Not quite this busy...

I've used Mark Stivers' cartoons on the blogs once or twice before (well, notably on my 5th anniversary post - What's your unusual super-power?). I came upon this one the other week, and it struck a chord with me because I had been having a particularly industrious February.

Quite unprecedented, in fact - at least, since I came to China.

February is usually a dead month here, the deadest of the whole year. Much of it is taken up with the Chinese Spring Festival holiday, and then work doesn't usually start to pick up until the new university semester gets under way around the beginning of March (much of my writing, editing, and recording work is for academic publishers tied to universities, and their working patterns are - mysteriously - prone to the same disruption by long vacations that the teaching schedule is; but even work that should have no connection at all to the academic timetable - business training, magazine writing - mirrors this boom-bust cycle, with long, deadly slowdowns in midwinter and high summer).

But this year, for some unfathomable reason, work started falling on me from all directions at once, right at the start of February. And it didn't let up until the end of the month. It probably helped that the Spring Festival fell early this year. There may also perhaps have been some impact from the fact that the holiday has been getting progressively shorter in recent years (only 5 or 6 days of official 'national holiday' this year, compared to the two full weeks we used to get until quite recently?). But I think, basically, it was just a weird - and unlikely to be repeated - concatenation of circumstances: I got lucky.

I began the month by turning in a mammoth article on China's luxury goods market that I'd been mulling over for a while. This client immediately hit me with a request to produce another, even longer piece on Chinese consumer trends (for which the writing was a comparative doddle, but I had to do lots of additional background research). A Chinese friend who works with a small European training company contacted me about helping out again with a huge language assessment that one of the major SOEs conducts of all of its staff every two or three years: I've assisted with this the last three times, so my contact now looks to me to help recruit most of the other examiners for it. One of the academic publishers I work with a lot then dumped an entire edition of one of their quarterly literary journals on me to edit (I assume all their other foreign editors have abandoned them because this work is so desperately boring). A friend asked me to write a brief article about the craft of copywriting for her company's blog; she liked that so much, she then asked me to help re-work some of her promotional copy. Another regular-ish client asked me to to do a few bits and pieces of editing for them, and write up some case examples for their website. I was put in touch with a translation/localization company who are floundering with a huge project to translate a batch of technical manuals from Chinese into English: quite beyond my capabilities, but I offered them some free consulting on how to start addressing the problem, and promised to try to chase up some leads on suitable translators/editors/technical writers for them.  I got a one-off voice recording gig through a film-maker friend (again, quite a substantial outlay of time, because the script was absolutely appalling - it required extensive rewriting and fact-checking). I've also been sounding out a couple of possible new writing gigs with local magazines, and trying to chase down a trio of teaching possibilities - legal English for a law firm, financial English for some senior bank employees, and a series of 'Psychology for Business' lectures for some cod-MBA course. Oh yes, and I was trying to write an entry for the non-fiction section of the Summer Literary Seminars competition.*

It was a bit of a struggle to stay on top of all of that - particularly when I went down with a colossal dose of 'flu towards the end of the month. In fact, a couple of these items got deferred until the start of this month, and I've only just finally cleared the decks.

Alas, that unwonted spasm of too-much-work is looking as if it might well be the last work I ever do. I now have absolutely nothing else in prospect for the foreseeable future. Rather worrying it is.

And it's not as if I exactly made a mint from that four weeks of hard grind: the editing mostly pays exceedingly poorly, and usually two or three months in arrears; most of the other stuff - recruiting language examiners and technical writers, writing blog articles - I was doing as favours, completely for FREE; all the new job prospects I was pursuing seem doomed to come to naught; and even the business articles - which do pay extremely well - only give me 60% on initial delivery (the balance I may have to wait another two or three months for, and it may - it's not quite clear yet! - be subject to swingeing tax deductions). Publishing cycles - dontcha hate 'em?!

Ah well, back to the death-ray...

*  I did in fact manage to finish a travel piece called '9 Ways To Die In Fiji', but decided not to submit. I'm not a fan of the judge. And I'm feeling a bit too emotionally brittle to deal with rejection at the moment. And I couldn't sort out a Paypal account to pay my entry fee. Also, I really do not approve of 'writers' workshops' (a rant for another day!). Two weeks in Vilnius in July, however, did sound lovely. I am torn by wistfulness. The submission deadline was extended from the end of last month until TODAY - so, I may yet change my mind, if I can use someone else's Paypal facilities...