My Life and Thoughts

If there’s one thing about the writing life that recommends itself to young people, it’s the limited capital outlay.  You don’t need to pay salaries, rent a recording studio, or make weekly trips to Denver… but does that mean it’s all about sitting back and watching the money roll in?   Alas.  Today I bring you a cautionary tale about how easy it is to wind up with between $817–$1,067 work-related expenses.

It started one day in August, when I received a notice for a missed UPS delivery.  The only package I was expecting at that time was the first uncensored translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle, which the publishers had been trying to mail me for some weeks, as part of a campaign to get people to write Solzhenitsyn profiles:

Although Solzhenitsyn died last August, the following individuals are available for interviews: Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Natalia (who made headlines last month when she rebuked Vladimir Putin during a meeting with him); the author’s son, pianist and conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn, who is musical director for the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia; and Edward E. Ericson, Jr., the noted Solzhenitsyn scholar. They can discuss:

· Where Solzhenitsyn fits in to the great Russian literary realist tradition bequeathed by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky;

· The two decades he spent as an exile in Vermont, stripped of his Russian citizenship.  How he lived in such fear of the KGB that he built a barb wire fence around his home;

· The differences between Stalin’s regime and the Russian leadership of today—and what might happen if Solzhenitsyn were writing today;

· How he damaged his reputation in the West by championing Christianity and railing against American pop culture in a rambling commencement speech at Harvard;

· The “censored” portions of IN THE FIRST CIRCLE, which included suggestions that Stalin had been a double agent, and that the Soviet Union should not possess the atomic bomb;

· And much more.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1974)

Being overdue on three deadlines, I am obliged to leave the Solzhenitsyn-profiling to other and better C-list writers, whom I certainly wish a pleasant phone chat with the musical director of the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra on the subject of AS’s famous “rambling speech” of 1978.

When I conveyed my regrets to the publishers, they magnanimously promised to mail me a copy anyway—so that’s what I thought was in the package at the UPS depot.

Why didn’t I hurry to Potrero Hill that minute?  I don’t know exactly, but I somehow kept putting it off.  And Solzhenitsyn’s ghost really taught me a lesson in punctuality, because when I finally got to UPS a week later, what I found waiting for me was not First Circle but my own book proofs, due back to the publishers’ in 10 days.

Since I had originally turned in the MS two months late and, thus, in a huge hurry, I ended up making a ton of corrections. So, what with the lost week the proofs spent in the “first circle” of UPS, I missed that deadline too.  By days and days.   Finally one afternoon I got a polite email from my editor’s assistant, like, “Hey Elif, I just wanted to tell you that there’s a UPS drop box 3.1 miles from your house, where pick-up isn’t till 5:15.  That way we could have the proofs by tomorrow morning when we really need them.”

24 hours later, I had finally reached the point where I could relinquish the MS, and rushed to the closest fully staffed UPS location, which turned out to be staffed fully by incredibly excitable Indian people speaking an almost-incomprehensible variant on English.  While I was there, three different customers came in and left without mailing anything, because they couldn’t understand what the clerks were saying.

My first problem was that they wouldn’t sell me an envelope.  “It won’t fit in envelope!” shouted two clerks at once.  I was like, “Well, that’s odd, because I received it in an envelope,” but they were like, “No, no!  Box, box!”  One of them grabbed the MS, rushed into the back of the store, and returned with an enormous cardboard box completely covered with packing tape.  I was like, “Oh, uh, thanks.”   Then his colleague gave me a huge pile of forms, and I tried to give him the UPS account number, and then they really blew a gasket. They all started shouting at me at once, “Impossible!” and “There is no way bill!”

I probably didn’t improve matters, because I kept thinking they were saying “wabel,” i.e., “label,” so I was all, “But the label is right here!”—until finally one of them wrote “way bill” on a piece of paper. In certain respects, this was one of those clarifications that actually don’t make things any clearer; on the other hand, it did finally make me accept that there was no way they were going to send that box unless I paid for it myself.  I gave them my credit card, and then I think they were a bit sorry they had yelled at me, because one of them said: “We do not charge you for the box.”  Score!  Free enormous cardboard box! However, next-morning delivery to New York by that point cost $67.  This is the first example of a work-related expense.

The second, related example is, it turned out that the vast quantity of my corrections exceeded the in-house composition capacities of FSG, meaning that they have to mail the whole MS to Ghana to be retyped by orphans, at the personal cost to me of $100 plus $1.40 per line, for an estimated total between $750–$1,000.

Because my editor is a really nice guy and doesn’t want me to run out of money, he just sent the proofs back, and I have until Monday to reverse as many changes as possible. It’s like a wonderful video game, where you get $1.40 for each reversible change you find, and if you reach $500 by Monday, then—so I like to think—you have officially crushed your opponent (a Ghanaian orphan).

A nous deux, kiddo, and may the best man win.

1859 Way-Bill from the Pittsburgh to Erie Stagecoach line

Tags: author photos, beards, book reviews, bureaucracy, current events, d-list, graphomania, money, non-publications, outsourcing, publications, religion, Russia, Russian literature, Tolstoy, translation

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.