Creating a Lifestyle Worth Living

As I approach my thirties, I have come to truly learn what kind of job I can not only handle but not dread from day to day. From micromanaging bosses to the gossip around the watercooler, I have not looked back since choosing to go freelance. I worked during college at my school’s private library for four years as a part-time student assistant, then as a receptionist in a law firm, and finally as a library assistant in a public library before being fed up with the pace and lifestyle those kinds of jobs made for me.

I have always been self-driven and goal-directed without the “helpful push” of a boss. I have always been my own boss. (My carefully filled-out agenda each school year would tell you as much). And with this personality came the difficulty of watching my peers slack off and enjoy standing still in their jobs while I felt like I was suffocating. Once I had paid off my student loans in about five years, I resigned from my last employee-centered job and went full-time freelance.

I began my freelance proofreading journey by taking the Proofread Anywhere course in 2017, and by 2018, I had completed the exam successfully. At this time, I was a receptionist at a law firm because the law had always interested me. My philosophy professors in college certainly pushed their students into law during my time there. It was considered a more “practical job” over becoming a philosopher, I suppose.

Proofreading has now become my longest-held job, and I have no plans to quit now. To me, typos had always jumped out on the page while reading books or other people’s papers. Perhaps I can thank my mother and father for reading to me at an early age and allowing me to challenge myself with more difficult reading material. My mother was also a writer and her day job consisted of copywriting for publishing houses, and my father wrote poetry for pleasure. Words were always a part of my world.

As a child, I loved holding my younger brother hostage, reading out loud from any book I could get my hands on. I would read for hours until my voice gave out. All of those moments of getting lost in a book, listening to the cadence of my voice rising and falling like waves, were so deliciously addictive. Nothing interested me more than continuing to read…and I still feel the same way.

With copious amounts of reading blossoms a desire for quiet, space, and routine. I grew accustomed to sitting in my home alone in silence and maximizing my time to accommodate more reading. This lifestyle translated extremely well into becoming a remote proofreader. I pull up the chair to my desk with my rather small laptop open on it, sitting in the quiet and reading most of my transcripts and manuscripts out loud. The lull of my voice carries the words back into my head, tripping an alarm every time I come across an error or something that simply does not sound or look right.

I usually have a split screen between the piece I’m proofreading and the Internet or a style guide sheet. Usually, reference books are strewn around me on various tables to my left and right. The thing about proofreading is that you have all the answers at your fingertips—you just have to know where to quickly search for them. Decision fatigue sets in after answering a million questions that crop up after reading every sentence with so much care. This is why I am being paid to do it. Proofreading can cause headaches, eyestrain, and fatigue. I have experienced it all. But I am good at it, and, while it is hard work, I love it.

Opening up a fresh transcript from a court reporter, I learn so much about any number of topics. I always wanted to learn everything growing up, and since we have yet to produce a chip to insert into our brains, I have had to spend time reading to learn. My desire to know more is not hindered by my job now—it is quenched. I learn new legal terms in Latin or medical terms or criminal slang on any given day.

When a publishing company asked me to copyedit and/or proofread for them a few years into my proofreading career, I paused. In college, we had creative writing workshops which were essentially learning to give editorial advice on everything from developmental, structural, and grammatical aspects. And I loathed it. Why? Sadly, the culture in this country, especially in the universities, is one of liberal, collectivist thought. I disagreed to my core with most of the stories. The fictional pieces were filled with things the college students had read in their other classes or filled with childish clichés from a lack of reading enough or riddled with grammatical errors that were acceptable to pass off as a “stylistic choice” thanks to modern writers everywhere. Not only was editing not appealing to me, but freelance writing and journalism paid for writers to produce work for businesses and products that I did not care about. My words (and brainpower) felt too precious to waste on those challenging jobs, writing was already hard enough.

My college days taught me that I would never be able to become a professor, though I loved learning, or an editor, though I loved writing, or a traditionally published author, though I knew my writing was good enough. My choices were made and shaped so much by this culture. But without feeling too much pity for myself, I decided that I still wanted to live a happy life on this earth right here and now.

So I pulled away from the “traditional 9–5” in exchange for the atypical freelance life. I took control of who I interacted with on a daily basis, which mostly consists now of my husband, family, and friends. I behave with the proper etiquette to all strangers I meet, but I do not engage any more than I need to. I guard my time carefully, and I devote myself to the most black-and-white type of work possible in the writing world: proofreading.

In another blog post, I wrote about how I considered proofreading a skill, calligraphy a craft, and writing an art. I wrote the novels that were in my soul when they needed to be written and put them out into the world myself. I practiced calligraphy after a long workday to help free my mind from the meaning of words to focus more on the beautiful shapes they made instead. (Plus, I had always wanted my cursive to look like my mother’s when I was young). However, in the spirit of transparency, living in Iowa and in this dormant age, the royalty checks are not large enough and the calligraphy clients are few and far between. Most of my money comes from proofreading alone.

While I struggle financially, I am not a “starving artist” thanks to the help of my wonderful husband. I surely help supplement our family income, but I am not at all the breadwinner. I am learning to be okay with my status, investing myself in more of the domestic duties around the home while continuing to learn as much as I can, since knowledge means much more to me than wealth. In a proper society, the value that I produce would bring me the appropriate amount of money, but this is not a healthy period. I acknowledged this reality, and so I adapted my life accordingly.

I continue to incorporate my skill, craft, and art into my daily life, and it is not something I ever plan to retire from. I won my freedom back from a school system that expected us to conform to the traditional workforce. I have created a life that I feel good about. And with my husband and me beginning to plan for children, I can stay at home with them in the future while working. A new chapter of my life is beginning and, for once, I feel grounded and in control of it.

My hope is more people think critically about the work that would fit best with their own personality and lifestyle. I realize that my path of being very much a homebody and self-directed is not for everyone. But it is what makes me happy. What makes you happy? If you had all the free time in the world, what would you do with your time? Is there a way you can monetize your passion for something? Go out there and create the world you want to live in, even if that is only within your own four walls.

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Views Expressed Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the postings, strategies, or opinions of American Wordsmith, LLC. Please also know that while I consider myself an Objectivist and my work is inspired by Objectivism, it is not nor should it be considered Objectivist since I am not the creator of the philosophy. For more information about Ayn Rand’s philosophy visit: aynrand.org.

On the Current Cultural Decay

Today’s cultural climate is full of desensitized and inefficacious people who assume that things just “happen” to them. People who are inefficacious disgust me. I have always sympathized with the truly great Men who take action. I love Men who fight against those who try to stop their innovation. They have efficacy and, therefore, my undying respect.

I can still remember, having been raised Protestant, seeing men, specifically, in church kneeling and I cringed, even as a child. I thought, “How lowly and weak they look!” Fast-forward to college and another late night reading session for tomorrow’s class where I have the works of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Marlowe’s version of Faust in my hands, further empathizing with the devil and the snake and Man who desires knowledge.

My sense of life became clearer to me when I felt this ferocity rise within at Man who is refused the ability to know and refused to feel proud of knowing. After all, our tool of survival is our mind, our reason! Why must Christianity squash the very thing that makes us capable of living? I find it pure evil.

Perhaps this moment of fierce rebellion in my soul, sitting in my college’s library, is why I always seem to come back to motifs of snakes and birds, heaven and hell, God and Satan, and Adam and Eve in my work. I cannot help but rage against those who tell me not to know when I have spent all my life trying to know everything! I’ve always said that if I could have a chip inserted into my brain with all human knowledge known today, then I would.

My fear is that we can go backwards as a society. Literary fiction and other art dies in a bad or sick culture. Today, all literary fiction is tribalistic and not about morality at all. The Left has thrown morality away since they believe it is incurably tied to religion, while the Right has kept to their small Christian publishing presses to put out more of the same religious morality texts. But where, oh where!, are the secular moralists who are capable of shining through the rubbish? Where are the writers and readers who want to learn how to be better and happier living their ever-longer lives on earth?!

Why are publishers saying no to any books that are not liberal or tribalistic in nature? Why is there outrage over “literary fiction” books even existing anymore? Because our culture is dying.

I can blame liberal ideology and religious ideology to a certain extent, but beyond that I am unsure. All I know is that the worst thing an individual can do is desensitize themselves to life. And, yet, drugs, drinking, hedonism in general, even rushing from one loud event to the next or traveling all over the world without one moment to rest are causing a group of desensitized people to roam around the earth and teach their children the same. When the music dies down and the party leaves, people can no longer stand being with their own thoughts and so they repeat the numbing process over and over again in one endless cycle.

I remember when I was presenting my literary thesis to my professors in undergrad. When I finished, one commented about how they thought it was a theatrical performance because of the way I read it and openly mocked me when I said that the meaning of life was about happiness. My professors were a product, in the most extreme way, of a culture that is dying, if not already dead. They were cynical, could not take their own subject seriously, and believe that “Truth” is outside of reality. My rebellious heart raged that day, and I will never forget it. Yet, again, here is the Left telling me that I cannot know anything, just as much as the religious Right does.

Well, I refuse to believe that I cannot know how to be happy or that it is not a worthy goal. And I would rather feel too much anxiety about every little thing in my life than nothing at all. I would rather feel deep gratitude for what appear to most as “boring” or “inane” things; I would rather feel endless sorrow for a loss in my life than to drown them in drink; I would rather behave as innocently as a child, than as cynically as a manic-depressive professor. Life becomes more bearable when you know madness does not arise “out of the blue” but is built up by hundreds of little acts of transgression over time that you and the others around you never cared to notice. Being in a desensitized state is a killer to human beings; don’t let it get you next.

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Views Expressed Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the postings, strategies, or opinions of American Wordsmith, LLC. Please also know that while I consider myself an Objectivist and my work is inspired by Objectivism, it is not nor should it be considered Objectivist since I am not the creator of the philosophy. For more information about Ayn Rand’s philosophy visit: aynrand.org.

My Business and Current Routine

Why did I decide to create three businesses and then combine them into one?

I felt more complete when I was able to work each day on my writing, which I consider my art; my calligraphy, which I consider my craft; and my proofreading, which I consider my skill. Each aspect of my “holy trinity” drains me in different ways, but they help produce multiple revenue streams as a freelancer as well as allow me to spend time engaged with words throughout the day differently.

I can typically only write for one to two hours at a time before I am drained. My art is what I hold closest to my heart and it takes the most effort. But that is not a full workday nor does it bring much revenue, especially not before I have published the next novel. Then, I tend to devote at least half an hour to calligraphy just to maintain and improve my muscle memory and script consistency. This typically does not make me money unless I am working on a client project. But I also get to look at the shape that words form and their physical beauty on the page. Finally, my bread-and-butter currently is proofreading. I spend an average of five hours a day on this and make the majority of my money here. This is a skill that I was trained to do since my schooldays. I always have style and citation manuals close by in case I forget one of the many hundreds of technical rules. But this skill brings me the joy of cleaning up writing that could run more smoothly and be clearer for the reader. When done all together, I end up with a pretty full eight-hour workday from home.

I decided to call my new business “American Wordsmith” because I realized that all day, every day, I was spending with American English words in a variety of forms: reading them, writing them, fixing them. But the constant shifting between tasks keeps me from burning out (though, I admit I’m still trying to find that work-life balance).

The idea of becoming a freelancer really began when I first joined the workforce full-time and saw for myself the office politics and the jack-of-all-trades tasks I was made to do. I knew that I had enough drive and determination to be my own boss and that I could do what I really wanted to if I only had the time and money.

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I truly believe that routines are essential to a person’s productivity and ultimate success in business. So, I have a very full “dream” schedule right now that I have been following closely for almost a year. I do not plan for my days to be this full in the future, but this is my schedule to create as much as possible within a relatively short period of time. I would like to keep this up for another two years and see where my business takes me from there.

5:00 AM (Usually Ends Up Being 6:00 AM): Wake Up

5/6:00-8:00 AM: Gym/Shower/Dress

8:00-8:30 AM: Breakfast

8:30-9:00 AM: Calligraphy (Craft; Time May Vary Based On Project)

9:00-10:00 AM: Read (Hobby)

10:00-11:00 AM: Write Novels (Art; Or Edit/Proofread/Narrate/Publish)

11:00-12:00 PM: Lunch

12:00-5:00 PM: Proofreading (Skill; My Bread-and-Butter Currently)

5:00-6:00 PM: Dinner

6:00-9:00 PM: Ballet/Social (Hobby)

9:00 PM: Bedtime

* Right now my schedule remains about the same for every day of the week, with rest days from the gym on the weekend.

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Views Expressed Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the postings, strategies, or opinions of American Wordsmith, LLC. Please also know that while I consider myself an Objectivist and my work is inspired by Objectivism, it is not nor should it be considered Objectivist since I am not the creator of the philosophy. For more information about Ayn Rand’s philosophy visit: aynrand.org.