I couldn’t
find myself a moment to sit and reflect yesterday, so I’ll do yesterday’s slice
today.
I had my
usual freelance copyediting of short book reviews, cleaning up files for the
magazine I work for and getting them ready for the next stage by 1 p.m. But
there were an unusual number of cases where I had to go back to editors for
second go-rounds. In one case, a sentence had four “how”s introducing examples,
which I hadn’t noticed the first time because of other questions. In another
case, the editor had deleted an entire review because he didn’t know how to
answer his supervisor’s editorial question; I offered a suggestion that was
accepted, but undeleting the review created a whole mess of other problems that
took time to fix. There was more.
And in the
middle of this work, I got an e-mail that the staff copyeditor was out that day
because his mother was in the hospital, in the ICU, probably with Covid-19.
That stopped everything for me, mentally, emotionally. This is the closest the
disease has come. I work from home, so I’m not afraid of being infected. But my
colleague is young and just got married, and I hope his mother pulls through
and is one of the 85% of older people who get well.
It was the
nearness of the disease that paralyzed my slicing, I think. I would like to
have missed this day entirely. In fact, let’s skip this entire year.
-------------------------------------
I’m participating in the 13th annual
Slice of Life Challenge over at Two
Writing Teachers. This is day 28 of the 31-day
challenge. It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a
community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to
slice about. Join in!
