And For My Next Trick . . .

After editing under familiar circumstances for the past week, your correspondent has begun to sink back into U.S. office culture.  Every business is unique, but switching internationally adds just that little bit of spice to the transition.

The metaphor I've long used for development editing is spinning plates.  It's  that circus trick where the performer has a bunch of plates balancing on sticks, and the trick to keeping them all in the air is to make sure they all stay moving, just fast enough, all the time.  When one of them starts to wobble, you either immediately give it another little push or it all comes crashing down.  It requires a lot of attention, precision, and calculation.

For a million reasons, from the circumstances of their custom publishing division to plain and simple cultural differences, I found my experience in India to be nothing of the sort. That four months was more like a big game of dodgeball.  People would throw projects at me and I'd do my best to catch them and quickly toss them off to someone else, because meanwhile three more projects were coming my way and it took all of my skill to not get clocked in the head.  I found myself relying more on quick thinking, self-confidence, and a huge amount of flexibility.

I don't think I was unique in drawing this conclusion.  One of my expat friends had the job of recruiting, hiring, and training people to move into army bases and teach soldiers how to teach English.  The only problem was, by the time the criteria were set and the training was in place, any new hires would need to be stationed at their respective bases five days after the job interview.  Not only did they succeed in finding enough candidates, but last I heard the program was doing great.  That is one intense game of dodgeball.

All of this makes me appreciate how orderly and automatic the processes are for my home editorial team.  The only hard part is making sure I don't mix my metaphors and begin throwing plates.