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!