31 October 2007
Back from Beijing
And this is just as well because no sooner did I have this set up and two months' work copied across from my laptop then the track pad on the laptop suddenly stopped working. With only a month to start delivering sections of the entirely revised edition of 'Beijing', this would be a bit of a disaster. As it is, I'll hand the laptop in next time I'm passing, and won't be in any particular hurry to get it back.
Also in front of me: a GPS with an assortment of data, a mobile phone with a Beijing SIM card and a collection of important phone numbers, and a Palm device running the splendid PlecoDict software enabling me to write characters and swiftly check pronunciation and tone where necessarily.
Just behind these stands a stack of rail, air, and bus timetables, and Beijing maps and street atlases for cross-checking against each other, and a very well-thumbed copy of the previous edition, many of them heavily marked with notes of various varieties. No two maps of Beijing can be relied upon to agree, and none of them are accurate.
On the floor to my left sits a large suitcase full of press releases, brochures, business cards, tickets, menu notes, and receipts, and in case, just slightly more than one jet-lagged week after returning, I've forgotten Beijing, when I open the case that inimitable smell rises to catch the back of the throat. Unnoticeable when in the city perhaps because one swiftly becomes inured, this mix of dirt, pollution, and print will hang permanently about until I throw the paperwork out.
The job now, other than listening to and transcribing many hours of voice notes now stored on the hard drive, is to take each scrap of paper, copy English and Chinese notes from it, and transfer it to a box on the other side of me when complete.
If this sounds less than glamorous, it is. Nevertheless, I'm actually looking forward to it rather more than I do to writing articles. Luckily the Cadogan format requires entertaining prose and provides plenty of space for it, so that the books in the series are often genuinely worth reading in their own right, and often very funny. But in the end the point is to provide a useful tool for the visitor to China, and the addresses, telephone numbers, prices, and so on contained in the already mouldering pile of papers to my left are the essential skeleton on which the flesh of the prose will be hung. The few who do guide books well care very much about getting these details right, and there's much pleasure to be had from having put in the effort to winkle out the truth of how various kinds of arrangements can be made, just how much really should be paid, and now seeing it go into print as sound advice for those who care to use it. (Some don't, and I'll write about that on another occasion.)
Having spent almost all day almost every day on my feet for the last two months (no weekends off in this job), it's also a pleasure to look at the pile of paper as the physical record of work done, and to feel the fruits of that labour in the transference of notes to hard drive, and eventually into readable text.
So for the next couple of months I'll be sitting opposite this screen, trying hard to adopt a position of which my physiotherapist would approve (and whose remonstrations partly drove the purchase of new equipment) and transferring facts, item by item, from paper to database.
I'm going nowhere. Except possibly New Zealand.
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3 comments:
Thank you!
Your post was very interesting.
I'm looking forward to reading your revised edition of your Beijing guide. Do you already know when it will get published?
Jiayou, jiayou!
CH
Thank you. Not until spring next year, I'm afraid. Right now it's gradually cohering text spread between database and Pages files, with last-minute updates flying in from here and there.
You've set the scene beautifully. I saw your work space clearly in my head. Helped along by the fact that I work in precisely the same manner, although I'm not nearly as methodical as I think I am. Sometimes a brochure I know I have will go astray and I'll waste forever searching for it, then it will turn up later in the most unexpected of places. How does that happen?
I'm linking to you by the way.
Good luck again with the project!
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