My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #1, July 5, 1999

SHY, NO; RETIRING, YES!!

As I write this, it is Sunday, July 4. My last day as a librarian was Wednesday, and I feel like I have just had two weekends in a row.

This is not to say I haven't been working. On Thursday, I wrote up this week's edition of Neat New Stuff I Found This Week and two brief articles for Ex Libris. On Saturday I wrote a new column for Fox, and I'm now sitting down to write this column.

But I'm not fitting that in around a 40 hour work week. Instead, I've been catching up on weeding and reading, walking and duck-watching, lawn-mowing and laundry. I've been chatting and playing games with my son who's visiting for a while, and making plans for my annual trip to Michigan.

I'm still at the stage where reading seems like a guilty pleasure, not research. I haven't quite figured out what my working schedule is going to be, or if I'm even going to have one. Having always run my life by "to-do" lists so that I could make sure everything got done in the limited time available for it, I'm tempted to hang loose and just let my life sprawl out all over my available hours.

Within limits, anyway -- I do still have deadlines to meet. Ex Libris runs on Fridays, My Word's Worth on Mondays, and now that my column for Fox will run weekly, Wednesday seems like a good target date for that.

There are things I'm looking forward to about setting my own schedule. It means I can hang freshly washed laundry out to dry whenever there's a nice sunny day, and not have to wait for sun to coincide with Saturday. It means that next winter, when it's 30 below zero, and the snow is up to our asses, I won't have to go outside unless I'm stupid enough to want to. I can go to the library or the store whenever I need to, and work at home when I need to. I don't have to look professional, and I may never wear pantyhose again.

But my social life is not going to be built into my job anymore. Work now is going to be just between me and my computer, which is going to aggravate the talent for oblivion my friends tease me about, that power for focus so intense that I lose all track of the world around me while working through an idea. I know I'm going to have to go out of my way to keep my friends, scheduling lunches and outings with them.

The other scary thing is that I've just gotten my last regular salary check. It's not like I ever coasted when I was working full-time, but it IS true that salaried people get paid for showing up (and even for not showing up -- sick leave is not built in to my new arrangement). From now on, no column, no money. Fox is paying me enough money to meet my most basic expenses, but anything else I'm going to have to hustle for.

I'm counting on my well-known-ness as an internet librarian to bring me invitations to do speaking engagements and workshops and consulting gigs, but that's a chancy kind of thing. Meanwhile, I'll also be rewriting some of my columns and putting them into proper manuscript form to send off to magazine editors -- I'm still hoping to break the print barrier one of these days and make some money off of writing I've already done. That, of course, is a chancy thing too.

So, here I am, insecure and exhilarated, nervous and liberated, a little scared and a lot excited. I would never have even considered such a move if it hadn't been for this column. Here's where I've learned how to write, to edit myself, to meet a weekly deadline. It's where I've learned to trust that I can keep this up, that I will always have something to think through and tell you about.

The nicest thing has been finding that what I say often resonates with my readers. While in principle I believe what Tom Waits says -- "You must risk something that matters" -- I couldn't have taken that risk without the response I've gotten from you. You're what made me believe I can make this work. Thank you.