Gigantic.26
Secrets of the Space-Time Continuum
Sliding my lunch tray along the rail in the Lincoln Center cafeteria, I paused to consider a cup of red jello with a small dollop of whipped cream. Standing next to me with his own lunch tray, Mercutio eyed the same jello cup. Or maybe it was Benvolio.
Whoever he was, he was wearing tights and a flouncy Elizabethan top. Romeo and Juliet must’ve been in dress rehearsals.
Despite the obvious amusements, I didn’t eat in the cafeteria much. Like our subterranean office, it had no windows. I preferred to walk down Ninth for a slice, just to get some air.
Working at Lincoln Center had its benefits. I scored a lot of free tickets. The symphony was exciting in its way, but I found I related more to the chamber orchestra. They were smaller and could play off each other like, well, a band.
The thing that changed my life at Lincoln Center wasn’t so much the music I got to see, but a radical, to me, new understanding of time management.
When I first got to Stagebill Magazine, I walked into an insane culture of last-minute deadlines. With seven or more different performances every night, you can imagine how many different, highly detailed programs needed to be churned out. One of the editors actually just started screaming while she worked sometimes. Everyone accepted this as normal.
I took a long look at the deadlines printed in panicked scrawl on the dry-erase board. I realized it only listed the absolute final deadline for each project. Weren’t there mini deadlines you needed to hit along the way? What would it take to do this more efficiently?
Completion backwards. I called my contact over at the Philadelphia Orchestra.
“Hey Greg, you think you could send me the info for the May performance?”
“That’s not for four months,” he said.
“I’m just trying to get a head start.”
“Works for me.”
I worked with something like thirty visiting orchestras. I called each one, did the same thing. Not only was everyone fine with getting material to me earlier, they were also cool with me doing the editing and layout and getting it back to them for approval earlier, it made life easier for them too.
If my theory worked, the final deadline simply meant the day I’d need to send everything to the printer. It was almost a formality.
The only real challenge was that there weren’t enough hours in the workday to keep up with the current schedule while getting future programs rolling at the same time, so I started working until ten pm every night.
It wasn’t so bad having the office to myself. I had a bottle of whiskey in my desk. I’d pour myself a little cup, work until my eyes got blurry, then hop on the subway, which was a breeze because it was never crowded at that hour.
This was so unlike me. I was the guy in school who wrote the term paper the night before. It didn’t seem like it could possibly work. But two months later, with my neat little schedule typed up with all its mini deadlines met, my plan fell into place.
There were five shows that night, everyone else in the office was freaking out. I quietly finished my work for the day by three, put my feet up on my desk, and read the New York Times.
No one could figure out how I was doing it. I almost couldn’t believe it myself. It was like the secrets of the space-time continuum had been revealed to me.
I probably could’ve kept going like that for a while, but other factors, like the windowless office, were still driving me crazy.
A friend told me about a freelance research editor job at a travel magazine down on 23rd Street. The conventional wisdom at the time was that a freelance job was what you did while you were waiting for a full-time job. Once you got a full-time job, you kept it, you didn’t trade it in for a freelance job.
But I did the math. The freelance job was not only more money, it was only two weeks per month. I could do whatever I wanted with the other two weeks. It was a no brainer, really.
Turned out I sort of liked research editing. I spent all day either reading books or talking to people on the phone from all over the country. It was like getting paid to learn stuff, even if it was mostly about hotels, restaurants, and national parks.
With two weeks off each month, I used my new time-management skills to bang out a novel about a guy who plays piano in a bar in Brooklyn then moves out to Seattle. Go figure. I can’t remember if I finished the first draft or not, but I polished up the first two chapters and sent them out to five or six graduate programs.
I had never done well in writing workshops, neither my personality or my writing itself ever quite fit in. I guess it just seemed like what you were supposed to do if you wanted to be a writer. Plus I’d grown intrigued with America. It might be cool to live in Missoula or Tucson for a while.
I applied to Iowa the same way you play the lottery when the pot goes up to a billion. You’re not going to win, but why not.
A few months went by. The rejections started coming in.
Thank you for your interest and for submitting your work for consideration. Due to the high volume of excellent submissions this year, after careful consideration…
Not only didn’t I get into any of my first choices, I didn’t even get into my fallback school in Florida. Looked like I was going to continue being a research editor for a while.
When the envelope came postmarked Iowa City, I was almost lackadaisical when I opened it. What could it possibly tell me that I didn’t already know.
When I read the letter, I scanned ahead, looking for their regrets. Damn, they were good, they’d obviously concealed the bad news in the most highly creative manner yet.
I started the letter again and tried reading it beginning-to-end. Then I reread the whole thing, and read it a third time. It wasn’t possible. And yet, unbelievably, it seemed to be the case.
I had gotten into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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