I would not be able to do it with Microsoft as our web host, and to be honest, I really wanted a host that provided the whole one-click installation of WordPress so that it was easier for me. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t just allow you to point your domain name servers to another host – I was going to have to end our service with them entirely, reclaim our domain name, and move the whole shebang elsewhere. I read this could take one to seven days, and it would affect both our website AND our email addresses. I was nervous, but I felt it was necessary.

With the help of more experienced friends, I picked a web host that supported the one-click WordPress installation, Web Hosting Hub (WHH). I read their instructions carefully for transferring a domain. Dave and I sent out email messages to recent contacts with alternate email addresses. We put notifications on Facebook and Twitter that the site and emails might be down. I printed out Microsoft’s instructions for how to end their services and transfer the domain to a new registrar, read them through several times, crossed my fingers, and canceled our service. The instructions said we’d get notification of cancellation, then an email with our registry key, which we could use to unlock our account at the REAL domain registrar, Melbourne IT, and then, finally, transfer the domain.

I got the cancellation confirmation, and then…nothing. I printed out WHH’s instructions on how to transfer domains to them, studied those instructions, set up our email addresses and installed WordPress on our new host servers, and still…nothing. I submitted a Microsoft support ticket, and got no answer. I searched high and low for a support email or phone number and found nothing. I searched the support forums and did not find the exact answer to my question – it seemed everyone else had gotten their registry key as planned. At this point, it had been 48 hours since I canceled with Microsoft, and I was freaking out a little bit. Finally, I found a forum thread where a user said Microsoft made the process as difficult as possible and gave support contact information for Melbourne IT. I contacted them, found out Microsoft had given them the wrong email address as my main contact (which is why I never got the registry key email), and they had everything straight for me in under 4 hours.

(This, by the way, is my BIG KUDOS to Melbourne IT, who were fantastic to work with and very, very helpful, even though we were dealing with a 12-hour time difference. I would have stayed with them as my primary domain registrar if it wouldn’t have cost me $25/year more than I was already paying for the hosting service with WHH.)

From there, everything went much more smoothly. I got the domain name servers pointed to WHH in case the transfer took a few days; I got the domain itself transferred to WHH; I got our email accounts set up in Gmail and working; and I got our content and logo and all kinds of new plug-in toys installed on the new WordPress-powered site. While we will probably be tinkering with the content on the site from now on, the important information is there.

I’m sharing all of this for our fellow freelancers, so that you can learn from our experiences. Hopefully I haven’t scared you away from making big changes to your website or changing web hosts – it’s not that scary once you’ve been through it! If any of our colleagues have questions about the process, I hope you’ll let us know in the comments.

Diary of a Freelancer 016: The Editorial Process At Work

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The bride entered holding flowers and all dressed in white. People turned to look at her. She was beautiful, everyone was crying. A piano began to sing softly from the corner. The bride’s father took her arm and walked her across the carpet to the open casket.

This is the first paragraph from a short story I entered into a contest at a site called Scibophile. It’s a cool site for writers, because it’s frequented by nothing but other writers and editors. Everyone tries to be honest and respectful and, most importantly, to help any work you post up realize its deepest potential.

Editing is a huge, huge part of the writing process. I’ve received a number of critiques on my story, and they’ve all helped me to shape it in some way. The paragraph I posted above is from the 6th revision. It may change several more times between now and October 31st when the contest finally ends. Here’s how it read in the first draft:

A soft piano sang from the corner. The bride entered. She looked so beautiful, everyone was crying. Her father held her arm and walked her across the carpet to the open casket. “He’s still so delicate,” she said, leaning over the groom and touching his lips with her fingertips. “Especially now, in death. Like an unfinished poem.” She was still wearing her wedding gown.

Quite a difference, eh? The dialogue ended up moving to a separate paragraph (oh, and it’s intentionally overwrought… don’t want people getting the wrong idea!), some of the thoughts were rearranged or deleted, and the writing has been tightened overall. Even if you don’t like the revised paragraph, I would bet that you like it better than the unrevised paragraph, and that it’d make you much more likely to keep reading.

This is what editors do. They don’t invent, they crop. They slash and shift and tighten and suggest. They make good things better and great things amazing. They improve.

The unrevised paragraph is grammatically fine. I point this out to illustrate the point that editing is not always about making sure all the commas are in the right place. Editors will catch those things as well, but, really, if you plan to trade in words, it’s time to grow up and learn how to spell and write a sentence; if that’s all you expect from your editor, Microsoft Word will get the job done for you just fine. The real job of editing is to shape and shine, to polish. To question. To get the best out of a writer.

I have no deeper point than that… just felt like showing everyone an example of what editors really do. To me, it’s indisputable that the revision is an improvement. And I never could have done it without the help of editors.

Diary of a Freelancer 015: Exercise

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Diary o’ mine, today I am living in my least favorite place: Between.

I am between freelance jobs (a permanent state of existence if the last month is any indication) and, more upsetting, between stories. Obviously, I’m not going to wake up every morning with a brilliant, great, good, or even bad new idea for a story, and that’s not the sort of expectation I should put on myself. However, as I have finished 1 story and completed first drafts for 2 others (they are with my beloved reader), I am eager to move on to the next project.

What to do, though, between now and the next time the inspiration hits?

Like about a billion other people, I’m an NFL fan. Being born and raised a Virginia boy, my team is the Redskins. (Whatever invective you’re thinking of throwing at me for that admission, please consider that I may have already suffered enough over the past 18 years.) I read this story last night about how the Redskins decided to skip their Victory Monday celebration following their upset win over the Giants this past Sunday, and it really struck a chord with me.

For those who don’t know, Victory Monday is, essentially, a day off. See, NFL players may only play one game per week, but their actual work week is 6 to 7 days during football season. They’re expected to be in the gym, in practice, watching film, studying the playbook, living and breathing the game between actual matches. Following a loss, teams are expected get right back to work the very next day to figure out what they did wrong and start preparing for the next game so it’s not a loss as well. Following a win, however, most clubs offer their players a single day off as a reward for their hard, hard work.

Now, it’s early in the season yet, so the players declining their earned day off may not seem like that big of a deal. They’re only one week in, and so haven’t yet been broken down either physically or mentally by the grueling NFL daily routine. They’re also fresh off of a win against a hated rival and, in a rare, rare instance, at the top of their division; one could almost make the excuse for them that they simply don’t want to lose their momentum. What impressed me about the gesture, though, is the players’ commitment to their profession and their unwillingness to celebrate their smaller achievements in favor of the pursuit of a larger goal. When they entered the season this year, no one picked the Redskins to go to the playoffs, much less win the Superbowl; most fans I’ve talked to have said that winning half of their games would be considered a victory. And that may still very well end up being the case — heck, it’ll probably end up being the case. I think they’re as aware of that fact as anyone. Rather than take what they can get in the face of long odds, though, they’re rededicating themselves to being the absolute best they can be.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve come to a sort of realization about myself, which is that I am a writer. I’m not yet a published writer, and I may not even end up being a good writer, but, deep down, it’s what I am. It’s the first time I’ve ever called myself such a thing out loud, or even thought about myself in that way… it always sounded so pretentious to me to claim to be a writer when you’ve never been paid for your work, like walking around declaring yourself an astronaut when you’ve never been within 100 yards of a space shuttle, or calling yourself a football player when you go undrafted. Intentions do not make professions. I think there’s something else there, though, that you can’t really run away from, Diary, a state of mind that tells you that, sure, you can do other things, but you’ll never be happy, never even be complete, unless you’re doing this, exactly this.

Writers are filled with voices that they can try to shut up through any number of means, but the only real way to exorcise them is to put them down on paper — and even then, the voices can take you over. (It’s no wonder that so many writers end up being alcoholics; I admit, I’ve spent an awful lot of the past decade trying to drink away the voices in my head. By the end of it, though, all I’ve ended up doing is getting the voices drunk, which, Diary, is no sort of relief, and just leads to anger, frustration, and depression.) Writers are also filled with stories, which, when you come down to it, are just people’s way of putting the world into some sort of order. Without stories, life is chaos, random events that mean no more or less than the random events that happened yesterday and will happen again tomorrow. It’s not just fiction writing I’m talking about, either, it’s all writing. News stories operate in the same way, taking a chaos of events that led to violence or death or some other misery and ordering them into a sequence of events we feel like we can maybe control, or at least understand.

Right… I’m rambling. This was all supposed to lead to a point. If I’m a writer — if I’m admitting that about myself at 32, if I truly feel like there’s nothing else I can do with myself that will fulfill me in any way — then I had better get cracking trying to turn myself into a good writer, and then, finally, a published writer. And that, little Diary, means that, from now on, I get no days off.

Since I don’t have a story idea in mind at this very moment, I went rooting around on Google today for some nice writing exercises. After all, even if it’s not game day, I have to keep myself fine-tuned, in shape. For starters, I found this list of 15 exercises that seem like as good a place to start as any. If nothing comes out of that list, I’ll find another, and then another. I’m going to read short stories, as many and as disparate as I can get my hands on, and critically study their form, style, and content. And I’m going to write every single day.

I won’t bore you with the actual exercises, Diary; no one wants to watch Adrian Peterson run on the treadmill, after all. But, I am at least publicly declaring my intentions, which is no easy thing. Failure seems inevitable, and public failure sounds like no fun at all. What else can I do, though, besides toughen up, put in the time, and work as hard as I can to succeed at being who I am?

Diary of a Freelancer 014: The Big Picture

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I am not a particularly detail-oriented person.

Or, well, I am and I’m not. Being an editor, I’m detail-oriented both by nature and by necessity. My job is to look at something and find out what’s wrong with it in as short an amount of time as possible, and it’s impossible to do something like that without at least having a bit of a knack for details.

As I’ve begun writing again lately, however — practically a full-time occupation over the past few weeks — I’ve noticed that I seem to be what a Twitter friend and colleague called a “big-picture writer”. And I’m not entirely sure it’s the best way to attack the writing of fiction.

Most writers, it seems, have the opposite problem. They include too many details. For them, editing means stripping out the unnecessary, taking out large chunks of story, maybe even entire characters, and leaving only the things that truly add to the stew.

Not so for me.

I seem to write in a mad dash. I’ve got my several points I want to make and the basic structure of my story in mind from the start, and I scribble it all down as quickly as I can before… before what? Before I forget it all, I guess (unlikely as that seems)? Anyway, the editing process has been, so far at least, a process of addition rather than subtraction for me. In a way, it’s a good thing… I don’t spend entire pages meandering around a point, I just drill it into the page as succinctly as I can manage. I try to write so that every word in every piece is as essential as the one preceding and following it. It’s a horrible way to proceed and lacks the slightest trace of whimsy; it leaves my first drafts feeling rushed, rote, and even, I dunno, manufactured. These aren’t the feelings you want to have when you make your first editorial pass.

I’ve been reading Tom Robbins’ Still Life With Woodpecker for my book group. I just finished it this morning and, really, if there’s a writer you can learn from as far as allowing yourself to meander on the page a bit, it’s Robbins (at least in this book). The novel is filled with countless asides and puns, little jokes, speeches, essays, broad thoughts… if most writing acts as a focused laser beam, Robbins’ writing acts as a laser light show. And I think that’s what I’m going to strive for on my next project: Not to emulate Robbins’ style or subject matter, but to create a world and really inhabit it for a while. To dig my fingers in its dirt, to describe that embarrassing childhood experience my main character had that led him or her to start drinking 6 months before he or she otherwise would have. To write out all the things I typically leave in my head, unsaid.

Hmm… on second thought, maybe the problem is that I’m too detail-oriented. So much so that I’m weeding out all of the unnecessary pieces of my stories before they have a chance to make it onto the page. There is more than one way to edit yourself while you’re writing, and it’s not always to agonize over sentence structure… sometimes it can be the leaving out of what you consider non-essential details, the refusal to explore character background and actions that you don’t consider crucial. Sometimes, though — hell, often — it’s those details that make people care about what’s happening in the important bits.

In short, I think I would rather my editing process be one of pruning rather than insertion — or, at least, that’s a place I’d like to try to get to for a while.

Diary of a Freelancer 013: Can Something Be Too Poorly Written to Edit?

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No, seriously. I’m asking, here.

I think that the world of ePublishing may be quickly transforming the definition of the word “editor.” See, Diary, in the good ol’ days of, I dunno, last January?, editing meant putting a polish on a writer’s words. Helping a writer say what he or she wanted to say in the most effective way possible. Making sure all the necessary commas were there and were used consistently. Checking the subject-verb agreement. You know. Editor stuff.

I’ve been working with more and more editing companies as I try to make my way as a budding freelancer. Editing companies are a bit like a temp service: they find the clients for the editors, they match editors with the appropriate gigs, they maintain standards so that every job that comes their way is met with a consistent level of professionalism, they set the rates, and they take half of the compensation. More than fair for someone getting his feet wet, and actually a really bright idea. Why wouldn’t I apply?

Just like a temp service, editors who work for these companies aren’t ever really handed, er, let’s say the choicest of assignments. No one’s sent out by a temp agency to be a Fortune 500 CEO for a week, he or she is sent out to make copies, perform data entry, or make cold calls. I’ve been a temp before, I know how this works. Similarly, people who do work for editing companies aren’t being handed a manuscript from the next Margaret Atwood or Cormac McCarthy, they’re being handed the literary equivalent of a filing and stapling job. Again, fair enough, and so long as you go in with your eyes open. . . .

The ‘net, and ePublishing in particular, have made it easier than it’s ever been to publish your own writing. We all know the drill: all you need is a computer and an internet connection. Heck, as soon as I finish writing this to you, Diary, guess what? Publish! It’s that easy. And, because it’s so very, very easy — oh, and cheap! — to publish new work, countless ePublishers are popping out of the woodwork and looking for content. Cause generating effect, this means that literary standards are p-l-u-m-m-e-t-i-n-g at an exponential rate; “all that’s fit to print” has quickly become “let’s fit it all into print!”

What this has done, as far as I can tell in my (admittedly) limited experience, is transform the task of editing into that of, essentially, ghost writing. Writers hiring editing companies will often freely admit that they are novices, unused to the crafting of sentences, much less stories. Okay, so everyone’s not William Faulkner, I get it; until I read the manuscript, that is. Like a waft of heat, the text smacks me in the face with a jumble of unorganized ideas and incomplete sentences. I find myself reading paragraphs 3 and 4 times each, not to determine the best flow, but just to figure out what the author is saying. It’s a bit like the old joke about writers being given “a brilliant new idea!” for their next piece by some schmoe at a party: they’re given a few broad strokes of plot and told, “There you have it! Now all you have to do is go and write it!” I find myself, more often than not, rewriting literally — and when I say literally, Diary, you know I mean literally — every single sentence in the text, soup to nuts, just to make the grammar work, just to make what’s written on the page make sense. “This,” I begin to think, “this is not editing.”

Is it?

Freelancers, especially those of us who’ve only been doing it for a few months, typically can’t afford to be picky. I get it, not every assignment is going to be my awesome dream gig. . . in fact, I’d be lucky if 5% of my assignments were awesome dream gigs. And so, I’ll grit my teeth and do the work. But it does make me wonder where that line is between editing and, well, writing another person’s book for him or her. Is the job of editing transforming before our eyes? Or did I walk into this thing blind, and this is what it’s always been?

Jeez, Diary, this has started to feel like a Dear Abby letter. Suppose I’ll sign off, for now,

Chagrined in Charlottesville

Diary of a Freelancer 012: The Literary Gourmand

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Editors — writers too, hopefully, but, definitely, editors — know when something is missing.

Probably the most difficult part of the task of developmental editing is, at least in my mind, knowing when something is off. Not necessarily a poor word choice or misspelling, but something really off about a piece. It’s one of the few parts of the job that can’t be taught, an instinct that can only be honed with years and years of reading. You read a piece — fiction, nonfiction, whatever — and there’s something a bit askew about the pacing or presentation, the rhythm. I think that most serious readers can identify that something is wrong, but an editor must be able to pinpoint what that something actually is. It’s the difference between declaring something bland in a restaurant and tasting, reflecting, and saying, “Hmm. Maybe with a pinch of cayenne.”

That’s basically what the editorial process is: One big test kitchen in which ingredients are added, subtracted, used in larger or smaller portions, cooked on hotter and cooler temperatures, until, at last, the author’s preferred variation of the recipe is reached, and can be served. Unfortunately, Diary, as I’ve only said about a zillion times already, it’s 100 times more difficult to satisfactorily edit your own work than it is to edit the work of anyone else.

The most frustrating part of writing for me is, by far, editing. Ironic, perhaps, considering how I’ve made my living for more than 10 years, but it’s the God’s honest. I tend to write in large jags, only re-reading portions of text to remind myself of small details and help regain the piece’s voice after I’ve put it down for a while. Then, when it’s all finished, I read it through and, invariably… something’s missing. Too much of this spice, not enough of that; it was cooked too quickly, is soft or otherwise poorly textured; was dredged through too much flour and is now thick and gummy instead of crisp. Only, I can’t identify any of those details… I’m too close to the dish, myopic, the guy in the restaurant who seems only to be able to make a funny face and say, “Eck! Too bland!” before pouring a mound of salt on the thing and trying to force it down my throat.

My typical advice to myself would be, well, to hire an editor. Luckily — for me, not for her — I am married to one. It’s a luxury I’ve never had before as a writer (remember, Diary, that I haven’t written anything complete in a decade, several years longer than I’ve been married)… I’ve had readers, of course, but not necessarily anyone with the instincts needed to quickly pinpoint exactly what’s missing. This time, hallelujah, that is not the case, and, after some constructive criticism from Jen, I hereby declare Story 1 final and complete. Not perfect, I am positive, but at least complete.

It might sound odd, but it’s the first time I’ve ever felt this way, and, I don’t mind admitting, it kinda makes me want to lock the thing in a box and never, ever let anyone else see it, lest my illusions be shattered. Thus lies the coward’s way, though. So, 1 down, 4 to go. Once I’ve got 5 that I’m happy with, that I’d feel comfortable enough handing to anyone on the planet, not with a “Here, taste this and tell me what you think,” but presented as a confident and complex dish that I’ll proudly stand by no matter how many times it gets sent back to the kitchen… once I’ve got that, Diary, we dive into the difficult and soul-devouring world of publication.

One doesn’t open a new restaurant with a single dish, however. And so, must run, ta-ta and toodle-oo, back to my kitchen!

Diary of a Freelancer 011: 2nd Story Building

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Diary: I appear to be on a path.

The story I finished last week got the nod of approval from Jen over the weekend, enough so that I now feel encouraged to start working immediately on a follow-up. Not that the first story is finished, by any means — I added about another half page’s worth of material to it this morning, in fact — but I’m beginning to feel comfortable enough with it that I may be able to send this early draft out to a few trusted readers for feedback and notes without feeling like a complete fool.

(Disclaimer: Being a reader for my half-uncrummy little story is an unpaid volunteer position. You will not receive money, college credit, or real-world experience from reading my work; you will instead likely wound my pride deeply and irrevocably with any criticism slighter than impossibly lavish adulation. Proceed at your own risk, and don’t be offended if I respond to your critique with phrases like “So what do you know?” or “You’re a poopyhead.”)

As Story #1 starts to go through the first of what I’m sure will be infinite revisions, I’m immediately drawn to a new idea that I’d like to start exploring. Maybe I just want to temporarily escape the endless loop of self-respect giving way to self-doubt and then, finally, self-pity; whatever my motivations, its encouraging to me that I’m already craving writing again. It’s taken me by surprise, but I seem to have finally learned to enjoy myself a bit. Not the sinking feeling in my chest that comes with the thought of having to finally present and be judged, of course, but the act of writing, the craft. Creating characters, building worlds, stringing together sentences. There’s a weird sort of nirvana in the space between constructing something and showing it to others, I think. It’s kinda fun to prolong that… too bad it can’t be prolonged indefinitely.

So, Diary, I’ve already got the nuts and bolts (not quite, yet, the blueprint) of an idea, and have even already written a rough draft of the story’s ending. I’m still figuring out my (ugh) “process”, if any… I’m peeking out at such thoughts from between my fingers, hoping against hope that doing all of this continues to feel genuine and necessary rather than rote. Maybe it should just remain, still and after all, the pursuit of nirvana. Jai guru deva ommmm.

Diary of a Freelancer 010: Check, Double-Check, and Triple-Check

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Hooray, diary! (Would it be pretentious, by the way, to begin capitalizing the “d” in “diary”?) It only took 3 days, but I managed to get my computer back up and running again. Thank you, internet, for leading me down a million and one rabbit holes until I finally threw my hands up in frustration and performed the necessary system restore I should’ve done in the first place. Repository of human knowledge my fat fanny.

Ahem.

I live in Charlottesville, Virginia. As in, Albemarle County. As in, the same Albemarle County which was recently reported by several reputable sources, including this LA Times article, as having banned Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet from local schools for being — get this! — anti-Mormon.

I saw the headline. Outrage. I read the story. Double outrage, combined with a keen sense of embarrassment. This is my home. This is the home to Jeffersonian politics, to the University of Virginia, to the Virginia Festival of the Book. You can’t walk down 2 blocks on the Downtown Mall without tripping over a used bookstore. And the Albemarle school system has one of the best reputations in a state that, itself, has one of the best public school reputations in the country. Yet, here we are banning Sherlock freaking Holmes?!

It’s an outrageous story to wake up to, the sort that sets your blood to boiling before you’ve even had a chance to drink your morning coffee. The only problem, of course, is that it’s not true.

Luckily, diary (Diary), I am an editor, and used to double-checking. And, when it comes to modern news, used to triple-checking, preferably from 3 different reputable news sources. So, I found this story reported by the Washington Post that said that, in fact, the book hadn’t been banned, it had merely been removed from the required reading list for 6th graders in the county.

Let’s be clear: I still don’t approve of the move. I think it’s wildly over-reactionary and, furthermore, insults the intelligence of children… I mean, I didn’t know that the way to rid the world of prejudice was to stick your fingers in your ears and sing “la la la” until it goes away. It seems to me that the best way to confront such issues is to face them head on and discuss them openly and frankly. Ignorance is, after all, the brick and mortar with which prejudice is built.

Furthermore, it’s disturbing that what appears to be the crusade of a single parent could bring about this level of change for all, that we’re continuing to enable the squeaky wheels in life by kowtowing to their demands — even in the face of simple common sense. I’ve never been a big fan of “majority rules” winning the day, but am really put off by the concept of “minority rules”; and, really, it’s difficult to imagine a thinner minority than the Mormon population in the Virginia Bible Belt. I have, no exaggeration, met more transsexuals in Charlottesville than Mormons. Rioting in the streets over century-old slights to Mormonism seems unlikely, to put it kindly.

HOWEVER: There is a world of difference between telling a child “You cannot read this!” and telling a child “We’re not going to make you read this, but it’s still in the library if you want to check it out.”

As you might have guessed, Diary (why not? I give in), I found out about this turn of events on Twitter, where I see such poor and false reporting spread like wildfire on at least a weekly basis. It used to just be misinformation written on blogs, or the misinterpretation of facts by amateurs who didn’t have as much access to all the data as they thought (or any real training in journalism). When I read a story in the LA Times or on the Atlantic Wire, though, and feel like I need to rush over to Snopes to verify its accuracy… well, there’s somethin’ rotten in the state of Denmark.

And, to cap it all off: The LA Times article was reported by someone who grew up attending Albemarle public schools. I believe this is what they call a “face palm” moment.

Reporters: Please print out the following 3 numbered lines. Tape them to your monitor, attach them to your headboard, sew them onto a hat; do whatever you have to do, but, please, never, ever forget the following:

1. I will check my sources.

2. I will double-check my sources.

3. I will triple-check my sources.

Because, as I said before, ignorance breeds prejudice… and what is the spreading of misinformation other than the perpetuation of ignorance?

Diary of a Freelancer 009: Whaddaya Mean I’M Tech Support?!

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Life, little diary, is a game of give and take.

When Jen and I first moved into our apartment, we were renters. We were paying somebody else’s mortgage — something that neither of us wanted to do any longer than we had to. When the complex switched over to condos and started selling units at a discount to established inhabitants, we decided it would be a good starter place and took the plunge into home ownership.

Ownership means freedom. We can knock out walls, rip up carpeting, get new windows installed. We can have our A/C replaced, get nice new faucets, or upgrade the washer and dryer. We can turn the inside of our place into whatever we want it to be; our only limitations are the condo’s physical dimensions and finding the money for all of these home improvements.

As we quickly learned, however, freedom also means losing the support system that is automatically in place with an apartment lease. When things break, we can’t just call the landlord — WE are the landlords. We have a lot more options, but, when presented with a situation that leaves us with no option but to get it fixed ASAP, we must arrange — and pay — for everything. We are now wholly, beautifully, terrifyingly responsible for everything about this place.

Freelancing runs on the same principles as home ownership. Loads more freedom to set your own hours, determine your own hourly wage, take the work you really want to take — yay! But, also, the loss of a support system and a dramatic increase in responsibility. Now you find the work, do the advertising, beat the pavement, invest back in the business. And, now you are responsible for fixing the problems.

So, today, I’ve got on a new hat: Tech Support. And I don’t mind admitting that this hat is way, way too big for me.

Around Friday afternoon, several things on my computer just sorta… stopped working. I’ve no idea why; no recent downloads, only official/scheduled updates, and everything, up to that point, was in fine working order. Then, poof! Error messages and programs refusing to open. Programs like the ones in the Microsoft Office Suite, like Word and Excel. Programs that I kinda sorta need in order to do any work. Gulp.

People who know me know I’m not great with technology. I can usually fumble my way through things, and I’ve learned quite a bit over the years trying to problem-solve these sorts of errors, but it’s by no means something that comes naturally to me. Telling me to search my registry editor for temp installer hot keys is kinda like handing a kitten to a lumberjack… you’re going to get a very, very bewildered look.

I wish I could tell you, diary, that there’s a good moral to this story. That I’ve risen to the occasion of my independence and handled the situation ably. That, hey, I’m a little smarter than I thought I was, and, if I’ll only apply myself, there’s no limit to what I can accomplish.

Unfortunately, though, what I’m really learning — and FAST — is that I really, really miss Tech Support.