A Brief Description of What My New Job Involves

I'm not moving to Portland; no, quite the opposite, I'm nestling even deeper into Connecticut. My new desk may be within sight of the old one, but the new job has this aura of semi-permanence about it, like I could be doing this for a while if I wanted to. (One of the other production editors has been doing the job for something like ten years.) I'm not taking it for granted that that's literally true, obviously. Still, in the medium term I'm going to need to figure out my long term; in the short term I'm just trying to get used to a whole lot of new work. Tomorrow kicks off the third week of this.

In case anyone was wondering what exactly it is I'm doing now, it mostly comes down to shepherding a bunch of manuscripts (already complete and under contract to the press) through their editorial life cycle. Copyediting, proofreading, and indexing are all done by freelancers for these; I coordinate things, answer editorial questions for the freelancers, try to keep everything on deadline, and check the last stages of proof. (I will be copyediting a couple or three manuscripts each year, too.) There's a lot of work, but ideally following a fairly rational plan. Now and then, as I understand it, one has to work with a crazy author, and then you get a less rational plan.

I'm looking at it as an intellectually semi-skilled day job that I find pretty appealing in comparison to other kinds of work. I'm happy to be here. Actually, this is almost exactly what I had in mind as an ideal thing to try when I was looking to switch jobs two years ago. We'll see how it goes from here.