HateHATEHATEhateALSOHATE

[ursulav]

I have a shiny edited file of the Goblin novella in my hot little hand.

I am trying to format it for self-pub.

I HATE EVERYTHING THAT HAS EVER LIVED AND I’M NOT FEELING GREAT ABOUT FUTURE GENERATIONS EITHER

I stripped everything out in a text editor and then Kevin said “Hey, you can do that much easier in Scrivener and it will compile it to ePub”

Comments

[gabyrippling]

Flip side to more control is always more responsibility (and hassle). Pretty much universal truth.

[banshea]

I was going to say, this sounds like the difference between being a child and being an adult. Or between being an employee and being a small business owner. I can do all the things, now! Oh crap, that means that I'm doing ALL the things now

[3rdragon]

I realized a month or two ago, when talking to my students (inner-city high school) that a lot of them view owning one's own business as the ultimate pinnacle of success.

"But, but, you have a college degree!" One young woman told me. "A four-year degree. You should be so successful. You could own your own business!"

"Yes," probably, I told her, ignoring the implied slight that being an AmeriCorps teacher WASN'T being successful, because she's tactless but means well, "But I don't want to."

She was completely flabbergasted. I explained to her that I wanted a job where I came in to work and had a boss and someone else gave me work to do and I did it . . . and I still don't think she really understood.

(Mind you, the similar conversation she had with my boss, who has both a computer science degree and a teaching degree -- and is still a high school teacher -- was really funny. Particularly since neither one of us wanted to discourage her from going to college herself, but weren't sure how to make her expectations more

[banshea]

I wouldn't expect high school kids to get that freedom isn't necessarily fun. That age is still feeling chafed by authority and is chomping at the bit to get out. You don't really appreciate having someone else calling the shots until you've been left flapping in the breeze for a while

[3rdragon]

Yes, I've thought a lot about what success looks like from different perspectives. My students also couldn't understand why I chose to study things that made me happy rather than things that would lead to a good job (though the way the economy has been lately, I could have been a little bit more employment-focused). I have some issues with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but I see truth in it, too.

I've been reading Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street, and thinking about this ideal of owning your own business in reference to that. He talks a lot about how a "street" mentality can lead to difficulty accepting authority (because taking orders damages your reputation), and I think my students see not having a boss as one way to get out from under a layer of authority. I just hope that, should they ever get there, they don't feel that the problems and authority figures they've acquired are worse than the problems and authority figures they had before.

[steelmagghia]

You know, there is probably a lot of truth to this. My AP kids (generally middle class or above) tend to have goals that involve bosses of some kind: doctor, marketing, pharmacist. High paying jobs, sure, but not without bosses. My non AP kids tend to want to do things where they can run their own things: cosmetology, crafts, occasionally more illicit businesses, but anything where they can have a BUSINESS, not a job.

These, of course, are only my upper level kids. The young ones, the non AP kids tend to have no idea what they want to do. That may also be part of it. They aren't encouraged to think about the future until it's almost there.