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”
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I've been running a little side business for extra income, and it's been a LITTLE business because about twenty minutes into it I realized just how much effort it actually is to be manager, lawyer, accountant, marketing, customer service, human resources, and product development all at the same time. Mostly I did that just long enough to get some reliable accounts and I've been coasting along on them ever since.
A while back, the small business owner I'd been working for as my main job confessed that he had hopes that I would buy the business from him one day. I had a good laugh and told him that I'd learned from my side venture that I really, really liked turning up somewhere and having someone else responsible for handing me money as a result. Sure, I wish the place could be run a little differently sometimes, but it's not actually my responsibility to follow through on seeing it happen.
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"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 realistic without doing so.)
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But then, I'd conjecture that the inner-city culture doesn't really provide for a lot of sense of freedom or security at any point. I'm assuming that you're speaking from a middle-class perspective, and as someone who was also raised middle class, I think we're taught to be happy working cooperatively, with a boss who tells us what to do and peers to work with us, and possibly some people below us. We can talk about different kinds of success because we can take for granted that we have food, electricity, and a home, so we can pick our own standard of comparison -- do we want all the best toys, or do we want emotional fulfillment?
On the other hand, if we're talking about a community where you can't take the basics for granted, where you have to consciously work every day to make sure that you have food tomorrow, then the standards of success become much more limited. Furthermore, when the writing on the wall is that there is no mobility for you, that the struggle you experience now is going to continue in some form or another for the rest of your life, that everything is set up to keep you where you are... I can see where the idea of having your own business, having one less person to keep you under their thumb, is a highly attractive prospect. Especially because being able to have a business means that you've managed to not just feed your family but have also gone another step beyond that. Yes, it's a lot of work, but so is everything else, so it's not really any different.
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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.
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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.
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