This week at Whispering Wick we have made a lot of progress on our first set of chapbooks. We worked on getting a few rounds of edits done and should be finalized by the start of next week and have also been making progress on the covers, all of which are looking fabulous. We also received some exciting new this Friday when a new contact emailed us with interest of interviewing our manager about the business and our coming publication. It has been decided that after the publication is finalized further details on the interview will be discussed. Stay tuned on said development. That being said, the biggest announcement is that we have a new team member who will be aiding us! His name is Faizal Eidoo and he is our new Website Content Creator. So, keep your eyes peeled for his upcoming magical touch to our site.
As for the rest of us individually, Tamara has been busy redoing the entirety of our schedule thanks to our team blasting through tasks because of their dedication and excitement. When she’s not working scheduling she has been busy overseeing each team member's progress and working with Faizal to help settle him into the workflow and team tasks. Tamara has been the glue that keeps us going as she continues to overlook the smoothness of our progress.
With submissions flying in Nate has had his hands full, but has prioritized the edits for our coming publications. He’s spent the entire week working with authors on edits to ensure their intended manuscripts flourish into the masterpieces we know they are. For an editor reading manuscripts that the passion is clear within the lines is a treat and being able to help turn the dream of publication into a reality is his bread and butter.
Since our first publication will be featuring some of the works produced by our own team, Rebecca was tasked with creating her first draft and envisioning a cover for it. When she didn’t have her hands full with writing and arting it up, she designed new posts for our Instagram page, which if you haven’t already, go check it out and follow us at whispering.wick. She even worked alongside Tamara to discuss the next steps for our social media pages.
Grace had her work cut out for her this week as she juggled designing the covers of two of our books, writing her manuscript, and taking over our Twitter page which you can check out and follow at @whisperingwick. For one of our covers she was tasked with hand-drawing it which took many hours of labour; and for the other the hours were less in labour and more in coming up with ideas of how it should look. Showing just how much of a powerhouse she is, Grace even banged out her entire manuscript within one day, not letting the quality diminish regardless of the short span it was devised in.
David was also up to his eyeballs in work this week, staring at different sheets, prices, materials, and taxes that would be required when we finally produce and launch our first publications. This was no small task as there was also the budget that needed considering, something that was made even more difficult as many of the items we require are difficult to come by in the format we need. For example, the threads we intend to use are not sold individually but instead as packs with multiple different colours. Not only this, David was also required to write up his own manuscript for publication after having taken a break from writing his own works.
As for our newest member, Faizal, he has been swamped with finalizing his paperwork for his new role. So stay tuned next week as he begins his official tasks Monday October 19th, 2020.
As an additional fun activity, all team members were asked to provide some thoughts throughout the week and everyone really jumped on the idea. So please enjoy words from our team.
Tamara:
“In my talk with David I told him how I didn’t care what the genre was (sci-fi, romance etc) and that he could be as creative as he wanted. There is the brand image and aesthetic and the publishing ethos. They are very different. One is how we market ourselves and show ourselves to the world. The other is what we publish and why. Very different but they can affect each other such as how we changed our website images. Yet the brand image will never overcome our ethos. Our ethos is our core for a reason.”
Rebecca:
“Worked on covers. Glued gold leaf on 9 pages and started to paint them. I like how they are turning out. They need a few more layers of paint but I will start on the next batch so I can go back and forth so I can use my time wisely.”
Grace:
“Guess what I did during my lunch break? Yup, that’s right, worked at my other internship for two hours. I’m pretty tired, not going to lie. But, I am very happy with the progress I’ve made on the twitter account. In 24 hours, we went from 12 followers to 76! Yay!
For some reason, putting together David’s cover was so much easier than doing my own. I think it’s because I didn’t have a clear idea for my cover, so I ended up starting and scrapping like 4 ideas before I found one I liked. I am really happy with how David’s turned out. I’m realizing it might be hard to format the interiors of the chapbooks, but hopefully I’ll be able to make reusable templates that we can use for all our chapbooks going forward. I’ve also determined I hate picking fonts. If it were up to me, everything would be Times New Roman forever.”
David:
“Writing takes time man. What’s worse is that it can be very easy to lose track of time when you’re writing. Doing my piece for one of the chapbooks, I kept finding myself looking over at the time and being surprised that it had passed so quickly. I’d say to myself “It’s 1:02, I can finish this by 2.” Then when 2:30 rolled around I promised myself that it would be finished by 3, and somehow it’s nearly 4 when I finish. I feel like it’s important to note that writing isn’t a straightforward process. I started tossing around and writing two different ideas before I landed on this one. Both of these previous ideas I’ve been rolling around in my head for some time, but I felt like I couldn’t get it quite right just yet. Or that getting it right would take too much time, which I didn’t have. So instead I wrote the story that I did.
An exciting day was had by all. Today was more of a shotgun day with various bits and pieces of work being looked after, rather than focusing down some large chunk of something else. One of the more exciting things today was working with the designer to create a cover for the chapbook. It’s exciting because it really does solidify that this thing is actually being created.”
Nate:
“Editing is such a journey. Reading someone’s work and knowing it’s their baby and that they’re essentially giving me the reins to help raise that baby is scary but amazing. When someone submits something that’s so full of passion it’s hard not to get passionate myself. Don’t get me wrong, there are times when someone submits something that, although it’s filled with the same passion, it just isn't what the press is looking for. Those times are tough, but honestly, those difficult read throughs are so worth the ones where I can’t put the manuscript down and become sad when it’s over so I read it again.”
Please also enjoy an extra word from our editor:
“What did the coffee report to the police? A mugging.” - Nate
