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!