De-blog

I'm going to start with the key points. Don't work your ass off. It's not worth it. Should you decide to take my advice, be prepared for resistance - the better you are at working your ass off, the more resistance you will meet. Also, be prepared to discover that working your ass off is no more productive than sitting on your ass and watching other people work. Mostly. I don't mean that, but I really hate the phrase 'work smarter not harder'. It makes me want to kick chairs over. To elucidate: I haven't had a holiday (or vacation, if you prefer) since...2000? I think that was when it was. Not what most people would call a holiday, at least, which would seem to consist of: a) leaving home and all of the accompanying responsibilities for a set period of time; b) not doing any work for the duration of that time. What d'ya reckon? Does that sound about right? Whatever, no doubt people will tell me I've been given opportunities for holida...

I read an interesting post about sensitivity readers over the weekend, and by interesting, I mean more than a bit offensive and - accidentally, I'm quite certain - an excellent demonstration of why sensitivity readers are important if an author/editor/publisher wants to avoid a public trouncing. (I'll come back to why I have phrased it this way.) For those reading this post who don't know already, a sensitivity reader is someone a publisher/author asks to read a manuscript to check for potentially offensive/problematic content. This includes the deployment of discriminatory/offensive language, events that may act as psychological triggers and anything else that may be considered a 'sensitive subject' for some readers. Sensitivity readers have specific expertise, either through professional affiliation and experience (e.g. a nurse in palliative care fact-checking a book dealing with the treatment of terminal illness) or because they are part of the political mi...