It’s been an awful week and a half here. Everyone except Sparky was very ill with the flu. Today is the first day everyone is where they’re supposed to be. We’re all tired and drained, most of us haven’t eaten properly all week, and I’m still mystified as to how Sparky managed to escape all of this. (HRH thinks it was sheer force of will, because we had a Lego party for five of his friends slated to happen here yesterday, and we warned him that if he got sick we’d have to reschedule it. He stayed well, and the party went off brilliantly. Six ten-year-olds, a tonne of Lego, pizza, and a movie; it was a good day.)

This is good, everyone being where they’re supposed to be, because I am starting a new project today, according to the contracts that were countersigned last week. I signed an NDA in early January, heard nothing for a while, and then was in negotiations with Paris office at the end of January. (Full confession: I enjoyed saying “I’m in negotiations with Paris” way too much.) This week is devoted to getting to know the project, the team, and talking about guidelines and standards. It’s an exciting project and one I’m very interested in working on. It’s an experiment of sorts for the employer who signed me, because they’ve never had a devoted copyeditor oversee all the written content for a project like this before. The team’s writers are said to be happy, too, because a pair of outside eyes is going to be going through it all for consistency and stylistic tweaks before release. It’s difficult to do that for your own writing, especially when there’s no clear stylesheet and several writers contributing. I like to think that if it goes well and there’s a measurable positive impact, then this may become a repeat gig. (And I’m not just saying that because I get to work with a very good friend. Observing inconsistencies or errors as a consumer drives me nuts; I like to think it’s good business sense to have a copyeditor manage the vast amount of text produced in a project like this.) It’s full time for a month and a half, then a possible week after that, followed by two (possibly three) more weeks at different times between April and June as various parts of the project come due.

On Friday I also accepted my first new project of the year from the publisher, which I can work on in evenings and on weekends if necessary. It’s short and a lot of the work I’d normally do is already done, as tends to be the case when I handle a manuscript for this particular editor. While the exciting new contract is theoretically full time for these six weeks, turning something down from the publisher felt like a dangerous move, especially if I’ll have to do it in a couple of weeks once I’m actually buried in actual deadline work for the new project. Every time a freelancer has to pass on an offered project, it’s a bit less likely that they’ll be assigned something the next time a manuscript comes up for editing. It’s good to stay on top of things and keep one’s availability fresh in the coordinator’s mind.

It’s been a quiet year work-wise so far. It’s nice to sit down and be able to work again. I certainly needed the break, and I am endlessly grateful that I didn’t have work that had to be done last week when I was out with the flu, or the week that Owlet’s daycare was closed in mid-January… but it’s good to get back to my desk. Just cleaning out the mess my work and personal e-mail inboxes had become over the last three weeks felt great today. Now… to work!