As I approach an unbelievable #200 Trekking Tale, I think back to when I first became a freelance writer after walking tentatively into The Times office with a copy of “The Meeting Place” in my hand. I’d been urged there by our friend Pat Sabiston.
With my story’s acceptance came a simple agreement: “We’ll publish one when we have space, so, when you see one of your stories in print, send another.” While that has been easy enough, sticking to the word limit has not. “I guess 500 words will do it,” I was told initially. “Well, maybe 600…” Trimming the fat is always the biggest challenge in any writing, especially since I have to delete most of my cheeky quips to reduce the count.
One day when I had nothing else to think about, I remembered a wee book I had enjoyed in my youth which begins with Mother (Father was dutifully at work) making a promise to her children. “Today I’m taking you to a place you have often seen on the outside, but we’re going inside to see what happens next,” she tells them. Puzzled, the youngsters discuss possibilities as they leave home. Soon they arrive at – the Post Office. Going behind the scenes, they watch mail of all shapes and sizes progress from letter drop and counter until exiting the building en route to destinations all over the world. From there my thoughts switched to my submissions and I realized I had no idea what had happened to each of those 200 Trekking Tales once I pressed “Send” on the computer. Deciding that it was time to remedy this, I made an appointment with Keith McNeill, editor of Clearwater Times.
“Your email,” he tells me, “announces its arrival on my computer with a ‘bong’, just like the other hundred or more that come in each day. When I see your name in my mailbox, I wonder what you’ve written about this time. I check for grammatical errors, run it through spell-check, and look at the word count. The number of words is crucial, the paper using 20 words/column inch. I save it as text file for easy page layout.”
Keith clicks through screen after screen on his computer until he opens a program called “InDesign” to show me how page layout is displayed. Keith mentions that office manager, Yevonne Cline, does the layout each week. Seated at her desk nearby, she grins at me. “Keith used to do that,” she says, “but somehow it came to be my job.”
Ads (they pay the bills!) are positioned first by Publisher Al Kirkwood and their location shows with an X on the screen in front of me. Keith shows me last week’s Trekking Tale tucked in there, one wee item among many. Yevonne takes all the stories and pictures that Keith has prepared and fits them together so that the overall look and feel of the paper remains constant, as do some of the advertisements. “Standing head (title) can be adjusted but tolerance for variations in line spacing and font is extremely narrow,” I learn. “Research suggests having different sizes of type on a newspaper page makes it difficult to read, causing people to simply skip over the information. We adhere carefully to specific lay-out rules.” Keith draws my attention to the changing size of columns for the many articles on one page, for easier reading.
As you will see in Part 2, my Trekking Tale (and the rest) now leave Clearwater, but return in print two days later.
