What do you do when you're good at nothing?

Ah, I was so spirited in my last post. I'm still excited about Poptimist, which should be on streets now, but I am not excited about the job I did on the December issue.


I gave it my all: editing stories, giving feedback, getting stories rewritten. I even wrote up a band myself -- San Diego's Tape Deck Mountain. (This was less of an exercise in writing than it was a way of making my budget. I decided I could up writer's rate if I wrote a 200-word article and two album reviews myself.)


I devoted nights after work, my Fridays off, and weekends to the project once all the stories were turned in. I read and reread the copy, changing punctuation here, checking spelling there.


Last Sunday I sat with the publisher for four hours as we made last-minute changes. The artist she had contracted wasn't working out so there was a lot of last-minute scrambling. She sent the final version to me an hour before it went to the printer. All the last-minute changes produced some errors, which I was quite proud of catching on my final read-through.


This all went to pot on Sunday. I had been out from morning to evening throwing a friend's baby shower and was horrified to see this email from our publisher awaiting me at home: "the concert listings all say 'November.' "


What?!!! Where?!!!


I scrambled to the print-outs I had gone through for the issue. The error wasn't on our club picks pages, it wasn't on our live picks pages, whew. Oh, but there it was, on the club listings pages. Clear as day it said "November" on the top of the page instead of December. It said "November" four different times.


I had poured over these listings many times. I changed dates, spellings, punctuation but apparently never looked up at the header. Oy!


This drops our publication from awesome to amateur and it's my fault. The buck stops here. I am paid to catch these kinds of errors. I take pride in catching these types of errors.


So for the last couple of days I have been blue. I am earning a living right now as a copyeditor yet I didn't catch what is now an obvious mistake. So if I'm not a good copyeditor or a good writer, what exactly am I good at? How can I sell myself as either when this keeps haunting me?


I dread seeing the magazine now.