If things were quiet around the blog last week, it's for a good reason — I picked up and took off for the wilds of Michigan, in a cabin by the woods. So strange, in this day and age, to be so completely out of contact. No internet connection; if I wanted to check e-mail I had to make a trek to the local McDonald's, which proudly declared "WiFi HERE!" in their window. And the cabin was in a heavily wooded dip, so cell-phones remained inoperative until we hit the main road. At first, it was a bit nerve-wracking, to feel so out of touch, and worrying that things were going sadly wrong without me checking in on them. But right around day 4, all that disappeared, and the sense of release and relaxation was simply wonderful.

Coming back to work, I had two particularly fun meetings to look forward to. First of all was the preliminary Pin-Up meeting for the November issue. This is the point at which the Art Department has worked their first-round magic on the projects, and we all sit around in a room with the stories — yes — pinned up on the wall. We'll take a look at the layout designs, look for things that might look a bit off, figure out if one story needs an additional page (it did) and if one story should probably lose a page (it did). Headlines? Background colors? Sidebars clearly identifiable as such? Captions needed? Enough white space? Too much white space? Any and all issues were brought up and chewed over, and solutions were proposed. I'm continually impressed and excited by what goes into the design of the magazine... we've got a great art department, and it's always a highlight for me to see what they've come up with for each of the stories. So much thinking goes into planning the visual impact and coherence of each issue. At Pin Up, with all the various stories collected in one place, we'll get a clear sense if one color is used too much, or if too many of the stories are oriented horizontally, as opposed to mixing up the look to keep it interesting. During one Pin Up, we realized that every other story was done in shades of blue, and so we chose a couple to shift color schemes. (This, no doubt, is my fault, as it's become common knowledge around the office that "Any color will make Hazel happy as long as it's blue.")

The other fun meeting was our monthly New Proposals meeting. For anyone who wonders how submitted projects are handled, this is it. An artisan will send us a proposal for an article — the proposal can be as simple as a digital image of a piece of jewelry, or it can be as extensive as a written outline of a project. Once a month, we collect all the proposals that have come in and we lay them out on a table. The editorial staff and one or more members of the art department, gather around the table. And then we talk. And talk. And talk. The NP meeting is basically a jurying process, with each of the editors and artists weighing in, and weighing each project against the needs of the magazine. Often times, we'll have ideas of how to make the project stronger, or more suited to our magazine, and we'll go back to the artist with those ideas. Sometimes we'll like a project, but we simply have too many necklaces (as an example) — we may go back to the artisan and ask if they could apply the same technique to a bracelet. Sometimes we'll see a pretty piece of jewelry that is too "beady" for AJ; in that case, we'll forward the proposal to Bead&Button or BeadStyle. When we meet, we'll have a running list of the projects that we've already accepted, and evaluate each of the new projects with a close eye on what we already have waiting for publication. For example, if we have 6 projects that use fiber techniques already approved and waiting — that's at least a full year of issues covered, and we'd be less likely to accept a similar project unless it was truly fabulous. Many times a rejection is simply the product of bad timing. Last year we received a great proposal for an introduction to cuttlefish bone casting — at the same time that we were looking at layouts for an article on cuttlefish bone casting that we'd accepted six months earlier.