A short entry this week about not much. Consider this spring break for me. The season finally arrived, a couple of weeks late, and I’d rather be out there in the sun. Besides, my pool of notes for this blog has run dry. Will have to generate more content next week.
It’s been a year. I’m am thinking about past coworkers who say they’re retired but aren’t, quite. They keep taking on spot work, or one-time contracts, or they’re telling me, year after year, that they’ll give it one more year, or a few more months. My last CE invoice went out on 7 March last year, with my retirement announcement attached, and since then I’ve been offered precisely one project. I turned it down. It would have been a good one, too – my first call from an Ivy League house, after decades of angling for one.
It was the right choice to make. My timing is likely to have turned out well. The industry is changing – there’s AI, soon to be AGI, and no one knows what that’s going to do the production side except that houses will look to it for ways to cut costs. There is the US government’s apparently serious war on universities, which won’t affect what people choose to write, or what academic houses hope to publish, but will affect what university libraries can purchase. Enough for today. I’ve earned a dose of patio time.