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.