Lost in the Intranet.

Today is my first day on the job as a full-time medical copyeditor for a publishing company in London, England. I am on a team of editors working on a joint project between the London publisher and a large American medical company in the United States. The only thing changing is that I now work for the London company and not myself. Otherwise, I still work from home, during the same hours, using my own computer, but for one company instead of several.

Isn't that a great change? It was a bit nerve-wracking for me, because after twelve years of freelancing, I spent the past two weeks turning down project after project. (Also, to make this change easier, I raised my freelancing rates considerably and that helped the freelance project offers slow down.) I still have a few very good copyediting clients and I can still fit them in during my non-employed hours.

So, I made that transition. Whew. Now, I'm blundering about on the London company intranet and downloading style guides and handbooks and figuring out the process. We have a ton of work to do this year. I'm really excited to be on the team (they are scattered throughout the United States and England and Scotland). And of course, delighted to be doing medical copyediting (my favorite thing as an editor).

Onto my free-time favorite things: writing and school.

The writing has begun. I am so rusty at this. I can tell that I've spent too many of my recent hours copyediting like a mad woman. I stare at the blank page (a client has asked me to write catalog copy for a new travel alarm clock) and I blank. And I mean completely; there is nothing in there to draw from. But I woke up this morning with the copy half-written in my head; bless a good night's sleep!

I will get better and faster at this writing thing because I'm not going to be cramming in copyediting (70 hour weeks the past month to finish everything before today), and that is so very good for my brain. I'm also studying my pile of college exam textbooks and hope to take my first test in July.

Off to study style guides. I will update my WIP word counts later today. I was able to add quite a bit to Cake today.

Keep Moving Forward.