I’m an avid golfer, usually playing two or three days a week. I sometimes play well, and sometimes I suck. That’s the way golf go.
However, I’ve been taking lessons (sadly, not the first, second or third time) and have seen marked improvement. Something clicked. My teacher gave me a free lesson when his other student canceled, and toward the end of the freebie, he mentioned he was writing a book. I’m grateful to him for helping me with my game, so I said if you need someone to edit a draft, I’d be happy to. Editing is a large part of what I did for a living.
He said yes and offered to pay me, but I said, no, consider this an act of kindness. Also, there’s less pressure on me if you don’t like my changes – not like you got ripped off! It’s a fabulous book, but it needed lots of editing. Some writers have solid concepts but don’t know the first thing about punctuation or how to be consistent with capitalization and other style/formatting issues.
I enjoyed editing his book and have been wondering if that’s what I should do for my retirement side hustle. Editing can be aggravating … so much to fix and so hard to catch everything. I must have gone through it three times and still found stuff I missed. In the end, I’m proud of the work I did, but I’m not sure I would do it again. Not a 175-page book anyway.
Today’s golf got rained out – just as I played one of my best front nine holes in ages. My teacher was in the clubhouse, so we met briefly to discuss the edits. The track changes feature in Word was driving him nuts, as it often does if you aren’t used to it. I schooled him a bit on that. For the most part, he’s on board with my edits, although like many corporate executives I used to support, he loves capitalizing anything he thinks is important. I called it visual clutter, and he looked sad.
Which reminds me – The New York Times featured an editorial on Trump’s communiqué about the Saudi mess, and they wrote, “The president made clear his commitment to the use of the exclamation point, if not to truth and justice.” I texted it to my friend from work who also cares about grammarly matters. We used to joke if someone pissed us off, we would deny them the exclamation point at the end of an email. The one that says:
Thanks!
You misbehave, and all you get is thanks. Period. The power of punctuation.
We had another pet peeve about names. It’s polite to start an email with the person’s name, whether you add hi, hello, dear or whatever. But use their name. We worked closely with someone who never used your name, ever. Just jumped right into whatever she wanted, and it came across as a giant bark.
But I digress. As for retirement side hustles, I could see taking on smaller editing jobs. Although I will not be penning the great American novel, I do know how to write and edit, which I don’t think robots have figured out just yet. I also like the way this opportunity emerged out of something I was doing anyway. That seems like a good way to find your retirement side hustle.
I’m going to let this one simmer for awhile. As you know, I’m kind of busy having fun. I’ll have to figure out if I can do both.