The Summer Shift: wobbly workflow

As we head into November and the days get shorter, I’ve been looking back on what’s been an up-and-down summer, and not just in terms of the weather.

Back in July, I wrote about a shift in what I’m working on, away from a long-term lexicography project and back to the regular freelance juggling act. The lexicography work hasn’t finished altogether, but from the start of August, I dropped down to significantly fewer hours. I had a new writing project lined up and I thought I’d managed to arrange my schedule to balance the two projects fairly evenly for the remainder of the year. So, how’s that been going?

Delays, delays, delays

The new project, writing a workbook for a new coursebook series, was due to use authoring software that I’d been told would need setting up before I got started. This was pencilled in to happen towards the end of July/beginning of August, then I was due to start work on my first unit at the end of August. The set-up, which I thought might take a couple of days, turned out to be incredibly messy and dragged on in dribs and drabs for weeks – waiting for replies to emails about problems I hit, waiting to arrange a call with an IT person and all hampered by the fact it was summer and key people were ‘on leave’.

Frustratingly, at the same time, there were changes going on in my lexicography work too which left me unable to carry on at several points as I waited for things to be implemented in-house. Those delays weren’t especially long, but just happened to coincide with the delays on the other project leaving me twiddling my thumbs and watching my income slip away. It might seem nice to have time ‘off’ right in the middle of summer, but they were the kind of delays where I was checking my email each day hoping for progress, so I couldn’t really use the time to do much else. And all round, it left me with worringly few paid hours through August.

And we’re off!

The software issues finally got resolved at the start of September and I got started on some writing just a week or so later than planned. I settled into the rhythm I’d envisaged for a couple of weeks, with roughly a third of my weekly hours on dictionary work and two-thirds on the writing project.

Because it was the first unit of a new project, there was a bit of time waiting for feedback and redrafting, then the unit had to be passed up the line for approval before I could carry on. Annoyingly, this once again coincided with a bit of a pause in my lexicography work and a few days of thumb-twiddling. Luckily, I had a talk to prep, so managed to fill the time productively, albeit unpaid.

October overload

I’d hoped to make a start on my next WB unit before I went away to the Euralex conference at the start of October, but for various reasons, it didn’t happen. That left me playing catch-up for a couple of weeks when I got back and working well over the number of hours I’d usually put in at my desk. It was only a handful of extra hours, but because it was a new project and new software, the extra focus and concentration involved really took its toll on me physically.

Finding my flow

As I’ve explained before, in order to manage a chronic pain condition, I need to work in relatively short bursts spread out through the day and through the week with plenty of breaks in-between. That’s super-easy with lexicography work that breaks down naturally into short stints. Activities for a workbook should also be fairly modular, but as this is for C1 level and each unit includes relatively long reading and listening texts, it’s easy to get caught up and spend longer stretches at my desk focused on getting a section sorted and not wanting to interrupt the flow while I’ve got everything clear in my head. The authoring software is also proving to be especially fiddly, which means greater stress and tension through my shoulders and hands manipulating the mouse to get the formatting correct.

When I talk about work taking a strain on my health, people often tell me to “be careful” and “take it easy”. I know the comments are well meant, but they’re also slightly grating because they infer that it’s somehow my fault and that I should just organize my work better so that it didn’t impact my health … which of course, is vastly easier said than done! When you’re trying to get your head around a complex new project, dealing with various inevitable stress factors (delays, miscommunication, looming deadlines) and you’re also under financial pressure, “taking it easy” isn’t always feasible.

Settling down

Thankfully, the writing project does seem to be settling down, with some of those initial teething problems sorted out. I’ve also pushed back a bit on the schedule, which has concertinaed up slightly from what I’d originally envisaged. I don’t want to extend deadlines too much because it’s a fee-based project, so if I take longer working on it, I effectively lose income, but a bit of shuffling by the odd day here and there, I think will make for a slightly easier workflow. 

Deadlines on sticky notes to allow for reshuffling!

 

Last week was moving towards being a slightly better balance of hours and towards the end of the week, there was a sense of feeling more on top of things. This weekend was also my first fully non-working weekend in several weeks (although I did write this blog post!). So, I’m hoping I can find a better workflow through November and December at least … before the added stress of needing to find new work from January onwards starts to kick in! It’s making me wonder how I’ve managed for the past 25 years of freelancing! A few easy years of ticking along with one project and I feel like I’ve rather lost the knack of the freelance juggle.

Writing rhythms

On most ELT writing projects, the work (and your life for the duration of the project!) gets divided up into units. For a students' book, that might be 10-15 quite large units, but for many of the sort of self-study, language practice type materials I work on, there can be anywhere between 20 and 50 short units which may only be 2-4 pages each.

At the start of a new project, you spend a bit of time getting to grips with the brief and playing around with the first unit or two to establish how they're going to work. Often, the format's already quite fixed in the brief, sometimes you have a bit of leeway to play with. Then once everyone's happy, you get your head down and start ploughing through unit-by-unit.

What interests me is how different people go about tackling each unit. Do they sketch out the whole thing then go back and fill in the details? Do they do it on paper or straight into a Word doc? Do they start from the beginning and work through each activity in turn? Or do they start with a core component, such as a reading text, then work outwards from it? A lot, of course, depends on the type and scope of the material, but even within that there's quite a bit of room for variation.

For the past couple of months, I've been working on some self-study vocab practice materials. There are 50 units altogether (across two linked projects) which is kind of daunting, but also quite nice as it means I've settled into a rhythm of roughly a unit a day. For each unit, I already have a (more-or-less) predetermined set of vocab items to practise across a number of activities. It's heavily corpus-informed, so I'm researching the vocab items to pick out features to highlight (typical usage and context, collocations, typical colligational patterns, etc.) and also using and adapting corpus examples in the activities. For the first few units, this was my approach:

 

The major downside of this was that I found myself running the same corpus searches numerous times. So, I'd explore vocab item A extensively in the initial research stage, then I'd find myself searching for it again several times to source examples for each exercise. I revised my approach after a few units so that I still did my research stage as before, but then sketched out a rough plan of the different exercises, e.g. exercise 1 focus on noun collocations, exercise 2 focus on following prepositions, etc. Then I ran a corpus search for each vocab item and added examples to several of the exercises at the same time. This seemed more efficient and I settled into it as a way of working for the first 15 units or so.

As is so often the case though, totting up my hours regularly as I went along, I realized I was spending much longer on the work than I'd budgeted for up-front. That meant that because the project is for a fixed fee, my hourly rate was nose-diving. It also meant I was getting behind schedule. After a bit of a review and discussion, it turned out that a lot of the extra work was just down to there being more involved in the project than I'd originally bargained for – isn't it always the case?! With no more budget available though, I had to try and rein in my hours regardless. So I came up with a new way of working.

On the plus side, it is much quicker because I'm only researching each vocab item once, then just reshuffling the results to create the exercises. On the downside, I'm not able to wait until I've researched all the items to see how the unit's going to shape up. So, if you like, the whole process is slightly less data led. In some units, it works out fine and the examples I've selected shuffle neatly into nice, coherent exercises. Other times, I find that a feature or exercise type starts to suggest itself towards the end of the vocab list and I realize I haven't noted relevant examples for some of the earlier items. Then I either have to squeeze the material I have into exercises which aren't a great fit or I have to go back and look for better examples for some items. For some units, I use up most of the examples I've collected, for others I'm left with a whole page of unused material at the end.

So often, ELT writing is a balancing act between how you'd like to work and what the time and budget allows. In this case, the hurry-up initially felt a bit uncomfortable, but as I go on, I think I'm settling into my rhythm again and making it work.

Manic May

Phew! I've just come out of what felt like a very busy, head-down patch of work. Since I got back from a break mid-April, it's been full-on through to a couple of deadlines at the end of last week … and it's really taken its toll.

As many of you will know, I suffer from a chronic pain condition that tends to flare up when I put in too many hours at my desk. I try really hard to keep a steady, manageable flow of work, but that's always a challenge. In this instance, a number of factors conspired against me:

• The two main projects I was working on expanded significantly from their original briefs, involving a lot more hours' work to complete, but without the deadlines really moving.
• A few unexpected queries came in from projects I thought I'd finished. Although they weren't big things, they did take time emailing to and fro, going back to look through documents, tracking down information and generally getting my head back into a different project.
• Several things also came up about potential future work, all of which is good, but again, is a distraction and requires shifting yourself into a different headspace to consider whether each one is of interest, whether it will fit into your schedule, then flurries of emails, phone conversations and in one case, travelling to a face-to-face meeting.

All of which made for a sense of there being not enough hours in a day and days in a week … and inevitably led to a pain flare-up. That then had its own knock-on effect as I struggled to work through more pain, which made me slower and less productive, so everything took even longer. On bad pain days, there are only so many hours I can manage at my desk, so I tended to work shorter days and with work piling up, that meant I ended up working through five weekends in a row just to keep up. And while fewer hours per day spread across 7 days instead of 5 meant I ultimately managed to keep all those plates spinning and hit my deadlines, the lack of any respite took its toll too.

Thankfully, this week has been much calmer. There's no rest for the wicked though with two new projects starting straight away, albeit at a less hectic pace – so far! – plus decisions to make about what I take on over the next few months. I'm feeling utterly drained and my inclination right now is to say no to everything and just rest, but I need the work and some of it does look interesting.

All of which got me reflecting on my working hours again and took me back to a blog post I wrote  last summer about My Working Life in Stats. As it's almost a year on, I thought I'd do a quick update with this year's stats.

2018-2019 in Stats

It's been a very tricky year for work. Just after I wrote my post last year, I took a couple of months off work almost completely to try and get my health back on track (see Not Working). It did help, in the short term at least. Then, when I got back to working in the late summer, I had a frustrating patch of jobs being delayed and cancelled. This had an especially big impact because I was being cautious about not overdoing it, so I'd only planned in one project at a time and when that dropped off, it left me with nothing to fill in.

As you can see from the graph, things picked up towards the end of the year (the numbers along the bottom are week numbers, so 41 is into October, 01 start of Jan), but work was very bitty with lots of short jobs which led to sudden peaks in busy weeks. January to April was quiet-ish, again with several shorter jobs, then the recent flurry through late April and May.

Financially, the year 2018-19 (that's the tax year April to April) was dreadful with my overall income dropping to about £21K which was just £17K after expenses. In part, that's down to the couple of months I didn't work at all for health reasons, in part it's down to the working time lost through delayed and cancelled projects, and also the bitty nature of short projects (which I wrote about here). I also worked through the autumn and winter on a royalties-only writing project which accounted for around 27% of my hours for the whole year. That paid nothing in the short term (although I have included the hours in my working hours graph), so that's effectively more than a quarter of my year working 'unpaid', but it will, hopefully, pay back in future years (fingers crossed!).

Looking ahead

I'm hoping the year ahead will be an improvement. From a financial perspective, my recent flurry of work through April/May wasn't counted in the income figures above and with solid work through June and into July, I should already be on track for a better start to the new financial year. And with a few potentially interesting projects in discussion, it's looking like the issue over the coming months won't be lack of work but trying to fit it into my schedule in a way that's manageable. In the short term though, I've just booked a week off before things get too busy again to wind down somewhere warm, do very little and hopefully ease off some of those pains!

The end of the affair

In my last post, I wrote about some of the challenges of getting started on a writing project, but endings can be tricky too.

When do you know you've finished?

On some projects, there's a really detailed scheduled with numbered drafts and handover dates, and when your final draft has been received, you get an acknowledgement - and maybe even a thank you - and you're encouraged to send your invoice. However, that's not always the case. All too often, you send in what you hope is the last piece in the puzzle and wait for confirmation, but nothing comes. You might get a short 'thanks' from the (often freelance) editor, but nothing to say you've actually finished. And so you have to compose that slightly awkward email asking if everything's okay and whether you can invoice yet.

How do you know it's been published?

If you're the lead author on a book, perhaps working for a royalty, you'll probably follow it through proof stages and with luck, will be told when it's published and receive copies. But if you're writing for a fee, as part of a team, even when you've written a fairly substantial chunk of the book, you often hear nothing at all. I've lost count of the number of times that the first I've seen of a book I've worked on is when I'm browsing through it on a stand at a conference … and flick to the back to find my name buried among the photo credits.

Sometimes that's a good excuse to email the editor (if they haven't already moved on) and ask if they could send you a copy. Sometimes they do, sometimes they’re more reluctant. To be honest, I really don’t mind the lack of credit, but how difficult can it be to keep a list of the people who’ve contributed to a book and at least drop them an email when it comes out?

How do you know how a book's doing?

I've worked on a handful of books for royalties and I get royalty statements every six months. I have to admit, I don’t really have a benchmark for what equates to good sales, but I do, at least, know which ones seem to do better than others. For fee-paying projects though, that last draft, and maybe a copy in the post if I'm lucky, is generally the last I hear. The only feedback I ever get is from chatting to sales reps at events who might mention that a book is 'doing well' ... although it's difficult to tell whether they're just being polite.

Can I help with promotion?

Authors of big coursebook series seem to be forever going around the world giving talks, but in my world of smaller, more niche titles, things don't quite work that way. For some books, I've been asked to do a couple of talks when they were first published, for others I've pushed to do the odd talk, for many I'm told that there's no budget, and for most I'm not involved at all and wouldn't even know who to contact if I wanted to be (see above re. not knowing when a book's been published/contacts moving on).

All of which can prove a bit dispiriting at times. As a writer, I feel that I should have those occasional moments of excitement when copies of my latest book arrive and I pop open some bubbly … but those are actually very few and far between. It mostly feels like my work just disappears off unceremoniously into a void.

Getting going: the economics of short jobs

Getting started on any new project, it takes time to get up and running. Recently, I've worked on a number of short jobs where the start-up time ate into the hours I could allocate to the whole job (based on the fee) to the point where the whole thing turned out to be hardly worth it financially. It's made me reconsider whether short writing jobs are always viable from a financial perspective.

At the start of a new writing project, there are lots of things to get your head around and no matter how experienced you are, that takes time. I've been writing ELT materials for 20 years now, so I generally know what to expect and can more-or-less 'hit the ground running', but even so, I still have to read through the brief and accompanying documents (of which there might be anything up to a dozen) to check:

- which market the materials are aimed at 

- the level (not just A2, B1 etc. but how it's actually pitched)

- the overall format of the book/components (even if I'm only writing a small part)

- the general style and approach

- any restrictions on topics, artwork or permissions for authentic texts
- any relevant exam guidelines or exercise types

- the format I need to use - templates, file naming conventions, combined/separate answer keys, etc.
- any requirements for artwork briefs or audio scripts

- the extent

- the styleguide (if there is one)

- all the other random bits I can't think of right now!

Then there's all the admin - emailing to and fro about dates and schedules and contracts and who to send stuff to, and downloading all the briefing docs.

On short jobs, you're typically writing a small part to fit in with other material (review units or tests or worksheets), so then when you start actually writing, not only are you flicking back and forth to check all the stuff above, you're also referring to the already-written material to check which language points you're covering, what's already been done, the approach the other writers have taken and topics they've covered. So the first unit (or spread or page) can take much longer than you'd normally expect for the actual amount of text you end up with on the page.

On longer projects, you can generally absorb that start-up time within the overall fee and hope to speed up and make up the time later. You might even find that time's been allowed in the schedule (and budget) to send in a first unit for feedback, and to go back and forth a bit to get the style and format established. On short jobs though, it seems there's little or no allowance for any of this. The commissioning editor looks at the number of pages/spreads/units and calculates a fee by simply multiplying how long they think each one will take to write. When those fees are already pretty low, absorbing that start-up time and still making more than a minimal hourly rate can prove tricky. Especially if you miss something in the brief in your rush to get started - or something wasn't actually mentioned or made clear - and so you send in your whole batch of work only to get it back with loads of requests for revisions. Now your hourly rate's ticking down even further.

Don't get me wrong, it's convenient to do short jobs now and again. Sometimes, they just fill a gap in your schedule and it can also be nice to do something simple where you don't get sucked into a big long complicated project. And sometimes they work out fine - occasionally, they can even take less time than you expect - hooray! In my experience though, that's getting increasingly rare. With publishers producing multiple levels and components of courses simultaneously and dividing up the writing between a whole slew of different writers, they also seem to just divide up the time and budget without taking into account that each of those writers has to factor in some start-up time.

That's not to say I'm going to stop taking on shorter jobs - like I said, they can make a nice change - but I'll certainly be considering that start-up time as a more prominent factor when I'm assessing fees and considering whether to take work on in future.