I had given Diablo a fond farewell my last week while walking out of those doors, thinking for sure that I had seen the Diablo offices for the last time.

But to my surprise, I got an e-mail from the Managing Editor, LeeAnn, who offered me a chance to come back one last time.  While Ethan was away for vacation, she needed a little bit of extra help in the office working with editing that I had never done before. And they would pay me for it.  I would have done it for free, regardless, just for the opportunity to learn something new. But being paid for it was even better. It made me feel like I actually worked there.

I was working some crazy hours at my last week at Best Buy, but I was able to come in on Tuesday and Wednesday morning.

It was a lot of fun.

I learned about InDesign, it’s the program they use for the layout and edits for the magazine. I have never used it before, so my job was to look at the markings of the proofreader and edit according to those. I learned a lot about proofreading marks as well.  I never knew there were three different size dashes: The hyphen, the en dash, and the em dash. And the difference is very slight, but it’s significant for where it goes and the use for the magazine.  InDesign was surprisingly easy to use, at least for what I was using it for.  I also got to sign my initials as an Associate Editor to verify that I put the edits through for the layout I was doing.  I was like an Editor for a day.

When I went super fast through the editing of the proofs, LeeAnn somewhat ran out of things for me to do.  So she handed me an article and told me to look through it and make notes if anything sounded off or confusing.  Like a real Editor!  So I busted out a red pen and tried my best.  I read the article at least twice before I started making marks, but read parts of it over and over about 3 or 4 times, making sure it sounded right in my head.  I’m not sure if they used my suggestions, but I’m sure I’ll find out when the August issue comes out.

On Wednesday, I did more InDesign proofs and a few other tasks.  The editor in chief had a couple of projects for me.  The first one was about the brainstorming.  Remember when we had the brainstorming session with colorful post its and markers that made me want to color?  Susan wanted me to get a whole Word document list of the post it ideas we came up with that day.  The project took awhile and I had a hard time reading some people’s handwriting, but luckily I was there that day and was able to remember what people suggested about their ideas.  The list ended up over 3 pages and I tried to categorize where the posts it stuck on the graph.  Susan very much appreciated my help in gathering the good ideas we had into one document.

The second task I was given was writing up tweets for Diablo Magazine’s twitter.  I worked on tweets for upcoming events and mostly I worked on tweets promoting Diablo’s Food Awards (anything you see about Food Awards are what I wrote).  I also used one of the tweet apps (I forget which one) that made a tiny url for the Food Awards tweets and tracked how many hits it got when posted on twitter.

It was a lot of fun and I enjoyed being a Guest Editor for the week.

I’ll really miss the staff at Diablo and working there.  I just hope I’ll end up working somewhere similar to it.

Doing something I love.