work

Saturday

Last night was our office holiday party, and I think I may have had a little too much to drink. Less than last year, but enough to leave me feeling a little shaky and hungover today.

I skipped finding out where the after-party was being last night in favor of going back to the office for my work computer — I know, fun times — and then coming home to watch Star Trek IV. That’s probably for the best. I drink so rarely, beyond a beer every now and again, and felt crummy enough today, that Spock mind-melding with humpback whales is probably more my speed.

Today it snowed, so it’s just as well I didn’t feel like going much of anywhere after running a couple of errands. I wish I could say I spent the day doing something more exciting than napping and watching a couple of movies — The Changeling and Blazing Saddles — and napping. But that would be a lie.

I think next year I may stick to beer at the office party. (I’m not sure it’s the sort of thing one should face completely sober.) Until then, I’m off from work until the end of the year. I went back to the office to pick up my computer, since I may need to do some work while I’m out, beyond glancing occasionally at e-mail. January is likely to be a very, very, very busy month, so if there’s any way I can get a jump on that, I will. Not just yet, though. For now I’m just going to finish recovering from the party and enjoy my time off.

Thursday

Today was my last full day in the office for the rest of the year.

Tomorrow is our office holiday party, and so we’ll be closing at 12:30, and after that it’s straight into some vacation time and the holidays. I almost can’t believe it myself.

I suspect I’m going to have a lot of work waiting for me when I get back and a very busy January.

Tuesday

So it’s turning out to be an interesting week.

It’s snowish, for one thing, or at least it was in the city, where it turned mostly into rain or too wet to stick. But here on Long Island, there was actually some accumulation. Not as much as in that photo up top — that’s from this past February, when it snowed a lot — but enough that I think this qualifies as our first proper snowfall of the season. We’ve had little bits and light dustings so far, but nothing really that would have lasted through the night.

We got a new coffee machine at the office. And while it’s very weird and perhaps needlessly complicated — little packs instead of little cups, no choice of serving size, and our mugs just barely fit — but it seems to make a better cup of coffee.

Two of the textbooks I’ve worked on published this week: one I was expecting and another I wasn’t, at least not for a couple of weeks.

I’m making some good progress on a short story, rather unexpectedly. Except tonight, when I was distracted by copyediting some stories for Kaleiodtrope‘s next issue, which it occurred to me this weekend is next month. (And I need to give authors time to respond.) I also spent some time re-creating a lost spreadsheet which had all of the stories and poems I’ve already accepted for 2014 and 2015. I essentially have the next six issues mapped out, or at least filled up, but reminding myself of which stories will fill those issues was good, as I’ll admit I’ve been feeling my enthusiasm for the zine lag a bit lately. It can feel like an expensive hobby that garners some very good but limited attention. I’m trying more ways of imprinting my own personal stamp on it. (Hence things like the fake advice column.)

Oh, and I haven’t mentioned that I will almost certainly be going back to the Banff Centre near the start of next fall. I still need to confirm the dates at work — still waiting til we can request 2014 time off — but my application for a self-directed residency was accepted. So that’s cool.

But, really, it’s all about that new coffee machine.

Tuesday

I have had worse days, I’ll just say that.

I finished one review report and sent it to the commissioning editor this morning, then kind of unexpectedly did the same for another review report after lunch. Both are projects that I inherited from colleagues who’ve left the company — at their own choosing, and we were sorry to see them both go — and the latter is just one I’m helping to shepherd along until our new development editor starts work in a few weeks. In all honesty, there wasn’t a lot to be done, and I was just compiling the reviews and summarizing what they said. Of course, there weren’t a lot of reviews, so points of consensus were a little scarce on the ground. But the feedback was generally positive, and I think the book will do just fine without me.

I always feel a little weird talking about work here, in part because I’m not sure it’s interesting to anybody else but me. (Then again, I could probably argue that about two thirds or more of what I post here.) I like what I do, but the mechanics of it aren’t necessarily exciting. I do market research, look at courses and enrollments, send out questionnaires and surveys to instructors, get feedback on textbook chapters and pedagogy, look for points of consensus about the strengths we want to highlight and the weaknesses we need to address, and put this all into a format that’s hopefully easily digestible for the book’s editor and its author(s). I do other stuff, taking books from proposal to production to publication, but that’s the main thing. And while textbook research can be surprisingly interesting — I think about pedagogy more now than I ever did as a student — it’s probably not the kind of interesting that’s easily conveyed in a weblog post, much less that’s infectious.

Though, honestly, without all that, the most interesting thing that happened all day was that I forgot my MetroCard at home and had to buy a new one this morning. And if you thought collating and summarizing reviewer feedback was less than scintillating…

Anyway, it was a pretty good day.