A week of ups and downs

It’s been a week of ups and downs this week, and a very busy one as a result. But there’s some good news in here too. Some very good news.

The week started well with me cracking on with another big editing job. It was actually due in the previous day, Sunday. But I warned the “handler” at the publisher that it might be a few days over as I had some last minute queries. I promised her that the author would have it back by the end of Wednesday, or Thursday at the latest.

On Tuesday I had technological gremlins. First of all my desktop, when I switched it on, went into an automatic repair … Uh? I didn’t even know it was broken! But this auto-repair went into loop and I had to over-ride it in the end to try and boot it up in safe mode.

But it wouldn’t let me boot up in safe mode either. And after that also went into loop, I over-rode it again and decided to restore to an earlier date. Of course, my heart dropped at that as I thought there was bound to be a load of critical data now lost (that I’d have to retrieve from backup), and I thought I’d have to reload all of my preferences and software, etc.

The restore date was actually 1am on Monday 17 July … and I hadn’t done any work on the pc at all on Monday. So this was very good news. The system restore took some time, but we got there in the end.

I settled down to some work, and then took the Kindle Fire into the conservatory to work in there … and the Kindle Fire also went into loop, trying to collect emails from my Yahoo account.

In the end I had to ask Kindle to call me and log a call. I spent half an hour with the lady there who had to pass me to someone else in the end as it was a fix she couldn’t do … and when the someone else came on, it turned out there was a known issue on the Kindle email app! And nothing to do with my Kindle or my Yahoo at all.

So we removed the Kindle email app and installed the Yahoo Mail app instead – and all is working well again.

I lost a lot of time on Tuesday, and I was already behind on that editing job … so I worked overtime on Tuesday evening.

And when I came to switch off for the day, I found that Word had lost ALL of my edits, despite having auto-backup and saving at the end of each page!

Meanwhile, last Thursday I’d dropped a book proposal in to the publishers I edit for. It was a history of a very big confectionery company … and I included samples. The samples went down so well that the commissioning person there shared it on Facebook, giving me full marks for making it stand out! (I’d been dropping this book proposal in for three weeks, but we kept on eating the samples … so this time I went straight from the supermarket …)

At 6:23am on Wednesday, an email came in from the commissioning person … with a formal contract offer! Wahey!  And had I not been so busy trying to catch up with the editing job, Wednesday might have passed in a very smug cloud of contentment.

The rest of Wednesday morning went by in a whirl as emails – and the contract – bounced back and forth. And I asked if lovely-already-boss could be my handler, as we’ve sort of worked together for almost as long as he’s been there and definitely as long as I’ve been working for them.

Wednesday afternoon I needed to pull myself together and crack on with that edit and redo everything that had been lost the day before … I also had some proofs in by now that also needed to be back by Friday. [Gulp!]

At 9am on Thursday the phone rang … and I didn’t come off the phone again until midday. I was still in my dressing gown, and I hadn’t even had a cup of tea let alone any breakfast. It was all very important personal stuff, but DIDN’T THEY KNOW I HAD DEADLINES?!

By the time we finished, I had something to eat and then battened down the hatches. I had to finish the edit, and I had to finish the proofreading too. AND I had a contract to read and sign.

I did it, though. By the time the poet had cooked us beans on toast for tea and was ready to go to band practice, I’d done all three jobs: I’d finished the edit and sent it back to the author; I’d checked the proofs and packaged them for the handler; and I’d read, altered, initialled and signed the contract and packaged that up to go back too.

Then I dropped the poet off at band practice, did the weekly shopping, collected him again, and hand-delivered the proofreading and the book contract. Phew!

I’m taking today off!

How has your week been?