Spins in July

THIS JULY, MY SUPERIORS informed me that I have to transition from my current technical-writing-slash-subtle-marketing project for a U.S. client to a short-term proofreading-and-XML-tagging project for a Swiss client. I concurred.

We started with a three-hour training session on a late-night schedule. The following day the client sent an e-mail that required administrative stuff, and I responded promptly to certain requests—of course addressing my superiors, not the client, to avoid bypassing. A couple of days later, I was summoned for an ad hoc meeting in our conference room. When I arrived at the meeting room, I found two fellow technical writers, who would be working on the same short-term project too, talking with our U.S.-based project manager on the phone. The project manager was addressing one of them, offering him a position to become the head of our team. I heard a familiar name too. Thinking about you and your experience though you’re not yet a senior in this company but your experience… but Alchris too came stepping in to these tasks and seems comfortable with it… deciding who between the two—some of the unclear conversations I’d picked up when I came in to the room.

My fellow writer said, “I’m unsure yet. Don’t know about what my manager would say. I think I have to come back to you after talking to her…” His exact lines I can’t remember.

Abruptly, I heard my name again over the phone. That somehow gave me the idea that my project manager shifted his focus. The room started spinning, the topic was spinning, the subject was spinning, the conversation was spinning… He was talking to someone else this time. He was mentioning something about “the face of the company to the client.” And he was waiting for an answer. Should the answer come from me? I was uncertain. Staring at and listening to the star-shaped, loud-speaker-enabled phone, I released the choked sound in my throat and tried to compose myself. I stammered, “I’m sorry”—with the question hint in my statement that meant I didn’t quite understand him.

Also based in U.S., my technical writing editor on the other line elaborated my project manager’s statement. “The face of the company to the client… the lead for this team... Are you okay with that role?” she asked clearly. I stared at my nails, convincing myself there were no pearls of sweat on my temple. Then I responded, “If my boss would permit.” That was my subtle way of saying, “Yes.” Suddenly, I became “the face of the company to the client.” It’s what a fellow writer would simply put into one acronym: TL.

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A couple of months ago, a just-starting association has dealt with me to come up with a story that will be published as a sort of a graphic novel or comic story.

I started off by writing in the way their writers create their stories—with all the graphic information, such as panel numbers and page specifications, included in the document; but I found myself uncomfortable with that beginning. I therefore first tried writing a novel; afterward I would create my storyboard and all that stuff. This required me to relearn the use of idioms and colloquial expressions to give my characters a tone that’s convincingly existent.

Last month, I forced myself to read a famous sci-fi novel, which I finished in a span of two weeks. This month, I continued some unfinished reading assignments on a few novels by my favorite author, Sidney Sheldon. Though I like Sidney Sheldon, I’ve been too busy to have time reading fiction for the past years. Reading has never been my hobby before, though writing is my passion. With layers of dust piled against their cover, the books I’ve finished now have been stashed somewhere in my bookshelf for years. And I want more. It’s all of a sudden.

In shopping malls, I see the world spinning that I abruptly and shockingly find myself making for the bookstore and choosing the next story to put in my to-read list. I’ve been downloading a lot of free e-books too, some of which are classics. I’ve become a reader, and my friend Marge—who never considered me as someone with whom she could talk about books and novels before—would sometimes talk to me about good novels. I love books now, I guess. My paradigm might be spinning.