This is definitely one of those jobs that is "saved" for when time is plentiful.
My collection of magazines from the Double O Gauge Association has been spilling off the bookshelf for a very long period of time and finally something has been done.
I'm sentimental enough that I like to keep a copy of everything I've ever had published. Since I edited the DOGA Journal for a couple of years, that means there was always going to be a reasonable pile to hang on to.
Editing this publication lead to me becoming a web person in the late 1990s. At the time I used to have to produce camera-ready artwork for the printers. This I did at work using the 600dpi laser printers out of hours. My boss was OK with it, I even quietly installed a copy of Pageplus on my computer to do it (I worked in IT, we had admin passwords. And I only used it on one machine at a time so we'll assume concurrent software licencing).
When the part-time web person left, since he knew I could do a bit of graphical stuff, I was invited to take over the role. A bit of a challenge, but after a couple of days with a teach yourself HTML book, I took the role on. Eventually, the job became full time and after a few years, I left to run the local council website.
My point is that you never know where your hobby can take you.
This is something I try to explain to anyone wanting to get their name in print. Society journals are always looking for material. You don't get paid, but the discipline of turning out an article is a good grounding if you want to go further.
As I worked my way through the magazines, even I was surprised to see the wide range of toy trains topics I'd written about. My "to keep" pile was fatter than expected. Taking the photos for the annual modelling competition each year added many issues too.
A few articles were removed to the box files of interesting reads and the rest went in to recycling. To be fair, as with all society mags, there's a lot that will never be of interest again such as meeting notes and appeals for volunteers, but there are some gems in there too.
The bookshelf looks a lot tidier too.
1 comment:
I would agree with your comment about not knowing how you will get into writing. I am primarily interested in military history and started a little blog about six years ago. About two years after I had started this, I got chatting to the editor of the Armourer magazine on Facebook in a shared group and he invited me to submit a small piece for publication based off of a blog post he had written...this has led to about forty articles over the last four years and on the back of that I got approached by a publisher to pitch a book which has since been published and done pretty well. All of this started because of a little blog (now in its seventh year and up to 2500 posts). I work with history students at a Uni and I use this little story to illustrate that if you want to get into writing- write! If you do enough of it and have a few breaks then who knows where it will lead.
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