What's Wendy been up to?

So, what’s been happening in our edge of ordinary? A few things!

It's hydrangea season. We get to look at
this every day outside our lounge window.

School finished

I guess that qualifies as interesting news? Our middle son graduated on Friday, so for the first time in many years we’ll have just one child at school, and he’s only got two years left. Empty nesting is just around the corner!

Our middle son isn’t sure what’s next, so we’ve also walked into a period that holds a lot of uncertainty. Over the last several months we’ve agonised over this, but I think we’re at a place now that we’re a bit more comfortable with the uncertainty.

Being married to a teacher, also means that from now he starts to wind down. Our family holidays start in just under four weeks, so the next few weeks I’ll be busy preparing to walk away from work for that time (it’s especially tricky taking holidays when you’re involved in time-sensitive work like social media, but I’m committed to taking a break).

Uncertainty in Japan

We sit, not just with personal uncertainty at this point, but societal uncertainty. Tokyo (as well as several other prefectures) are still under a state of emergency, at least until June 20. Who knows if that will continue? We've been under SOE since the start of the year, barring three weeks in spring. Additionally, there is the uncertainty surrounding the Tokyo Olympics. 

The former mostly affects us in terms of making summer plans. We’d love to book a camping trip or two, but facilities in Tokyo are closed and facilities outside of Tokyo are closed to those coming from Tokyo! We've got a couple of leads for private arrangements that might be doable, so watch this space :-)

The Olympics doesn’t affect us much, though we do still hold Paralympic tickets. It was very sad, however, to hear that the director of the accounting department of the Japan Olympic Committee jumped in front of a train the other day in an apparent suicide. Holding the Olympics is a contentious issue in Japan and those charged with making it go ahead are sadly saddled with a lot of stress.

Editing a novel

Yep, I've been copy editing a novel over the last four months. The only way I could fit that into my life was to do it on Saturdays, which wasn't ideal, and meant it took a long time. I estimate at least 60 hours. It's my first time to edit a long work of fiction (actually the first time to edit any lengthy book), so it took a while to find my feet. But I really did enjoy it. The author is a close friend and his reason for writing is similar to my reason for writing on this blog: to explain to others a less-than-common life experience that we've each lived. 

I think I also enjoyed having a long-term project during this pandemic that I could look forward to doing on weekends. When the state of emergency stretched on interminably and there wasn't much to look forward to on weekends, having a spare-time occupation like this was very therapeutic.

In some respects it was a lot easier than editing short, non-fiction articles, like I do at work. Because facts aren't set in stone, but also because a short article has to have a pretty tight structure and be a complete unit in itself. So I was able to edit much of it a lot faster in the end. Oh, and I had a very appreciative author, that always makes work much more enjoyable.

What's next? I don't think I'll be taking on another extra-curricular editing job for a while, I don't have a lot of spare time and editing once a week does tend to disrupt the flow, making it not the most efficient way of editing a longer work. But if someone had a paying job, I might consider it! 

However, it does open out the possibility of supplementing our income some time in the future, as editing is something that can be done part-time and from my dining room, wherever that is. Also writing coach is something else that is a possibility. It is good to have this experience under my belt now, and know that the skills I have gained from short-article fiction editing do transfer quite well, especially to copy editing. Developmental editing might be a bit more difficult (think: story arc, character development etc.)

As for long-term weekend projects? I'm thinking about maybe picking up a sewing project. We'll see.