Randomness

I've been going through a slow patch with the scientific editing this last couple of weeks. Usually one or two manuscripts come in each week or so, but for the last four weeks, nothing. Now this is not unique: I've had slow patches like this and times when the work was coming in way too thick for my liking in the nine years I've been doing this. But whenever I get a dry spell like this, I am always sooooooo grateful that it's not all that I do.

I'm also grateful that it's not work I want to do for the rest of my life, and if it slowly starts to peter out, that's fine with me. What I do need to do, however, is be mindful that that income needs to come from somewhere, and push myself to ramp up my other work to pick up the slack. This is the tricky bit, because we all get comfortable in our lives, and recognizing that you need to ramp up the hours you're spending doing something is much easier than actually making that shift.

Now next week three or four manuscripts could very easily come in: that's how it works, randomly, and so I might need to ramp back down the expectations for my other work. This randomness is a bit of a pain, in other words. But it's also just part of the deal. I have the same randomness with my Christmas tree farm, in that people show up or not, often for personal reasons that have nothing to do with me. New customers come and go, and there is an overall trajectory that you can see from a distance, but the particulars are pretty random.

One of the things I love about my model of taking orders for spoons and running a wait list is that it serves as an antidote to this randomness. It's the opposite: a list of work waiting to be done. I can speed it up or slow it down within reason, and it feels like money waiting to be made. That is a comforting backdrop to all that randomness in the rest of my income.

What's random about your own income? And what can you do to create a backstop for that?