Lately I’ve been struggling with productivity over the weekends. For some reason, I’ve slipped out of the “Every day is Tuesday” rule, and yesterday afternoon I had to leave the house to really get some work done.

I set up camp at my favorite coffee shop and was joined on hour four by a nice guy named David who needed access to a power outlet. (Earlier two very blonde grad students also shared my table, and I spent 45 minutes listening to them debate the benefits of dating an older guy of 30. “It’s nice when they can, like, take you out for dinner, you know?”) David and I talked for a little while about the intermittent strength of the internet signal, then he switched to normal small talk.

“So, what do you do?” David asked. This was a few minutes after he made a passing reference to his girlfriend, so I had much less interest in the small talk than I did when he first joined me.

“I’m a writer,” I said. This is a tough sentence for me because his next question always follows.

“Oh, wow. A writer. Cool. Novels? Magazine articles…?” His voice trailed off as he met my eyes. The blue from his laptop screen made his face look a little green.  I had just completed a rewrite of a brochure for a class for energy efficiency professionals.

“I’m a copywriter — brochures, newsletters, press releases. That kind of thing.”

“Ah,” David said. “Cool.”

But I could tell at this point that David didn’t think my title of “writer” was quite as cool as when he thought I was a published author or a jet-setting travel critic. David understood the term “copywriter,” which I’ve discovered is not something that everyone knows. But he didn’t really think copywriting was worth further discussion, and he didn’t ask me for my autograph (or my phone number).

I love being a writer of any sort. This week I’m interviewing energy efficiency experts for a newsletter article on how they view the trend toward energy conservation awareness in the coming year. On Friday, I’m consulting with a legal expert on how to rewrite association bylaws. I write tips on low-fat menu planning for meeting planners, biographies of amazing entrepreneurs, press releases of state-of-the-art neurological breakthroughs that give people back their lives, web pages for expectant mothers. I love absorbing the information I write for my clients, and I’m very happy to give them information they can share with others.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be an author of my own material, with my name on the spine and my material inside. I’ll get there someday.

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