Day one in the big publishing house:
At the age of thirty-one, I felt like I was back in year nine starting my work placement all over again. A deer in headlights had a better expression upon its face than I did. I was so terribly nervous.
Again, I arrived at the office ten minutes early, notebook ready, dressed to impress. Anna greeted me and showed me to my computer. The office was deafly silent! Two adjoining rooms with over ten people typing away and yet you could hear a pin drop. My background comes from working in a busy solicitor’s office, with a side office shared by four secretaries, and the old office sounded like a nightclub compared to this space.
If I’m honest the silence made me feel uneasy. It felt completely alien and having already felt under pressure to impress, I now felt that each move was watched (although all the staff were honestly lovely and I do feel that they were not judging me as harshly as I was judging myself). I found the minutes ticked by very slowly.
I was given a manuscript of a book already published to practice copy editing. I loved every moment of this. Firstly, I love reading, and this was a job where I was to read a book! How blooming marvellous is that. Although I do not particularly enjoy picking out people’s mistakes, I have come to appreciate (especially with my own writing) that we all make mistakes. When there is that much enthusiasm to get all the information down on the page, writer’s sometimes easily overlook spelling mistakes, punctuation errors and even half written sentences where a thought has interrupted the flow.
I was given the original manuscript to this book so naturally there were mistakes in there waiting to be found out and put on trial.
At the end of the working day, I took my findings to Anna. She was very complementary of my work, and I had seemed to find all the issues in this manuscript which is a good job of a copy editor. In the future, I don’t want to be the professional that publishes a book only to be shown all the mistakes I had missed.
REDSMITHS and ROBINS 