Sea of fabric merges and circles together in through the same revolving door...

Since I last wrote I have had three interviews, at three different publishers, for roughly the same positions. All are in the managing editorial department. I'd personally rather be in the editorial department, but with the publishing industry/economic climate the way it is -- I'm starting to wonder if it may be best to take what I can get (if I can even get it).

One of the publishers I interviewed with I don't think I want to work for (commercial SciFi), but the other two would be great. I had an interview at Penguin on Friday and they gave me a copyediting/proofreading test to do over the weekend; I had to fax it in on Sunday afternoon and then drop off the originals in person on Monday morning.

It was odd, commuting to Penguin during the morning rush with everyone else. As I was walking amidst these chic publishing execs and top editors I wondered if they noticed that I stuck out. If they knew, just from looking at my non-jaded facial expression or my cheap-looking clothes, that I didn't belong. That I was a fraud -- that I didn't really have a job in publishing...yet. I looked down at myself. I had tried to "look nice" in case I ran into the woman who interviewed me. I was wearing a simple knee-length, high-waist black skirt, a powder-blue button-up blouse from JC Penny's (courtesy of my Mom), tights (my only pair where the run conveniently falls on the upper thigh, thus carefully concealed underneath my skirt), and brown boots. Now if I was being interviewed, I would have brought nice shoes with me in my tote bag (nice shoes hurt my feet) and swapped foot attire just outside the building. My boots are falling apart, you see, I do need new ones. There a holes in various locations on both the right and left boot, and the rubber soles have peeled away from their bottoms, creating two mouths at my toes that gape and flap when I walk. It is a flap that is not without accompanying audio. And if I step in the thinnest of puddles on the sidewalk or street the skin of my foot feels the cold wetness before it takes its next step, and if it rains forget about it. A cold I will soon have.

But that day, no one saw my shoes -- at least no one who cared or who I cared about seeing them. But I felt like they all knew I wasn't there to go to work -- I was just there to gawk and envy.

So I did this copyediting/proofreading test and it took me all weekend. Not because it was terribly difficult, but because it was incredibly time consuming. I could tell that someone went through the manuscript excerpt I had been given and took out certain words to replace them with others (were for was) and lopped off the endings of adverbs. They were trying to be sneaky. (For example, one manuscript quoted a line from Romeo + Juliet, the Oh Romeo, Romeo bit...which is obviously Juliet's line. And at the end Capulet had been swapped for Montague...those sneaky devils!)

On another note: Last night I had a dream that I was about to kiss a boy and then I woke up in the middle of the night, with a hunger of disappointment for the kiss that hadn't happened. So I sleepily kissed my pillow and floated back down into the dark corridor of dream world.