Juggling — the story of my life!

I'm up to my neck in editing. This managing editor job has so many angles on it, as I've mentioned before (here and here), but the one I'm up to at the moment mostly involves interacting with authors to get the best product I can from them (and the right sized one). This month has been complicated by the fact that my editing boss is in America, and barely stationary for more than a couple of nights at once. Add to that a guest editor for half of the magazine and a fairly new production team, we've had and got some significant challenges.


We are still in the throes of moving the burden of day-to-day management of the magazine over to my shoulders and there are still a number of things I need to ask him to decide. I'm thankful for the ease of email, yet it can build up unrealistic ideas that someone is easily contactable, no matter what they're doing. As it is, he's been less free (and with less internet time) than he imagined and it's been a challenging time.


I guess we'll have the reverse of this when I go to Australia next month. It is shaping up to be a pretty intense time of it, and I can't see myself doing much editing during that time, regardless of whether we have internet access or not. So many people want "a piece of us". We have a lot of friends. We also have family, who rightly want to spend time with us. Our families aren't centred in one spot, so just getting to their geographical localities at the right time is a challenge. I hope we don't disappoint to many people. For this is also our annual holidays: the time when we kick back and relax a bit, recovering from the year behind and preparing for the year ahead.


It is hard to get a balance when we visit Australia for a short time on holidays. That is one reason we don't go back every year (besides that it is very expensive for a family of five to fly). It is just too hard to find time to relax there when so many people expect so much of us. I also expect a lot of myself. I WANT to catch up with too many people, many who mean the world to me. Argghh.


So, having said all that — I'm up to my neck in editing, I'd better drop this and go and do it! See you.