I haven’t posted in a while because it’s earnings season. I work part-time as a financial transcript editor. Every financial quarter, the big corporations hold their earnings calls in which they declare how much money they made, what their balance sheet looks like, and how completely awesome of a company they are. A bunch of Wall Street analysts join the conference call and ask questions. A transcriptionist captures the whole call, with of course lots of typos and misspelled product names. The raw transcript comes to me. I research product names, obscure towns, gold mining locations, types of oil drilling ships, or whatever else they have their tentacles wrapped around. After I edit and proofread it, the transcript is finalized.

It’s decent part-time work. I work from home, so I can wear pajamas. I get paid by the call, so during earnings season I try to pack as many into my time as I can. Effectively my job is 4 weeks on, 8 weeks off–which suits my writing habits nicely. For whatever reason, my writing seems to be better when I don’t “have to write” every day; something about 4 weeks away from it all refills my creative well. Plus, it helps me focus my writing time; each “session” is about 8 weeks of uninterrupted time, aside from all the household burden and so on, which makes goal-setting easier. (Part of the deal my husband and I have is that I take care of more than 50% of the household burden, in exchange for working part-time)

The calls are sometimes interesting. I rate them by how many times I have to shout EVIL during a call. There are three-evil calls, much like three-alarm fires. The predominance of rich white men is quite striking, though unsurprising.

Anyway, I work 12-14 hour days during earnings season. The worst week of an earnings season is the third one, which means the first weeks of Feb, May, Jul, and Nov are usually brain-numbing for me. I require lots of playfully violent stress relief like videogames and composing little ditties about stabbing people.

It’s nearly over. I can’t wait to get back to writing. I lost most of my “fall session” to taking care of my health–which was well worth it, and I don’t regret that, but I’m seriously pissed off about not getting more writing done. That MUST be remedied.