This is the second of these Editor's Notes that I'm writing this week. It's gonna be a tough one, I can tell you. Usually, I only have to write one per week, and I'm lucky if I can pound that out.
The reason I'm having to do this is the holiday season. With all the days off, we have to adjust our deadlines. Sometimes that means we have just a couple of days to accomplish what we'd normally do in a week. It's exhausting.
Be that as it may, it's something that I'm pretty used to by now. I've always worked in fields where I had to work on holidays. I've been 20 years or so in the publishing business, and the holidays are always the busiest time of the year. Before that, I managed a cinemas. So no holidays off there. And when I worked in radio, I had to do my on-air shift, even if that meant I had to work on Christmas.
Be that as it may, it's still kind of exhausting. In publishing you have to make sure that all your work is done so the people who do the rest of the process — people in pre-press, printing and distribution — have time to do their jobs as well. All of this to make sure that the magazine hits the newsstands and subscribers and website on the usual schedule.
And now that I live in Thailand, there's an additional holiday that I have had to get used to. When Songkran hits, we're also on short deadlines, which means long, strange hours for everybody.
All of this, of course, is balanced out by the fact that we get to enjoy long weekends and other days off. So, as the old saying goes, every moment of pleasure is purchased with a little pain.
The upshot of all of this, and my point really, is that sometimes I've got to sit down and write two columns in one week. My life just isn't that fascinating, and I've already written about most of the interesting things that have happened to me in the past. So you end up getting something like this.
It's an Editor's Note about why I'm having to write this Editor's Note. Enjoy!
Sean Vale
Editor
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