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Learning the long haul...
Jul. 15th, 2012 01:36 pmBack when we lived in Jacksonville, Florida, many moons ago, the president of the local chess club enlisted my aid in producing the club's newsletter, which involved taking the finished product to the printer, where it would be professionally printed.
I recall there was a cartoon posted up near the cash register. The illustration depicted what appeared to be a print shop with a customer in the background (shown walking out the door), and a printer's apprentice in the foreground who, evidently holding what the customer had just dropped off, had turned away from the shop's counter and was asking the boss, "Say, how do I handle this job? It's not a rush!"
I could sympathize then (I had just finished a three-year stint at a publishing house where we had weekly deadlines for submitting journals to print), and as a translator, I can certainly do so now.
Over the years, I've become pretty good at juggling jobs with short turnarounds, mostly because that's all I ever got. If there were variations in the severity of deadlines, they hovered almost exclusively between "ASAP" and "yesterday." One of the interesting casualties of this mania for immediate turnaround was the gradual disappearance, somewhere in the mid-1990s, of "rush" rates precisely because everything had turned into a rush job.
The ability to turn assignments around quickly (without sacrificing quality) thus became a huge plus, in a market where there has been steady downward pressure on rates over the past quarter century. I have clients who pay me the same rate today as they did 20 years ago, yet who still send me work when it has to be turned around quickly and not have to be edited six ways from Sunday.
On my end, most of the trick is to figure out how much of a load I can carry before I simply have to decline work. Every once in while, a job with a long lead time—I've begun to call them "long jobs"—might come in, and those could get tricky, especially if I end up getting a steady stream of short-turnaround jobs that start to eat into the long job's time.
Right now, I have not one but three long jobs on the plate, and it's becoming plainly apparent that by sheer volume alone, I need to be particularly aware of what I've committed to already (hence my remark Friday about "getting past a 'general feel'" for what's due).
Currently, I've got about 45,000 words in 3 jobs scheduled for between now and the 15th (or so) of August. That comes to about 1,500 source words per day, every day, not counting routine stuff that pays the bills.
Tread softly, grasshopper!
I recall there was a cartoon posted up near the cash register. The illustration depicted what appeared to be a print shop with a customer in the background (shown walking out the door), and a printer's apprentice in the foreground who, evidently holding what the customer had just dropped off, had turned away from the shop's counter and was asking the boss, "Say, how do I handle this job? It's not a rush!"
I could sympathize then (I had just finished a three-year stint at a publishing house where we had weekly deadlines for submitting journals to print), and as a translator, I can certainly do so now.
Over the years, I've become pretty good at juggling jobs with short turnarounds, mostly because that's all I ever got. If there were variations in the severity of deadlines, they hovered almost exclusively between "ASAP" and "yesterday." One of the interesting casualties of this mania for immediate turnaround was the gradual disappearance, somewhere in the mid-1990s, of "rush" rates precisely because everything had turned into a rush job.
The ability to turn assignments around quickly (without sacrificing quality) thus became a huge plus, in a market where there has been steady downward pressure on rates over the past quarter century. I have clients who pay me the same rate today as they did 20 years ago, yet who still send me work when it has to be turned around quickly and not have to be edited six ways from Sunday.
On my end, most of the trick is to figure out how much of a load I can carry before I simply have to decline work. Every once in while, a job with a long lead time—I've begun to call them "long jobs"—might come in, and those could get tricky, especially if I end up getting a steady stream of short-turnaround jobs that start to eat into the long job's time.
Right now, I have not one but three long jobs on the plate, and it's becoming plainly apparent that by sheer volume alone, I need to be particularly aware of what I've committed to already (hence my remark Friday about "getting past a 'general feel'" for what's due).
Currently, I've got about 45,000 words in 3 jobs scheduled for between now and the 15th (or so) of August. That comes to about 1,500 source words per day, every day, not counting routine stuff that pays the bills.
Tread softly, grasshopper!
