Moving On from States

Last week again consisted of working on states. I guess the time that I left for Spain and the time that I came back ended up being bad because I left during one issue's states and came back during the next issue's states. No break yet from it!

But alas, either this Wednesday or Thursday I'll get my break from states. It couldn't come at a better time because I am getting incredibly burnt out on writing those. Especially since I've known for awhile that I'm going to be writing a feature article. Knowing that just makes me anxious to get started on it.

Today I mostly tried updating the word counts on the states I had done already. What happens is before the ad layouts are finished I have a word count for each state and I work on that. But then once the ad layouts are done we have to readjust the word count for states with no ads. For example, I had 675 words done for Illinois then the updated word count was 1,400. So I had to find more to write. Or for Montana my original word count was 400 then it changed to 88. So then I have to severely cut down on my words, obviously. That's actually pretty difficult. Not only because I hate deleting so many words that took me so long to get... but also because I have to decide what is the most pertinent information. It ends up being pretty dry and straight-forward.

Our weekly staff meeting was longer than usual today. It's very interesting to hear what goes on within the entire company (not just our office) and in the industry. Today the publisher, Kasie, discussed the fact that the management company of one of the groups they publish a magazine for is going to step down next year. So now that group/organization has to find a new management company. Some of the employees were wondering what that meant for the office; whether or not they would lose that organization as a client. But I guess they signed a contract with the organization's board of directors, not the management company. But now they have to worry about the next few years because if the next management company doesn't like them, or maybe offers publishing within their company, that could mean that Serendipity would lose the client.

Since I've never really worked in an office setting it really is interesting to me to see things like that happening. There is so much going on behind the scenes. And everyone has so many different jobs to do and projects they're working on. That could be because the company is fairly small, though.

Hopefully next week I'll have something to report on other than states!