Monday, January 13, 2014

Wide Eyes, Big City

January 10th - 13th, 2014

Step one to reaching your destination on time: placate the weather god so not to have ice rain. My 1:00 appointment became my 2:30 appointment, but it worked out well anyway. On the second highest floor on not nearly the tallest tower in NYC, I now live out of a quad with only one other person, a very pleasant painter from Texas. The stairs, however, I fondly refer to as Fat Camp's Revenge. The good thing is that by the time you're thinking "Oh god they never end!" you've reached my floor, and you thank your lucky stars and your remaining breath that you're not one of the people one more level up. (I also say this as someone quite out of shape and for whom burgers are a favorite food. On the brief subject of food, my favorite restaurant title I've seen in the city thus far is the "Loving Hut: vegan cuisine," because very few things could be more passive aggressive.)

My acting friend from school arrived the next day, and we took to wandering the city in what turned out to be about a four hour drunken circle (we were sober) back to the house. On the way, we sort of got lost through Times Square, Midtown Comics, Grand Central, and Madison Square Park, among other places, and it only poured for the last twenty minutes of our travels. My shoes may possibly dry out by next weekend.

Between the stairs and the wanderlust, it turns out my body didn't hate me enough to stop me from getting up the next day to pretty much do it all again. This time, with my brother.

My brother is my favorite person in the world, and it saddens me that not every sibling can have that kind of relationship. The commitment that we put into being there to love and to torment one another is almost as strong as our commitment to ticket reservations on Broadway. The latter, actually, was the reason for my brother's visit, though it certainly helps that he himself is a New Yorker.

Because I love my parents and my parents love Groupons, I got two tickets to see Peter and the Starcatcher on its last night. Naturally, my brother was my first pick for ticket number-two. Not only can I make a notch under my 10-show-quota, but it was a wonderful performance! The show acts as a prequel to Peter Pan, though it takes some liberties to tweak the story some to keep it interesting, too. I had felt that act one dragged a bit compared to the fast-paced action of act two and that perhaps the climax was a little underwhelming, but despite that the show was excellent. Peter Pan held a balance between a little brat and an endearing child, Captain Hook stole the stage with a fearsome and incredibly flamboyant air, and I have quite a soft spot for puns and story references.

As for navigating the city, I think I'm starting to get it. Numbers increase north and west, and decrease south and east. Name-streets are thrown in there just to mess with you. And to get to DAW from my house (I know that's what we've all been waiting for in this blog), just take a right and go straight on till morning! Or like thirty-some minutes until you're half a block or so past the Dunkin Donuts--that actually works better.

Despite walking into an internship for fantasy and science fiction, I felt very grown-up in my office attire and 1930s-esque blue suede pumps.

The building, I'm certain, is designed to both intimidate and make its workers feel incredibly important. If the outside of it is not made of dark, polished stone, then the rest of it is made of gigantic glass walls that shifts into spinning doors in three symmetrical locations. Inside, the space has a high ceiling and is made of more polished stone that would echo like a train station, except nobody is that loud. Down the long, narrow rug, past the huge rectangles of art-deco that are lost in the empty space of the walls to make you feel even smaller, is a large wooden desk. By the NYC standard of congested space, I'd bet a half a dozen people could work behind that desk. Instead, there is one security guard (the same one that was there when I had my interview, which is cool. He probably has some really awesome take-down stories of book-fans who just couldn't wait for the release date. I have another goal: I want to be friends with this security guard by the end of my internship. I want to know these stories).

To access the rest of the building, I had to give the security guard my name, my ID, who I was visiting, and from which department. He rang up to double check my claim, then handed me a day pass that I scan at the gate around the corner from his desk with all his video monitors that reflected back at you in the polished wall behind him, and then I could get to the elevators that would take me to the appropriate floor. Then, I reach waiting room number-two and ask the secretary to ring for the person I'm meeting, followed by my contact meeting me to personally escort me to the real office.

I will eventually get a pass that will skip through at least eight of those nine-hundred steps to office admittance.

Once at DAW, I was seated in a cubical that I will give back to the accountant on Tuesdays and Thursdays and share with the part-time intern from NYU some days. I've not met her yet, but she's more interested in cover art, which sounds awesome.

I was given six magazines to peruse for anytime one of them name-dropped DAW. (Two Locus, two RT, and two PW.) Anytime DAW is mentioned in one of the magazines, I had to highlight it and mark it with a sticky-note. Anything from book releases to reviews had to be noted, and reviews have to be copied off. I don't have the pass that allows me to use the photocopier, so my supervisor actually does that part still.

Then, I was tasked with finding ten review quotes about a Seanan McGuire series that was being featured in a promo-booklet. There was a new book coming out, and so DAW wanted to push the earlier seven books of the series to hook more readers into the fandom before the release. One of the quotes I pulled offline was from Felicia Day, which is cool. Though somehow I'm not surprised Felicia Day enjoys novels that feature a private investigating, half-faerie badass. I would.

Next, from the same author-different series, a book was on a pre-release to a specific list of reviewers to help build hype online before the actual release. I packed and labeled all eighteen packages myself! Some books went to SF reviews, others to specialists of smutty-romance, others to fantasy, and others to places like Publishers Weekly, and those readers are the ones pretty much responsible for most of the editorial reviews you'd find on Amazon.

After that, it was called a day. Because I had orientation at the house, I actually ended up leaving an hour earlier than I would normally. Regardless it didn't feel like I was at the office very long at all! The coolest part--other than the fact they feed me when I'm there, which is an unbelievably sweet deal--is that next time I'll be working with REAL manuscripts! I'll also be responsible for assembling five articles about current events in the publishing-world and sending them out to people in the office. I've never been up-to-date on my current events, so this will be interesting.

So far, very exciting for in hindsight sounds like "boring office work". So good sign for me, maybe?

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