O/B: Week Fifteen

Good lord, things are wrapping up quickly aren't they? All the sudden there are a mere ten days left in the semester and, of course, I feels as if I have more to do now than I ever have before. There's not even time to panic about graduation.

This week at O/B has gone by even faster than the others. Today was the deadline for summer submissions, so I've been in the office since 7am putting the finishing touches on my own work, and am now inundated with copy-editing everyone else's. I have another deadline on Friday of this week for some of my excel tasks, that to be honest, I've yet to start. It's difficult trying to manage all my work for finals, my job, and the deadlines for this internship. Leaves no time for anything else, and a viscous thirst for whiskey on my lips. I'm confident that I'll get what needs to be done finished, but until then I will radiate stress.

Wednesday was our creative art meeting, where we looked at the photo layout for the summer edition. These meetings are usually very beneficial to me as a writer. They serve as a meeting of minds; everyone is in the office and we all come together to discuss what has thus far been separate pieces of work and try to figure out how they will talk to each other in the final drafting of the publication. Angie and Ryan spearhead this meeting, and Mike, Tuck, Drew, Christopher, and I get to sit back, postulate, and give our input. Something I hadn't give a lot of thought to as a writer, before this internship, was how photos are chosen to accompany a piece of text. Often times the writer doesn't get to make this decision, and it's really quite interesting to hear someone removed from the piece try to work out what should be it's focus. It's a good test of clear, centered writing.

We began our proofs for Cast 8am Friday morning, which turned out to be a nicer day than I had expected. Mike bought the whole office pizza, and everyone was stoked it was Friday, so the day passed quickly. I found lots of errors in the PDF mock-up, so it was refreshing to know that the work I was doing was actually useful. Sometimes it's hard to tell here. We will second proof the publication tomorrow at 8am.

O/B Week Fourteen

For the first time in a long time, I only spent one day on the weekend working on things for O/B and had a day off! I actually got to go out to Virginia City for their winter series Chautauqua and a NRDC-sponsored conservation banquet, which was a lot of fun... until my boyfriend got violently ill and I had to drive his manual (which I do NOT know how to drive) back to Bozeman so we could get him to urgent care. Lesson in that? Apparently fun comes at a cost. Or don't eat Virginia City cheesecake anymore. Either one.

I'm having a hard time remembering what I even did this past week in the office-- that's how thrilling my work has been lately. I mostly have been writing my articles for the edition, and working on small tasks like updating our social media and distribution things. I audited the spring edition article uploads (again) and finally have found those to be complete. If I never upload another thing online again, I will die happy.

I met with Mike to discuss a piece I wrote for Cast on hiking to fish at alpine lakes. He had a lot of critique for this particular piece. On his dual screens, he pulled his edited-final version up and my original side-by-side and discussed the changes he made. I found this incredibly helpful because I could see and hear the difference in the final version, and get a small explanation from Mike to reinforce the idea. Most of what he pointed out was so obvious to me that I couldn't believe what I had written originally. It was a good reminder to keep editing and to stop and ask myself "what work is this doing?" or "is this needed here?" since I have a habit of being verbose, and adding details that, though pretty, are non-functional.

During this same  meeting I was able to talk to Mike about my final days here. Looks like we'll officially end the internship May 1st, but I'll be coming in sporadically for a couple of weeks to help Tuck finish up the copy-editing and fact-checking for the summer edition. (UGH, I thought I might have gotten out of that one.) I also got to talk to Mike about writing for O/B after I'm gone as a paid writer, which he was game for, and we even discussed a few articles he's been wanting to get in the works that he thinks we could feature for the fall issue. Hopefully my first summer free from the binds of school is just angsty enough that I can bring myself to get going on that writing!

O/B Week Thirteen

You can tell it's been a busy few weeks, since I forgot to post last week! Things are rolling forward and with graduation on the horizon, deadlines are becoming more and more real. I have ten thousand things to do before May first and have started back up at my airline position, so I'm just continuously trying to check things off the list and keep my head above water.

Surprisingly, the internship feels almost like a break at this point. Don't get me wrong-- I still have an immense amount of work to do for O/B, but since the Cast copy-editing and fact-checking (the worst part of this gig) is now done, I'm just focusing on writing for now-- which is kind of nice! As I mentioned from the first week in April, Mike and Tuck assigned me a feature article for the summer edition on catch and release fishing. I have to admit, I was overwhelmed by the idea of the piece. Mike felt really strongly that we had something to prove by publishing it, so there was a lot of pressure on me to find the right kind of content. Just for background, they wanted me to look at the number of licenses sold in the state of Montana in a fishing year (there are more than FIVE types), and somehow calculate based off a now-outdated fishing pressure survey how many fish are likely to be dying as a result of catch and release, and decide whether it would be more ecologically beneficial to just operate on a bag limit premise. I'm sure you can see how quickly that becomes complicated, and just as easily inaccurate. I would have had a little less than three weeks to complete the research, conduct interviews, and write up the damn thing. 

Thank goodness they came to their senses. I'm not going to say that Mike and Tuck were crazy in thinking that I could reasonably get a project of that size done in that kind of time frame (not to mention the overlap with finals week and the completion of my capstone paper), but at the very least it was an unrealistic assignment. They tabled it for the fall issue and gave me a few other articles to write for summer, which has been the focus of most of my energy lately. 

I was assigned a small news and notes piece on the GLVT's guided walks, a single page spread covering the A.R.T. utility box project, a segmented article on trail food, including foraged and homemade foods, an energy bar comparison, and a profile of a few different energy goos. I am in charge of the Outlook again for the summer edition (yay!), and wrote two gear reviews for a pair of mountain biking gloves and my Scarpa trail running shoes.  It doesn't feel like as much writing as the spring edition did-- but then again, I'm settled in now and feel much more confident in the kind of work I'm doing. 

The most difficult part of the magazine right now is how hectic things feel. All the deadlines are culminating at the end of this internship, and though Mike has significantly pared down my to-do list here, I still find myself concerned with the amount of smaller, menial things I need to find the time to get done. I have several spreadsheets to work on by the first of the month as well as an intern-wide coupon contest , and the deadline for the summer edition is the 27th, Since we just got things sorted out with Cast, and the summer issue follows so closely there's really no break at all. 

Did I mention ANOTHER intern quit this week? Our video intern, Morgan left us since her work was sub-par. Only two more weeks to go. 

O/B: Week Tweleve

I have a thousand things to cover this week. It feels like a month has passed in a short five days.

This week was dedicated to copy-editing and clean-ups. Luckily, Cast is a smaller publication than O/B so the editing process isn't nearly as extensive. I edited my own work, then suffered through grammatically-inconsiderate work of the fly guides writing for this edition, and then finished up by reviewing the "final", reprinted articles that we will recycle into the 2015 edition. Next week will be the proofs.

Overall, I spent 9-5 on Monday editing and was in the office from 9-11:30 on Wednesday to finish the additional articles. Tuck sent me home with a few over the weekend that I finished on Easter Sunday. I spent Thursday evening working on the second round of hyperlink editing for Chris in the sales department, and finally got that in to him at 12:30am. Friday I worked on fixing the spring edition online article uploads-- I had forgotten to label about half of the pages with departmental headers (who would have thought that something so minute could mess up the entire organization of the site! Lesson? Attention to detail, always.) After I fixed those, Tuck did an audit of the winter article uploads which the intern before me (who quit) had uploaded. He was missing a lot of them, so it's my job to fix them. It's a busy week, and the next one coming even busier, but it's productive work. I just never want to fact-check again. Ever.

The meetings on Monday are what I want to talk about. I mentioned earlier we had three: the Spring post-mortem, the Cast alignment, and the summer idea meeting where we offer up our best potential drafts for the summer edition. I really liked the ideas I had, and left the meeting feeling confident about what I had suggested. I found out today Mike wants me to write a feature in the summer edition on the implications of Catch and Release fishing. Exciting! I'm a little bummed I won't get to write the things I wanted to, but it's a great opportunity to get my name headlined in the magazine. I need to discuss how long I'll be with O/B, since the internship requirements are coming quickly to a close. Three more weeks, give or take!

O/B: Week Eleven

This week at O/B has been nothing short of overloaded.

However, I did have a lot of chances to be productive and really work hard to get things done, which is always good practice (because, inevitably the "real" world will be just as demanding.) Wednesday was a day entirely spent plugging away at the article uploads that I've been on for the past couple weeks. The process is tedious and boring, but needs to get done. I spent a long day in the office Friday (9am-11:30pm) finishing these up, and damn it feels good to be done.

I was able to take a break on Friday to go out with another intern to MSU Friday to represent Outside Media Group for the incoming freshman. I ended up having a really great time talking with prospective students and getting to give advice about MSU, O/B, and the awesome valley we're all nestled in. I was surprised to notice some of the trends in questions I got, like most freshman wanting to now super close locations for recreation, probably because most won't have a car on campus. This means that I can use this kind of observation to better tailor the MSU Pocket Guide facebook posts to reflect the kind of thing freshman are going to be into, which potentially means more "friends", and more $$ for O/B. It was a rewarding experience, and gave me a much needed break from the hum-drum of working away at my desk in the office (8 hours there can be taxing).

Monday was the deadline for Cast, so I spent a good chunk of time this weekend working on the articles I wrote for the guide, and fact-checking our sidebars. This is a collaborative process with the sales team, which I realized can be tricky. Even though my deadline to get this stuff in was the 30th, the sales team didn't quite have all the ads laid out yet, so Tuck and I will have to wait. This can be more stressful for us, but as long as we can get the rest of the copy-editing done we should be okay.

Monday also brought an onslaught of meetings, an intern meeting with Mike and the post-mortem meeting for the spring edition, and then the summer issue idea session. Pizza and beer was had by all. I'll talk about how these went and what we discussed in next weeks' post.
For now, I must edit!

O/B: Week Ten

This is it.
The moment I've been waiting for since I dumped my picture-books into the bathtub as a six-year-old child, proclaiming I wanted "the real thing"; the moment I'd craved since that child grew into a bold teen who fawned over T.S. Eliot instead of T-Pain, since my fingers first found cathartic pleasure in stringing letters into lyrical phrases to say more powerful things than my mouth could even manage. The moment when I can call myself... a writer.
This is it.

The spring edition of Outside Bozeman is officially here, and I am officially published. My eight articles are not much, and they're neither the most beautiful pieces of writing I've produced, nor the most engaging, but they're out there for the world to see, and that's one hell of a foot in the door. The road could have been shorter, simpler, and less strenuous, for certain-- but I'm glad it was not, and I'm thankful for every mistake that now makes me a better, tighter writer.

BUT-- there simply isn't time to revel in the beauty of what's done... there's still so much more to do! Production deadline for Cast, the fishing guide, is set for the thirtieth of this month, and I have several articles to write for this publication, as well as a few other tasks before the craziness of copy-editing resumes next week.

In the "post-mortem" meeting for the 2014 Cast, I pitched a couple ideas that I'll get to write about in the 2015 edition. The one I'm most looking forward to is a piece on river stewards, where I'll get to highlight some of the great non-profits that work to keep Montana's rivers clean and healthy. I'm especially excited about this because it's the closest I think I can get to eco-crit/lit. with this internship. Though Cast isn't as big of a publication as O/B, it will be a nice challenge to see what I can produce in a limited space that's working within a niche with which I'm not as familiar (I'm sadly just a novice fisherwoman). The best part about this magazine though, is now that I've been through the production process with the O/B spring issue, Cast will be much easier to prepare for.

Right now it seems to be deadline week. Aside from the overwhelming amount of class work for MSU that I have due and my production deadline, I've been charged with article uploads for the spring edition. It's an incredibly tedious task, and I've been getting through the 128 page magazine at the rate of about 2-3 articles an hour. I've managed to work on uploads for four straight days, and am approaching the half-way point. It's slow progress, but it also teaches me to be careful and meticulous-- traits important to hone for the next round of copy-edits, and my own writing.

Other tasks this week on top of writing and uploads include checking the hyperlinks for the digital edition of O/B for the sales department, and working the booth for MSU Friday. I had a re-alignment meeting with Mike at the beginning of the week and thankfully he offered to give me an extension on a few excel spreadsheets he asked me to work through, so those are off my plate for now. Something he said to me in the meeting was nice to hear, "Ask for help before you sink, not after". I think too often with school and work, we feel like, in some way, we're not allowed to reach out when things become a struggle. Personally, I feel ashamed when I can't manage everything that's thrown at me, and I really hate asking for help in any way. But honestly, had I not taken the deadline extension when offered, I would have sacrificed the quality of the job I did-- which wouldn't help anyone. The lesson? Everyone gets overwhelmed, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT-- that's stepping up to the plate, even if it means admitting you need to take a step back.

This is a busy one, and I'm now certain that it's going to be a very long five weeks...

O/B: Week Nine

Mike graciously gave me a week off for spring break, which I took full advantage of by heading to the Netherlands for a couple of days and biking all around Amsterdam. Had a blast, but now back to the grind.

The magazine is done-- and it's incredibly rewarding to know that on Wednesday the months of hard work will be held in my hands, finished, and I'll be a published writer. After countless late night sessions, meticulous edits, and a slightly buzzed-for-creativity captioning session, production is done. I learned a lot about the publishing process, and I'm grateful for the experiences I've had here. I can look back and know that when I submit a query or am assigned an article for a future publication, I know what's happening on the other end of the process as well, which means I'll be familiar with ways to make it a little bit easier (like proper formatting!).

Out of all the writing I did for the spring edition of O/B, my raptor center article was the most important to me. I felt compelled to portray the center the way I experienced it, and it was the only article I wrote that required face-to-face communication. I felt obligated to "repay" Becky and Jordan for the great work they were doing in any way I could. In this case, through a well-written and thorough article. Well. In the process of all that editing, my eyes must have glazed over a few errors in the text. I made an awful mistake and called Jordan, the assistant director, Jason, and never caught the error. Luckily, Mike called me into his office on Monday and we went through the article, which by pure luck had be edited by a volunteer at the center who fixed the error and found a few others... like a bird named Chaco that I said "fluttered from perch to perch", but who, in fact, cannot fly. These small errors killed me. I'm a clean writer, and if I want to be a journalist or anything similar, there is no room for those kinds of mistakes. I have to work on tightening up my prose and fact-checking. Lesson learned. 

This week is reminiscent of my first here-- I'm in charge of uploading articles from the spring edition to our website. I remember how confusing and complicated this seemed to me in the beginning, and now-- thought it is still incredibly time consuming and equally frustrating at points-- I feel like I can take it on no problem. It's cool to see that kind of organic growth goin' on. 

O/B: Week Eight

Layout's were done this week, meaning we have a full mock-up of the magazine, and the editorial team segments it into three parts based on page number. We then use Adobe to go through it digitally (though Mike does it all by hand) and look for aesthetic problems, like too much white space or mal-aligned photos to text, as well as another round of copy-edits to be sure nothing has slipped by us as far as the writing goes. Each editor (there are four, if you include me) looks over each section, with Mike doing the final approval of our comments. We will then repeat this process again (tomorrow) when the creative team has finished their corrections. We also have a meeting today where we will brainstorm titles and subheadings for the articles, which will be worked into the final edition.

This past week was unpredictable. There were a lot of assignments for the magazine that were last-minute, like a few sentence captions for photos, or fact-checking assignments. The proofing is tedious work, but it keeps me on my toes and makes me more alert to the small errors that pop up in my own writing.

We begin our post-mortem sessions for the Cast Fishing Guide today, which means assignments will begin coming later this week. I just keep telling myself I'm halfway there!

O/B: Week Seven

This week was a slow one, comparatively. Turned in two blog posts-- one on winter riding and one on  for the MSU Pocket Guide blog on study snacks to avoid gaining weight in the winter. They both came out rather quickly and easily, but necessitated much editing.

I had a good lesson this week-- Mike and I went over the study snacks blog, and got into a minor dispute over the nature of the type of food I chose: mostly healthy, and unintentionally meat-free items. I wholeheartedly disagreed with his critique, but it took me a while to realize that wasn't the point-- and the change was then made, and the article published. Respect the editor, respect your boss, they have the final say.
After all of this, I had a few additional changes to make before publishing the blog on a Friday night, so I made them and went home, forgetting about it. Saturday morning, while glancing through the online version, I realized that the edit session with Mike hadn't been saved, and the published version reflected the original draft of the article... and all it's errors. I had to go back through it quickly and try to remember everything Mike had corrected. In a way, it felt like a blessing in disguise because it tested my ability to retain what Mike had taught me and spot those small errors in the text again. He hasn't mentioned anything to  me, so I think I must have caught (nearly) all of them.

Copy-edits for spring are done, and now we wait for the end of the week to proofread and finalize the layout. Assignments for Cast will soon be allocated, and then we will repeat the process. This week one of the other editorial interns quit, which I have mixed opinions about. It means less competition, but now more work for me.

Today I'm bogged down with administrative tasks-- sorting through excel spread sheets, de-duping, updating, organizing, etc. It  makes my head hurt, and is completely uninteresting, as well as rather hard to understand and make decisions about because of the nature of the material. It's frustrating and slow work, but it's sort of nice to have a break from the editing and writing... for a little while.

O/B: Week Six

Stressful week. Copy edits, re-writes, more deadlines.

The week was a slow one for all those not in the editorial department. We're getting closer and closer to our production dates, so articles are reaching the final stages of their drafting. Once an article has been written, it becomes a draft which is then fact-checked (by an intern), and goes through it's first round of copy-editing. A second round is done by an out-of-house editor who checks for content consistency, and then the drafts are sent to the managing editor to be copy-edited again, laid-out in the appropriate category, and for any changes to be made. These drafts are then approved by Mike, who does the final round of editing and sends the finished article to the writer for consent. This process ends this coming week, so the art editors can have the week to work on creative layout and photography. Then, next week, we will begin proofreads of the mock-up, and the issue will be go through the final stages of editing before print.

This week I did some editing, then some writing. I've been assigned two more blog posts, and had to work on the Outlook, a more creative photo-accompanied piece for the beginning of the mag., as well as some rewrites for the articles I already turned in.

Things are still going well overall, and every day I seem to learn something more about the language that I didn't know (like "cleanup" is one word when used as a noun!). I feel stressed about the amount of work I know I have coming up (Mike assigns to-do lists so we are always responsible for deadlines, which is stressful), on top of school, but I am motivated by knowing this is my last semester and that this work will be paying off in the long run.

More to come.