work

Thursday night your stockings needed mending

Today was an awful lot like yesterday, just without the panic of waking up late. We had a team meeting at work, where we mostly discussed our frontlist (the books recently published and on slate for the coming year), and I worked on two or three other projects throughout the day. I did manage to spill water all over myself while eating lunch, but that actually turned out to be not such a big deal. I was presentably dry about 15-20 minutes later.

It wasn’t particularly exciting, but it was a pretty average Thursday.

Wednesday morning papers didn’t come

After all that talk yesterday about train schedules and sleeping in late, I guess it serves me right that I didn’t wake up until a little after 8 AM this morning. I had a panicked moment as I realized how late it was, then I resigned myself to getting the 8:30 train.

It wasn’t the last time that time would go a little wonky for me today. I completely lost the hour between 1 and 2 PM, for instance; one minute I’m eating my lunch (vegetarian chili over rice where they forgot the rice) and reading through revisions on a manuscript, and the next chance I have to look at the clock it’s well over an hour later. Even though I’m sure it couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Say what you will about a lot of work, it does make the day go by faster.

It also means there isn’t much of anything else to write about. I chipped away a little more at this short story I’ve been working on, and right now I’m going to try to watch a little more Doctor Who (“The Ambassadors of Death”) before bed. World on a string, have I!

Wednesday various

  • I wish my company had letterhead this cool. [via]
  • An in-depth interview with Netflix’s Chief Content Officer, Ted Sarandos about their recent deal with Warner Bros. I think this goes a long way to explaining the deal and why it’s ultimately a boon to Netflix subscribers. (As such, the interview is maybe only of interest to subscribers.) There’s been a lot of anger over the planned 28-day window between when DVDs go on sale and when they’ll be available for rent at Netflix. But I really don’t have a problem with it — not if it means more, and better streaming content and a greater likelihood that when a new release is available, there will actually be enough stock for me to get a copy.
  • An interest Catch-22 of science fiction translations revealed:

    Because it takes so long for English-language science fiction to get translated, people in non-English speaking countries are often reading books that are several years behind the current fashion in English speaking countries. They then write books in response to what they have read, but when those books are offered for translation into English the big publishers reject them as “old fashioned”. [via]

  • For most authors, breaking 1,000 words wouldn’t seem like much. For Bruce Holland Rogers (who contributed to Kaleidotrope #3, by the way), it’s practically a novel!
  • And finally, some truly beautiful papercraft [via]

So that was Thursday

I helped out at our company’s exhibit booth at a local conference this morning (hence the tie in the above photo), which was a nice way to break up the work day and spend some time out of the office. And hey, I don’t usually get a chance to ride the subway to work. An author had very generously left a box of fresh pastries for us, and the conference organizers (or the hotel staff), in order to apologize that there wasn’t any of the usual free coffee, had given every booth a hefty Starbucks gift card the day before. So no complaints there. (Although the free water they did make available tasted a little like bitter coffee grounds, so clearly they were determined to use the same dispenser no matter what.)

After all that, it was back to the office with one of my coworkers, a quick lunch, and a little light editing on some PowerPoint slides. I know, the life of a developmental editor is a thrill a minute. Then it was time for home, a couple episodes of The Mighty Boosh — man, that’s an odd show — dinner, playing with the dog, and finishing reading Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, which I really liked — and about which, I suspect, more later.

All in all, a pretty decent day.

It’s already the second week of January?

When you get right down to it, Arthur Dent was right about Thursdays. They really are impossible to get a hang of.

Beyond my mild shock that the work week is almost over, there’s not a whole lot to report. Last night, right before bed, I read a short story by Dan Chaon called “The Bees.” I seem to think I’d read it once before, but it’s a masterful piece of work and an incredibly disquieting ghost story. Which, you know, maybe isn’t the best thing to read late at night.
It’s collected, among other places, in the Peter Straub-edited Poe’s Children: The New Horror, if you’re interested in tempting nightmares yourself.

I somehow managed to get a pretty good night’s sleep, despite that, and I caught the earlier train into Manhattan this morning. On my walk from Penn Station, I started listening to this This American Life show about the problems with alcohol at Penn State. It’s hard not to feel a little sad for the place I went to school, and where I worked for several years, and it’s hard not see the fraternities as a big part of the problem. The amount of alcohol a lot of these college kids consider “not a big deal” and a common, every-night occurrence, is maybe more than I’ve ever had to drink in my entire life. Honestly, three drinks over several hours is about as crazy as I ever get, and I was 21 long before I had anything more than a sip of alcohol.

Meanwhile, one of my co-workers was being shadowed all day by a student from his own alma mater who’s interested in publishing, and I spoke with her for a few minutes about what I do as a developmental editor. I always worry, when I explain my job to fresh-faced hopefuls like this, that I’m making it sound boring. But it’s always nice to discover that I do in fact genuinely like what I do. It really is satisfying to take a good book and, with the author, make it better.

And hey, we got word about our end-of-2009 bonuses and (small but still appreciated) raises today, so that’s something, right?!