A Day In the Life: Tales of An Editor
by Terra_Cide, HSM Editor
Hi. You may or may not know me. I’m a single, working parent to a child with special needs, attempting to finish a degree I should have done ages ago. Oh, and every now and then, I proofread an article or two here at HSM.
I’ve been told I’m a Type-A overachiever, though I really don’t see myself as one. An over-scheduler on the other hand – you bet. A twenty-four hour day is insufficient time to squeeze in everything I need to get done, everything I want to get done, and still maintain a sleep schedule.
Case in point: it’s another late night – almost three in the morning. My eyes are practically seeing triple at this point, and I know that it’s going to be yet another mad-dash morning to get up and get my son off to school on time, and to get myself ready for work.
“Just one more tweak, then I’ll go to bed,” I mutter the trite promise to myself, after previewing for the umpteenth time what a team member’s article would look like published in another tab. I have about a dozen tabs open at any time – and usually three of them are devoted to HSM – all with a specific purpose in mind.
It’s been the same song and dance since volunteering for this role, and when I say “volunteer,” I mean going to bed one night and waking up the next day with the word “editor” next to my name. I promise myself a proper bedtime, then promptly disregard that promise.
For some bizarre, masochistic reason, I seem to function best when I have way too many balls in the air to handle. Or rather, make that chainsaws – flaming ones. And instead of cowering in fear and requesting help, I look for more burdens to shoulder. And I still have all my fingers.
Seven devils, bring them on, indeed.
To confess, editing has been a way of exorcising my own personal variation of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder; putting a comma here, making someone’s article “flow” better by rearranging a paragraph or two there, moving a picture a line down (or up), and so on. And for the record, no, I don’t polish and name each tool I own and put each in its own particular place (plus or minus a millimeter) in my toolbox. Yes, I own a toolbox; why are you looking at me like that?
I repeat these things and other adjustments, previewing the results each time – much like a hand-drawn animation – over and over again, on each article that comes down the pipeline. The cycle repeats itself until I’m either satisfied – or I faceplant unconscious on my laptop’s keyboard. No, really, that did happen once. Fortunately, the number pad didn’t leave any permanent marks, nor did any drool get into the circuitry.
It’s not as if I’m alone in my experiences on this matter. Norse is a professional cat herder in real life – and you all thought he just did that here with the magazine. He works an insane quantity of hours, six days a week, and that’s not including his tireless work behind the scenes here at HSM. He is also – if you’ve been following along with the podcasts – the first “hooman” male to be expecting a Homeling, dubbed the Norseling.
As a result, Norse and I have developed our own language – sleeponese. Now, to the alert, conscious individual, this is merely an indecipherable string of mumbling gibberish and snores. However, he and I seem to understand each other so well when speaking in such a manner, that we are more than just fluent; we’re practically telepathic.
With a six-hour time difference, real life obligations, and aging, thirty-something bodies that just do not have the same kind of stamina they used to have in order to still function while sleep-deprived, how else would we be able to keep this beast rolling at its current pace?
It’s rather like that metaphor about a having a weasel in one’s shorts – exciting, but not particularly fun. Unless you’re into that kind of stuff. And apparently, we are.
Tools of The Trade
Yet there’s much more to this role than just going through simple mechanics. It’s the emails and messages to field and respond to on a daily basis. It’s my nightly reports to Norse in order to keep myself accountable – a major priority for me. It’s the mad dash onto Home to do an impromptu recruitment for volunteers to pose in pictures for a guest’s submission that needs them. It’s the publicly congratulating a writer on a job well done on a podcast. It’s the coaxing and cheerleading one sometimes has to do with individuals who want to share, but doubt their own abilities.
It’s even sometimes being the bearer of unfortunate news and the dealer of dirty work. Not the severed horse’s head in your bed variety of dirty work, although sometimes I do wonder – metaphorically speaking, of course.
Such is the fine balancing act between the iron fist in a velvet glove. It’s never personal, mind you; it’s just business.
Or as HearItWow put it, “All editors are jerks. Myself included. All good writers know this.”
And yet it’s not business as one would conventionally know it. No one gets paid for their work – it is all truly a labor of love; a love of helping create something unique and fostering some truly brilliant stuff. We all make sacrifices of our time – and in some cases, much more – in devotion to something bigger than ourselves. It’s as if we’re a collective of warrior-monk scribes.
All joking aside for a moment though, I will admit to asking myself if it is all worth the sleep deprivation, hair-tearing, and face-palming (and planting) an editor does.
It’s no one’s fault but my own. I’ll readily admit to having high standards as a baseline, and as a result, I do hold myself and everyone I associate with to them. Is it fair? Who’s to say, but when you are a part of a publication such as HSM, which touts itself as being the most literate and mature source of Home-related information you can find, you do have to hold yourself to a higher than average standard, else risk getting nailed to a wall.
This is not to say that I can’t empathize with those who chafe at the bit, wanting to say and do things that they know they shouldn’t. It’s a bit of a surprise my tongue isn’t pierced for the amount I bite it. So, as a preventative measure to ensure I don’t give myself any involuntary body piercings, I do my best to avoid such environs altogether. Yet there are instances where it can’t be helped and I do have to wade in. Does it raise my blood pressure? Honey, you have no idea.
But then I get the odd message from a hopeful contributor, asking for guidance, perhaps sending a sample of their work, or even someone who has an article idea that is important to them, but they lack the confidence to write it. That lights up my synapses like the Tunguska Event lit up the Siberian sky for days. I live for that; it’s what makes me come back time and time again.
And when I see their work up on the front page, along with the enormous reception I know it deserves, I’m just as proud of them and their efforts as I am of my son when he does something new for the very first time.
It makes all those sleep-deprived hours worth it and more.
September 10th, 2011 by Terra_Cide | 19 comments
Terra _Cide is the former Community Manager for Lockwood Publishing and Editor Emeritus for HomeStation Magazine.
Twitter
You’re awesome
I honestly mean that. You also scare me to death. You edit me on twitter with your ”Disorder” 
It’s a gift you have and all contributors here have.
Your beauty is the fact that you care. You care about us and that is a wonderful thing. Thank you so much for all you do. /hug
Sleep!
I don’t sleep. I stand horizontally and ponder the meaning of life behind my eyelids.
Ha Ha Ha! I hope pizza night and drink was a good thing for you. Nice write up here. Nice to see the editor is human.
I think Terra does an awesome job.She has led me to believe I can do instead of maybe I can do. we recently had a party in her and Norses’ honor.Please check out the video the staff made for them both.
http://www.youtube.com/user/AvatardProductions1?feature=mhee
Aw Terra, you’re the best! I see your laptop, coffee and Playstation controller. Your work area bears a striking resemblance to mine! I had fun hanging out tonight and fun reading this article
It is a testament to Home that so many different fan media projects exist to support it and try to give back to its community. In the case of HSM, the prevailing belief is that Home needs a pro-Sony and pro-Home publication devoted to it which is mature, polished, literate and professional — something that looks like it might have come from Sony itself — as a way of helping illustrate the wonderful experiences one can have which are unique to Home.
(This is not to say that outside journalism about Home isn’t valid; merely that to the people who populate and use Home — a number which is measured in multiples of millions of registered accounts — an “in-world” publication, so to speak, is far more valuable. I could spend an hour on a beach in Dar es Salaam and claim to know all of Africa, but the reality is that — in the truest sense of Gay Talese’s concept of New Journalism — you have to live it to truly be able to write about it.)
For the contributors who give their time, art and words to HSM, it is an arrangement which benefits everyone: the author benefits from the exposure, the publication benefits from featuring another unique voice, and Sony benefits from having a resource devoted to Home which might help increase the average user’s enjoyment of the service.
Projects of this size and complexity can be daunting to keep in operation, however; let’s remember that we all do this completely for free, in what spare time each of us has from our hectic daily lives. And let’s also remember that HSM has a production schedule that’s pretty intense for a fan publication.
What it takes is a group of people who genuinely enjoy the act of artistic creation itself, more than any hope of gain. Audiences can inherently sense the difference, and that’s reflected in the numbers.
The Home projects that succeed, in my view, are the ones which check their egos at the door and function as a cohesive team effort: where the focus is on the product rather than serving any one individual’s vanity. To that end, the ones who coordinate such a project do so out of a desire to give, rather than some misguided sense of power.
Look at Cubehouse, for instance. The guy wrote Facebook Chess. FACEBOOK CHESS, people. He also created AlphaZone4. And he chose to build the HSM website. He’s one of the most down-to-Earth people I’ve ever met.
How about Jersquall? The guy’s insanely busy as an HCV, and he’s also the head of HOMEinformer. Yet he spends uncounted hours editing our podcasts.
And Mike? You show me someone else who can singlehandedly put together one-hundred-plus pages of magazine issue, month in and month out, while remaining virtually invisible. I also happen to know his real-world workload is just as insane as mine.
The whole team is comprised of spectacularly talented people — Aeternitas, Burbie, Olivia, Orion, Cheeky, Gideon, Keara, Seal, the list goes on at some length — all of whom have chosen to contribute to HSM. In so doing, they have become more proficient at their chosen field of interest (writing, filmmaking, artistry, et cetera), whilst HSM has provided them with an opportunity to be read by thousands of people every month.
For me, personally, I’m happiest when my face and byline are nowhere to be found on HSM’s front page. HomeStation wasn’t designed to be The Norse Show, and it never will be. When you live in Hawaii, you sacrifice beach time in favor of Home for exactly one reason: because you love it that much.
So let’s talk about Terra.
Finding people who share HSM’s team-first/product-first ethos isn’t always the easiest thing in the world to do. Finding people who share that ethos and are willing to volunteer the kind of time necessary to keep it running is doubly hard.
Finding someone who’s willing to edit all of that *and* help coordinate the team *and* help with developer communique, though…you might actually have a better chance of winning the lottery.
And let’s keep in mind that, as she points out at the beginning of the article, she’s also a single mother of a special-needs child. And it’s not like she doesn’t work a job and go to school, ya know.
The average reader, leafing through HomeStation’s *many* pages, has very little idea of what takes place behind the scenes to keep everything moving — particularly at this pace and level of quality. And, perhaps, that’s as it should be; if the magic can happen transparently and we all make it look easy, then we’ve done our jobs.
But as HSM’s present publisher and editor-in-chief, I do want to comment, publicly, on what a truly spectacular job this team does. And, in particular, the work that Terra puts into keeping everything going. It’s nothing short of astonishing.
WOW… All I can say is amen! And it is rare to stump me for something to say! Love you Terra. You are an awesome editor, mother, candle maker,person and most of all my friend! And we can not forget our tireless leader. Norse in is honorable that you want to turn the lime light on us, your loyal staff. Truth be told though, we would all be rocking back and forth blowing spit bubbles and licking windows without your endless support and leadership. A good leader credits his crew, a great leader excepts his own do praise. So much for just saying amen huh
To build upon Olivia’s mention of candles -- you are all candles. (Including you, Norse, so don’t be thinking you can go slink off into a dark corner. You get your butt right back here, mister.) And at the risk of sounding like some hokey motivational poster, a candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.
That’s what you do as a team.
You have absolutely no idea how much I adore terra, and really appreciate the work that she puts into HSM. Yes it’s all voluntary, she didn’t have to take on that role as editor, she could easily have walked away from that. And hell, so can anybody else on the team. But she chose this. ‘We’ chose this. Through norse, we have a leader that truly believes in the product that is churned out practically everyday. There is so much material to be found in Home, it’s almost impossible to cram it all into one publication. There is ‘always’ a story to be found somewhere on home. I never would of thought I would stay around NA Home for as long as I have. (In truth I planned to only stay for a month) But i made so many friends through NA Home, I now find it impossible to leave. And being a part of HSm, wow, I never knew that would happen for me and these guys made me feel so welcome, I love learning about what each person does and what they are capable of. Cubehouse is not only a fellow Englishman like myself, but he is all out Rocket science to me on one level and down to earth on another. Burbie ‘always’ manages to hunt down an exclusive interview and i’ll never know how she does it, she is a truly driven and ambitious character, if there was a ‘Lios Lane’ writing for HomeStation magazine, then she is a prime candidate. Sue (AKA Death) surprises me with her personal, but quirky anecedotes of her experiences of Home. And the Video team surprise me everytime with ideas and projects that could well get maximum publicity in the future, (and very soon when i finally get my hands on my new laptop that can edit HD footage, i can be a part of this future too.) Terra you do so much for this magazine, I thank you so much, not only as an editior, but a friend too x
Totally awesome Terra! TY for all you do for HSM. I know that all your efforts do not go unnoticed and as a fellow mother I can relate to you juggling your responsibilities between other things and your son. Even with all that is on your plate, you still are a good friend to many can attest to, including those who have commented here thus far. TY for your insights into all that goes on into your work as an editor. The PS Home Community should be grateful for what you do. Personally I am thankful for all that you have helped me overcome my nervousness to write my 1st article and all your encouragement along with others from HSM to continue to try more. Keep spewing your awesomeness ma. Big hugs and lots of kisses to a great editor and friend
First and foremost I want to say that without the generosity of spirit that all of the people I work with at the magazine, I would not be able or even be motivated to keep coming up with new article ideas. When I started writing for the magazine back in January, I did it with the intent to write the one article they asked me to do, the one about my club, the Grey Gamers. When Norse asked me to come on staff I was very flattered as I have always been a fiction and poetry author, never a factual magazine type. At first I wasn’t sure of where this path would take me, but through the encouragement of Norse and Granny and Terra, I have found my voice here. Now I feel very confident in my article choices and also in my ability to produce them. This is all due to these two wonderful editors who are gentle yet firm in their directions, exactly what a new magazine author needed. I can’t thank them and all of the people I work with enough for this wonderful opportunity. Love all of you guys!
(NorseNote: We rarely write stories about HSM itself, but if you’ve been enjoying the work this team produces, please join me in thanking Terra and the entire team for the hours they’ve devoted into bringing HomeStation to life. This publication exists because of *them.*)
OK. Thank you all for writing articles. I enjoy many of them.
I’m going watch football now. Good luck to your team, better luck to mine. Bye.
Aloha Terra, once again you spew awesomeness.I would be scared and the same time intrigued as to what’s in your tool box…I was surprised to not see handcuffs or a whip in tour picture of the tools of the trade….Put the candles on the pie because cake is a lie…FFF FTW…
Thanks Terra!
All I can say is anyone who can fix my ramble on sentences and syntax errors deserves a metal. So I kiss both your cheeks and bestow upon you the loyal order of the ace editor flying auto correct cross!
Thank you, Terra, for all the help and encouragement that you have given me. HSM publishes an article on this website everyday, including weekends. Think about that for a moment. She gives up an enormous amount time to make sure that commitment is met and that each article meets HSM’s high level of standards. But wait this is not all she does. She even writes pieces for the magazine, gives words of encouragement, posts on the form, sends emails, and much more. Bravo Terra. Thanks for everything you do.
This may sound like a paradox, but the best way to show our thanks to Terra is to keep the pending file full with our articles.
Having run editorial operations for some pretty big companies, I know what goes on behind the scenes. A good editor (and there are plenty of bad ones, I’m talking about the good ones here) does everything in her or his power to be invisible. Through a combination of advanced psychology, cheerleading and occasional whip-cracking, a good editor not only helps every writer willing to listen learn to be better, but convinces an attention-challenged populace that the words on a given page are worth their time.
You’re very good at what you do, Terra, and this community is truly blessed to have you poring over its words.
Agreed HIW! We are all amazed at Terra and Norse’s ability to maintain their real life necessities and still do what they do.
And everyone is well aware of Terra’s whip!! LOL
That’s your problem right there. You have a gold PC, and gold is a heavy metal. Heavy metals lead to medical problems which can effect the body for years in high doses. You should trade it in for a MAC.