I'm not going to become a consumer site, but these things really piss me off, if you haven't noticed.

Huge thanks to Schizohedron for pointing out this great site that I did not know about.

The Consumerist: Grocery Shrink Ray

If any other readers know really good sites that are professional and discuss consistently the screwing over of products, sizes, and prices that is going on, let me know.

Thanks to Work at Home Mom Revolution blog for pointing me to this great site ... so up my alley!! My top pet peeve right now is how so many merchants, supermarkets, restaurants are being cheap in this economy! You have to watch everything!

I Spy Restaurant Tricks

Reporting on what restaurants are shrinking, screwing with, and trying to get away with!

We finally got outside after work yesterday, took a long walk in the county park, went on the shaded path by the river, me with my water bottle, so frustratingly slow and too quickly out of breath, so much so that I had to take to a bench for a few minutes. Soon after we sat we saw a small fawn in the woods behind us, a rich caramel color, and then it seemed that taking a break was the right thing.

I've made a deadline for writing and sending out some more poetry, and the walks will help with that, among other things. It's been too long since I've been inspired and taken the time to try verse. The time when Sundays were devoted to picking out a few potential magazines, revising my poems, sending out submissions seems ages ago. I'm not thinking in poetry anymore, but I have to move toward that again. I just read that Kay Ryan is new poet laureate. She seems to have my sensibilities, the short poem, that tight, intense image. I'll have to pick up one of her books and hope to gain momentum.

Okay, this is it. Seriously. I have just decided that I will shower and dress immediately when I get up from now on and start acting like clients are going to come over! Typically I wear bum clothes or PJs (as I've posted before) and don't shower until later in the afternoon so that I can get a jump on work right away, but just now I had two policemen at the door looking for a neighbor, and it was terribly embarrassing to look like this. [Well, you can imagine me in sweat cutoffs, a T that is short and rising up the belly, and flip-flops. Ugh.] So no more. Even if it means getting a few more comfy shorts, then so be it!

Cool. I'm in. I got this from Lori Cates Hand's blog Publishing Careers.

The National Endowment for the Arts has an initiative you may have heard of called the Big Read. According to the Web site, its purpose is to "restore reading to the center of American culture." They estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

For fun, let's see how many of the top 100 books we've actually read. My list is below. How well did you do? Have you read more than 6?Here's what you do:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (I know ... so flog me)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 [Wuthering Heights] - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 [Great Expectations] - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (please ... just not some of the historical ones)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 [[[Anna Karenina]]] - Leo Tolstoy (FAVORITE BOOK!!!)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
MISSING 51
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 [The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time] - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 [On The Road] - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 [Moby-Dick] - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (actually I may have and completely blocked it out ...)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (Seriously? this book is on here?)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 [Hamlet] - William Shakespeare (Why include this if complete works is above? Not sure)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (the play rocked, though)

My score: 39/99

Regarding Bill Walsh's latest post on the copy editor's responsibility to check phone numbers, all I can think about now is an editor working on a piece about 1980s pop music and coming across "867-5309/Jenny" and getting an earful after dialing it.

Stewie: [picking up the phone] Hello, operator. Hello ... Oh, God, that's right, you have to punch in the numbers nowadays. Uhhh, I should know this. Oh yes, [dialing number] 867-5309, yes, that's it. Wait, that's not it. Damn you Tommy Tutone!

You work at home in peace for almost a year. The street you live on is a quiet side road. You back up to a park with a stream. Many nice families live here. Many people are away from home working each day. Sometimes a mother walks her baby to the park. You hear birds singing in the trees around the house. All respect the neighborhood.

Then some months ago, someone buys the on-the-market-forever house diagonally from you across the street. A teen boy (the word boy on purpose) comes with that someone, and suddenly that old garage that sits not far back enough from the street houses an evening garage band from time to time, and the street is filled with football-throwing, loud-whirring-motorbike-riding, rowdy teens all day and night who refuse to get out of the street when you drive by and give you the Outsider kid look out the corners of their eyes. New neighbors move in below with a number of kids of all ages, and these kids join other loud kids on the street from time to time. Your brain starts to fall out of your head as you desperately try to focus on neuropsychology articles while that damn motorbike does a bumblebee impression up and down the long street, over and over. You don't want to close the windows, damn them. It's sunny and breezy out and why should you have to? On regular nights some other male friend visits in his souped-up car and revs up the engine to sound his large muffler pipes and then races back and forth like we live on a drag strip. Then you find your sideview mirror bent into your car and a white streak on the rounded plastic of it, and you're happy that it's not broken but you know that someone must have smacked right into it, and you never had this happen before those congregating kids.

Maybe it's because I grew up on a very busy street and never heard kids playing right outside my windows, and believe me I try to be zen about it all and smile at the joy I sometimes hear in their screams, but when their raucousness (and no, I'm not being a middle-aged crab here; it's not their expressing their "kidness" that gets me, as this street has had young kids playing and laughing outside before) keeps me stuffy and behind in my work, I get a bit worked up. I just keep repeating to myself, "Remember, we're renting. Eventually we'll leave. Remember, we're renting. Eventually we'll leave."

So how is this possible? As soon as the new ymail address became available today, I was right on it. Immediately. The minute it came up. I wanted copyeditor@, or editor@, or editing@ or ANYTHING generic like that. But NOOOOO! They were ALL taken. Seriously. Everything I could think of was taken. It's just like f'ing concert tickets when you log on to get some right away, to no avail.



So they say, Oh, try to put something unique on it. No kidding, Sherlock. I could do that on the regular mail.



This sucks.

Every one in a while, fellow freelancers--whether it be on an e-mail list or a blog or a meeting with other freelancers--bring up rates, and I must admit, this topic always gets me edgy. I make what I make and accept what I accept based on my experience, time with the company, and so on. I take lower rates from certain companies because I know exactly what is expected of me, how much it takes to get the work done correctly, and how demanding that work is when compared to another type of work. All of my work, high and low paying, add up to my salary, and I'm happy with that.

It's clear that we ALL should be making the highest rates possible. But all projects are different, and some freelancer (who I probably don't know and can't assess) stating that he or she gets XX dollars from this type of publisher (or worse yet, a specific publisher) and feels that XX should be the industry standard doesn't accomplish much on its own. Maybe the pool has 20 people in it and 5 work much harder and better than you do and 5 do passable work and make less. The only person who knows that is at the publisher, and that person isn't saying. I've been that person (and tried to fairly distribute rates in a range I was allowed to work in). I know.

Yes, yes, if we all know and agree that XX dollars for academic work or XX dollars for fiction work is a competitive going rate, we can all push for those rates and make the world a better place, blah blah. EFA already has a list and that doesn't seem to get publishers all scared enough to offer those rates. And freelancers worry: What if I am accepting a lower rate and the publisher snickers about me because everyone else is getting more? (I recently was happy about a new rate to hear later that it's apparently the metro industry standard. Oh well.)

I guess if this discussion must come up on a regular basis, I would add that the rate needs to be discussed with all the details of the job: How long have you worked for them? What do they want you to do and how do you do it (coding/tagging, electronic, traditional paper, multiple passes, author interaction, PDF editing, formatting, etc.)? What type of schedule are you expected to keep? Are you very fast and computer literate? How long have you been an editor? What is your relevant experience? Where do you live and what kinds of financial situation are you in? On and on. These things all add to what someone will and should accept in a rate.

Here's what I think: Look at the project. Think about the effort it takes you. Look at your rate. Are you happy? When you write out your final invoice, does that total make you satisfied? When was the last time you asked for a raise? If you feel you need more, then make your case and ask, or ask again. If you are denied, do you want to keep doing it at that rate? If not, look for other, better paying work. If you really like the work and can afford to do it at that rate, keep doing it.

Maybe I'm too simple. ...

Oh my. I just was holding a banana in one hand and in the other dialing the cordless phone to talk to my parents. Then as the phone was ringing, I put it down and held the banana to my head. Then I looked at the phone on the table and wondered why it was making a ringing sound when it should be fruit.

I thought it was just folksy talk, but now I see it's true. My brain has officially gone away for a while. And when I really need it, too!