She's Writing a Novel

When you were a little kid, introductions weren't necessary. You could play for hours with strangers and never even care about learning so much as their name.
When you got a little older, you needed to learn names, and "favorites." Do you like this and hate that? And you banded yourself into tribes based on pop albums and shoes and tv shows and sandwiches. By high school, you weren't talking to anybody so introductions didn't matter.
But in college, you came out of it, and introductions were the cliche, "So, what's your major?" And you stared baffled at math majors and flirted with lit majors (but if you had it to do over again you'd reverse your approach, knowing the average salaries of math majors and lit majors). Then you left college, left the world of study altogether, and found yourself meeting people and being asked the question "So, what do you do?" and grateful that your answer isn't "work at Barnes and Noble."

"Publishing," you always say, being sure to mix it with just the right notes of enthusiasm, boredom, pride, and indifference.

And almost without exception, the response from people is excitement and respect and maybe even envy. Some of them are would-be writers, and take you as The Big Break or The Connection they've been waiting for. Some of them work listlessly in service or retail, and admire you for managing to work in an office building and getting yourself health benefits and a business card. Some of them retain a vague idea of publishing as something glamorous, and think you must be terribly cool. Some of them hate their jobs and "publishing" sounds more exiciting than whatever they're doing. Some are lit majors who work in Barnes and Noble, and wish they could say they worked in publishing instead. Some are people who know that publishing can be hard to break into, and respect you for the achievement or suspect you of whoring your way through life.

In any event, announcing what you do generally earns you points with strangers. And usually you try to leave it at that, evasive about what you publish and what it is that you actually do. You like the idea of leaving strangers with the assumption that you publish a glossy high-fashion magazine, or cutting-edge books, or novels by undiscovered authors. They don't need to know that you publish extremely specialized high-science articles you can't understand, and that you mostly push files around to people and tell them "do this" and later check to make sure that they did. They don't need to know that for the most part it's boring, and you don't do much actual "editing" even though you are an "editor." They don't need to know that publishing doesn't really pay, and you'd make more money as a waitress.

They don't need to know that the best part about working in publishing is telling people, "Me? Oh, I work in publishing."