| Oh man, what a day. We just missed a deadline, and I'm pretty bummed about it. But not bummed enough to stay up late finishing it. There's just too much left. I kind of shifted the responsibility onto Page. Our current practice is to call our mother once a week on Monday nights. The original plan was to call and tell her we couldn't talk long because we had to get back to work. But when I made the call, Page came and sat on my lap, and stayed there for an hour and a half. I know that Page sometimes gets tired of lap-sitting and gets up after sometimes only ten or twenty minutes, so I was like, "I'll just keep talking to Mom until Page gets up." But by the time she did, we were like, "Mmmm, nope. I don't want to stay up until midnight finishing this translation." Fortunately, I think what we have done has turned out pretty well, or I would feel much worse about getting it in late.
In the meantime, Facebook continues to also be a time sink. We keep seeing interesting-looking articles that then take forever to read. And then we try to make jokes that nobody gets. If people hadn't told us we're good at translating comedy, I would start to question whether or not we really have a good sense of humor, because if nobody is laughing at your joke, maybe the problem is not the audience. (There was an instance on tonight's phone conversation where our joke fell flat, too, but even I admit that one wasn't very good.) On the other hand, in this case the audience was someone who had been in the manga industry, and manga industry people are notorious for having a difficult time with comedy (they even admit it without hesitation, almost unprompted), so... (Disclaimer: the audience in question is a fine individual.)
It also helps that our sister called later, and we told her all about it, and she laughed at the joke without my having to explain it. So at least our family gets our humor.
Today I'm thankful for having lovely conversation with our mother, having a lovely conversation with our sister, getting to spend lots of time with Page on my lap (she also sat on my lap during dinner and Galavant), not coming across a major speed bump in this translation every hour we worked on it, and the knowledge that our jokes don't fall flat on everybody. |
Sorry about your missed deadline. If it's a consolation, the book I'm working on was supposed to be due like a week and a half ago. (I got an extension to the end of last week, but now I've missed that too—lucky for me, the editor always seems to be frantically busy and hasn't asked about it yet.) These things happen...
We don't know if we're so good at coming up with our own jokes, either, but we like to think we're pretty good at retelling them. And we amuse ourselves, anyway. We're glad we amuse you, too!
Oh man, it's like it never ends. And the worst part about missing deadlines is it means you have to move everything else back, so you're in danger of missing all those deadlines, too, and it creates this horrible domino effect. In fact, we sort of missed two deadlines this week, but we already warned the other editor that that was going to happen. Now the late translation is going to be even later, so we're probably going to have to check in at some point and let her know where things stand. Of course, both of the titles in question are ones that you letter, so...
Uuuugh, the domino-deadline-effect is the woooorst, I know it all too well. At least, since both your late translations are series I letter, I can assure you I'm in no position to start working on either of them! So there's that. If they're for a publisher that edits their scripts before sending them to me I suppose they'd still have a use for them, though. (but even then, there's enough time between when they get me files and when my part is due that even if they had to tighten that up a bit, it wouldn't have any real effect on me because I don't actually start on a book until a week or a few days before it's due, regardless of how long I've had the files.)
I know, right!? It's hitting us pretty bad right now, too. We're like, "That's okay, we'll just finish this, and the next thing will go super fast, and we'll be almost on track again!" But it never goes super fast. (Haha, we're the same way! We'll have a book for a month before the deadline and not start on it until a week before. ...Or two days, as has recently been the case. Sigh. (But then we have one editor who wants to make sure we have plenty of time, so he'll send us the book as soon as possible, and then like a week later, he'll be like, "So how's it coming?" and we're like, "Eh heh heh heh..."))
(now back to the half Yona vol due tomorrow that I started working on at 9 last night...)
Usually when they tell us they'll get us the book by this time and ask when we can get it in, we look at our schedule and see where it fits. Of course, if it's three or four months in the future, it's probably one of the first things on the list, so we have to just arbitrarily pick a day. The problem is, we keep forgetting to factor in weekly anime episodes, and future volumes of series that hit semi-regularly (we should know by now that there's going to be a Fire Force approximately every two months...), and then we end up squished again. Part of this comes from being so busy that when our editors ask about deadlines, we're so eager to just get back to work that we don't want to think about it for too long. One of these days we'll figure it out.
Good luck with Yona!