Thursday, August 23, 2012

Learning a New Rhythm

"What's it like to edit a monthly instead of a weekly?"
More than one person has asked me that, now that our first monthly issue of Christian Standard is in the mail and arriving in people's hands.
The most complete answer to the question is, "I'm still figuring it out."
One thing I know for sure, and I guess I should have anticipated it more than I have: Each step in the process takes longer than it did before! This should be obvious, I guess, since the new monthly contains at least four times more material to get ready at one time than before. And each step takes longer than I anticipated it would.
We had our fourth art meeting for the October issue today, and it took 10 or 15 minutes longer than the hour we had allotted for it. Part of that was looking over decisions that had already been made, critiquing layouts in progress, reminding ourselves of art decisions we had made and changing one or two of them.
This kind of scrutiny, tweaking, redoing, and rethinking is a luxury we didn't have when we were cranking out another issue every week. It's part of the plus of going monthly.
But it IS an adjustment. We're still finding our rhythm. And because I was gone so much in July, it feels like we're a bit behind. So I'm working to remedy that.
We're going to the ball game tomorrow night with John and Mary Jane Burgess, and the plan is to stay and enjoy the Friday night fireworks. So I may try to sneak in a blog post tomorrow during the day, because I'll probably be too tired at 11:30 or later when we get home to  make my fingers type something coherent.

Evelyn had to stay at school this evening to attend the LEAD banquet (a leadership development program at the school; a select group of students is paired one-on-one with faculty and staff for mentoring etc.) So I satisfied a hankering I'd been having and treated myself to Skyline for supper.

No comments:

Post a Comment