On the heels of Ai Lin Chun’s post, A Day in the Life of a Nature Editor in Japan, the following post from Henry Gee, a Senior Editor with Nature offers another perspective on what the job of a journal editor entails and gives a glimpse at the path a manuscript takes from submission to publication.

There’s a tale that when Winston Churchill

wanted to address a meeting of the Free French, he insisted — despite earnest advice to the contrary — on giving the speech in French, a language with which he was not as familiar as he might have been. “When I look at my past,” he wanted to say, “I see that it’s divided into two parts.”

What came out, though, was slightly different.

“Quand je regarde mon derriere” as the great war leader portentously intoned, “je vois qu’il est divise en deux parts”. The reception, it is said, was rapturous, and Mr Churchill probably felt that his address had gone rather well.

Like Winston Churchill’s backside, my life is divided into two parts. As readers of my blog will know, I work three days a week in London, and two days a week in Cromer

You Aren’t Here

on the Norfolk coast — 130 miles away.

Cromer natives are friendlier than they appear

The miracle of the internet means that many editors spend one or two days a week at home, where they can (hopefully) concentrate on manuscripts without distractions.

However, it means that my day-to-day life varies enormously, depending on where I’ll be, so it’s impossible for me to merge everything together into one idealized day-in-the-life. So I shall describe my life as two separate gluteals idealized episodes. Left cheek London, first; Cromer, second. It’s nice to end on a happy note, after all.

The Road To Babylon

The alarm rings at 5 a.m. and I stumble out of bed to a warm welcome from Heidi, our blonde Swiss fitness instructor heterotrophic coprophage.

After a breakfast of puppy kibble, used sump oil, exhaust pipes from 50’s Buicks and rusty bicycle pedals (honestly, at that hour of the morning I’m not that fussy) I put the Fairtrade Medium Roast in the coffee jug and take a cup, leaving the rest to greet Mrs Gee when she surfaces a little while later.

Mrs Gee is a political journalist and editor of an online magazine for a charity that promotes volunteering in the corporate sector, and works almost entirely from home.

Pausing only to slip on my diamante kitten heels, don my grass skirt and green lurex boob tube, grab my rocket-propelled grenade launcher, a few rounds of fuel-air explosive and a nice clean hanky to surrender with, I leave, walking the half-mile or so to my local railway station, Roughton Road, on the outskirts of Cromer. On the way I get a brief and distant glimpse of Cromer lighthouse and the sea below it.

The station is no more than a halt in the middle of a wood — a platform and a single track.

The rush hour hits its peak at Roughton Road

Eventually a train pulls up, which on a good day has two (2) carriages. Cheerful rustic banter might be exchanged with the driver and conductor as the train snorts merrily to Norwich. This is the scenic Bittern Line, and my day opens with lovely views of Norfolk’s picturesque countryside, including stretches of Broadland.

Quick! Grab that dastardly Gee before he gets away!

Once at Norwich I hoof it round to platform 3.1413 and the express train to London, stopping at Diss, Stowmarket, Ipswich, Irkutsk, Ouagadougou, Montivideo and Colchester. This is my opportunity to have a couple of hours all to myself: so that’s when I unclog my trusty Asus Eee or Dell 6400 and get to work, writing or editing, usually fiction.

Last year I wrote a kind of Gothick Horror Mystery Novel called By The Sea, almost all while on the train. Jenny Rohn kindly serialized it on LabLit and you can read it here.

This year I’ve been revising an SF epic I drafted some while ago: many train journeys turned this into a thumping great 280,000-word trilogy. You can order the draft version from Lulu here and I’d be pleased to have (constructive) criticism.

For some reason I really enjoy writing scenes that involve sex, violence, aliens, violent sex, or violent sex with aliens.

Violent alien sex, yesterday

I’m not sure what deep psychological flaw should prompt a happily married, beardy middle-aged croc-wearing father of two to write such filth stuff, but whatever it is, it certainly sets me up for a day at the Nature office.

At the moment, though, I am editing material for the next issue of Mallorn, the twice-yearly journal of the Tolkien Society, which I edit. And so the hours fly by and I find myself in London, alighting at around 9 a.m. Elvish has left the building.

My first tasks in London are to check what’s been going on at the Nature Network and then to go through my emails. This might take a few minutes — at other times it could take most of the morning. I also spend time catching up with what my colleagues have been up to.

Lunch is taken with colleagues in the staff canteen. Although the food is free, reports that you get what you pay for are wildly exaggerated. The grub’s pretty decent, actually. But perhaps I have simple, undiscriminating tastes.

“How was that manuscript on nonlinear optics?”
“Dunno – everytime I looked for it, it was somewhere else.”

The afternoon is taken up with the serious business of appraising manuscripts.

Another day, another dinosaur..zzz…zzz

I deal with around 700 new manuscript submissions per year (or about 10-15 a week), together with the ongoing caseload of manuscripts in various states of peer-review, of which I can afford to publish 35-40. These manuscripts may concern a wide variety of subjects.

Many years ago when the world was young I was a vertebrate palaeontologist,

Three years ago I couldn’t even spell ‘palaeontologist’, and now I are one!

and this is still my core area of expertise. But I also deal with what I’d call integrative and comparative biology more generally — everything from the mechanics of bird flight to comparative genomics; hardcore phylogenetic systematics (yo, baby, do it to me!) to palaeolithic archaeology (pant pant gasp).

This wide range of interests means that I interact with colleagues elsewhere in the Biological Sciences team who are more familiar with molecular matters, and also with colleagues on the Physical Sciences team, discussing issues as varied as mechanisms of magnetic sensitivity in animal migration, to advice on the different ways to date rocks.

Evolutionary developmental biology, or EvoDevo, is currently what floats my boat. I find the application of shiny new machines that go ping to previously intractable zoological problems immensely tumescent stimulating.

Being in the London office also allows me to attend editorial meetings (I’m pleased to say that as an organization, we have refreshingly few of these) as well as make decisions on manuscripts that have been out for review, which require more hands-on paper-pushing than can be easily achieved remotely. Even now, some aspects of the remote handling of manuscripts feel rather like decorating your front hall by standing outside and poking the paintbrush in through the letter box.

Although most of the time I am Dr No, rejecting accounts of people’s hard-won results,

So, Professor Bond, you’re appealing? You don’t look very appealing from here!

deep down I just want to be loved.

Oh pleeease let me accept a manuscript this week.

Accepting a manuscript is always a nice feeling, especially as a way to end a working day.

One of my other jobs is to edit and run the award-winning Futures section in Nature and Nature Physics. Futures started in 1999 as our foray into science fiction, and has been going, on and off, ever since. Last year a hundred items were collected in this well-received anthology. Contributions are mostly unsolicited, and I receive a smattering each week. When I have collected a dozen or so, I seal myself up in my escape podule and read them in one go. The psychological effect of such immersion replaces nearly all my requirements for psychtropic drugs.

Excuse me, is this the 06:08 to Norwich?

Depending on the trains, and whether the hamster powering it has a hurty foot, or the horse has to be boiled down into glue somewhere just north of Chelmsford, I get home between 7.45 and 8.45 pm: hopefully having committed another 1,000 words of graphic violence to disk.

On arrival at the Maison des Girrafes I am greeted by the smell of fresh bread (our household robot makes a terrific ciabatta)

Take me to your leader

and have but a short while to catch up with Mrs Gee before reading an episode of Harry Potter and the Release of Calcium from Intracellular Stores to Gee Minima.

While Mrs Gee subsides in front of an improving television programme such as How To Look At Footballers’ Wives Naked; Blot or Not: Tart Up Your Westerns with Trinny and Susannah, or Location, Location, Location (which I was surprised to learn isn’t about quantum mechanics, as I’d assumed), I catch up on my email and make a few more manuscript decisions that have plopped into my inbox while I’ve been on the road. By 10.30 I’m fit to drop.

Seaside Rendezvous

My days spent at home are much more fun. I am usually either woken by Heidi barking at around 5:40, or our cat Fred

peeing on my head, and the next hour and a half are spent in a foam and frenzy of business, disinterring the children for school, recalibrating the chickens (we have six bantams) and setting up the EcoMo™ for its morning run.

One of us will then walk the children the hundred yards or so to their school, the J. Peasemould Gruntfuttock Academy for Near-Earth Asteroids, and we’ll settle down to a couple of hours work.

Then another of us will take the Swiss fitness instructor heterotrophic coprophage for a walk. This is usually to the cliffs about a kilometer from home, down the Stairs of Cirith Ungol

Surf’s Up, I see

through the woods to the beach

(if the weather isn’t too windy), and then home.

The Maison Des Girrafes, yesterday

After more work, Mrs Gee and I will usually go into Cromer town centre to score some dope vandalize a bus shelter do our errands and have a spot of lunch. As I usually have one of these on my shirt, these chores are swiftly completed. However, we’ve recently rented a beach hut,

so I should imagine that many lunch hours will be spent there over the summer.

After a couple of hours more work it’s time to rescue collect the offspring from school, and the early evening is spent in a foam and frenzy of business similar to that of the morning but in reverse, and will often involve the additional tasks of ferrying combinations of children to ballet class/ brownies/ choir; chasing stray chickens; and watering plants. My cucumbers and sweet corn look like being pathetic this year, but I’m looking forward to some decent peas and beans and enough tomatoes to throw at authors make into a jolly good salsa.

Once everyone else is in bed, I’ll have an hour or so more of peace and quiet to catch up with the inbox before I collapse.

It’s a tough job. But somebody’s got to do it.