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From time to time, we try to give you a glimpse into work in our offices around the globe, so we are excited to bring you an interview with Erin McAuliffe, a Product Marketing Coordinator for Oxford’s online products. We spoke to Erin about her life here at Oxford University Press — which includes marketing a range of digital resources including Oxford Bibliographies, Oxford Islamic Studies Online, Oxford Competition Law, and more.

What is the most important lesson you learned during your first year on the job?

To be flexible when relying on others. I am a little bit of a control freak so learning to go with the flow was a challenge.

When did you start working at OUP?

I was an intern on the Online Product Marketing team during the Summer of 2010 and then returned as a full-time employee on the same team one year later in June 2011.

Erin McAuliffe, Marketing Coordinator, at her desk in the New York office.

What’s the most enjoyable part of your day?

When all my meetings are over and I can sit down and check projects off my to-do list! Or when I finish a to-do list!

What’s the least enjoyable?

9:00 a.m. conference call meetings.

What is the strangest thing currently on or in your desk?

Four different pictures of Ryan Gosling and a cheeseburger mouse pad.

What was your first job in publishing?

This one!

What are you reading right now?

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd; it’s just okay.

What’s your favorite book?

This is impossible to answer but my favorite book that I have read recently was Columbine which is a non-fiction book written by journalist Dave Cullen who covered the Columbine shooting and its impact on the community and families over the next 12 years. It was the most honest, heartbreaking, and complex book I’ve read in a long time.

If you didn’t work in publishing, what would you be doing?

Probably working for a media or ad agency.

What’s the first thing you do when you get to work in the morning?

Put my lunch in the fridge and then scan Internet news while my email loads.

What will you be doing once you’ve completed this Q&A?

I will be coding the public page update of Oxford Bibliographies. I had to teach myself HTML when I started working here and now I love it. It’s cathartic and systematic and you get to be creative.

If you could trade places with any one person for a week, who would it be and why?

Probably Barack Obama. I think having that much responsibility and pressure would put a lot of things I worry about in perspective.

If you were stranded on a desert island, what three items would you take with you?

A book, some sunscreen, and a regenerating frozen drink cooler.

What is the most exciting project you have been part of while working at OUP?

Probably the creation of an interactive author map for Oxford Bibliographies. It was a project that I thought of, got approved, and executed in a short amount of time and it was something completely new and different for OUP and for the online products.

What is your favorite word? 

Rigmarole.

What is in your desk drawer?

Shoes, A Fondue Set, a stockpile of napkins, and a large amount of blank USBs.

Most obscure talent or hobby?

I can juggle, though not very well.

Longest book ever read?

IT by Stephen King, a little over 1100 pages. Close second is World Without End by Ken Follet which I think is just under 1100 pages.

Erin McAuliffe is Global Product Marketing Coordinator, Digital at Oxford University Press. She works across a range of online products including Oxford Bibliographies, Oxford Islamic Studies Online, Oxford Competition Law, and more.

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By Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

No, the image to the left is not a newly discovered picture of Jane Austen. The image was taken from my copy of The Complete Letter Writer, published in 1840, well after Jane Austen’s death in 1817. But letter writing manuals were popular throughout Jane Austen’s lifetime, and the text of my copy is very similar to that of much earlier editions of the book, published from the mid-1750s on. It is possible then that Jane Austen might have had access to one. Letter writing manuals contained “familiar letters on the most common occasions in life”, and showed examples of what a letter might look like to people who needed to learn the art of letter writing. The Complete Letter Writer also contains an English grammar, with rules of spelling, a list of punctuation marks and an account of the eight parts of speech. If Jane Austen had possessed a copy, she might have had access to this feature as well.

But I doubt if she did. Her father owned an extensive library, and Austen was an avid reader. But in genteel families such as hers letter writing skills were usually handed down within the family. “I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper what one would say to the same person by word of mouth,” Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra on 3 January 1801, adding, “I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter.” But I don’t think George Austen’s library contained any English grammars either. He did teach boys at home, to prepare them for further education, but he taught them Latin, not English.

So Jane Austen didn’t learn to write from a book; she learnt to write just by practicing, from a very early age on. Her Juvenilia, a fascinating collection of stories and tales she wrote from around the age of twelve onward, have survived, in her own hand, as evidence of how she developed into an author. Her letters, too, illustrate this. She is believed to have written some 3,000 letters, only about 160 of which have survived, most of them addressed to Cassandra. The first letter that has come down to us reads a little awkwardly: it has no opening formula, contains flat adverbs – “We were so terrible good as to take James in our carriage”, which she would later employ to characterize her so-called “vulgar” characters – and even has an unusual conclusion: “yours ever J.A.”. Could this have been her first letter?

Cassandra wasn’t the only one she corresponded with. There are letters to her brothers, to friends, to her nieces and nephews as well as to her publishers and some of her literary admirers, with whom she slowly developed a slightly more intimate relationship. There is even a letter to Charles Haden, the handsome apothecary who she is believed to have been in love with. Her unusual ending, “Good bye”, suggests a kind of flirting on paper. The language of the letters shows how she varied her style depending on who she was writing to. She would use the word fun, considered a “low” word at the time, only to the younger generation of Austens. Jane Austen loved linguistic jokes, as shown by the reverse letter to her niece Cassandra Esten: “Ym raed Yssac, I hsiw uoy a yppah wen raey”, and she recorded her little nephew George’s inability to pronounce his own name: “I flatter myself that itty Dordy will not forget me at least under a week”.

It’s easy to see how the letters are a linguistic goldmine. They show us how she loved to talk to relatives and friends and how much she missed her sister when they were apart. They show us how she, like most people in those days, depended on the post for news about friends and family, how a new day wasn’t complete without the arrival of a letter. At a linguistic level, the letters show us a careful speller, even if she had different spelling preferences from what was general practice at the time, and someone who was able to adapt her language, word use and grammar alike, to the addressee.

All her writing, letters as well as her fiction, was done at a writing desk, just like the one on the table on the image from the Complete Letter Writer, and just like my own. A present from her father on her nineteenth birthday, the desk, along with the letters written upon it, is on display as one of the “Treasures of the British Library”. The portable desk traveled with her wherever she went. “It was discovered that my writing and dressing boxes had been by accident put into a chaise which was just packing off as we came in,” she wrote on 24 October 1798. A near disaster, for “in my writing-box was all my worldly wealth, 7l”.

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade has a chair in English Sociohistorical Linguistics at the University of Leiden Centre for Linguistics (Leiden, The Netherlands). Her most recent books include In Search of Jane Austen: The Language of the Letters, The Bishop’s Grammar: Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism, and An Introduction to Late Modern English. She is currently the director of the research project “Bridging the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public”.

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Image credits: (1) Image of Jane Austen from The Complete Letter Writer, public domain via Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2) Photo of writing desk, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade.

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Really really really good tips in the Mystie Winckler book Pamela Barnhill recommends here, gang. I thought I was already using Evernote & Google Calendar efficiently, but I picked up some useful new ideas (including better integrating my systems) in the book. Which is 30% off with the code in Pam’s post. So, like, under $3.

In Paperless Home Organization, Mystie Winckler leads you through the process of using digital applications to build your very own paperless system. She walks you step-by-step through how to use four free apps to digitally store the same information you would normally keep in a home management binder.

Which means if you have a smartphone, or an iPod Touch, or any tablet, then your binder no longer sits cluttering up your counter, but in your hand – at the doctor’s office, the bookstore, even at your school room table.

I’d been meaning to try Remember the Milk—my pal Ron raves about it, and he doesn’t rave lightly—and Pam’s post, and Mystie’s book, nudged me to take the plunge. Last year I relied on TeuxDeux for daily task management, but my free trial period ran out and I decided I wasn’t enough in love with it to pay for it. It’s a really gorgeous, clean layout but too hard to go back to past days. Remember the Milk isn’t quite as visually appealing (its web app, that is; on my phone it’s quite nice) but it is so much more flexible and functional. Thanks to Paperless Home Organization, I’ve now got it talking to my Gmail account (my RTM to-do list pops up in my inbox sidebar) and WOW, this is just right for the way mah brain works.

As for Evernote, I rely on it for everything. Or so I thought. Now I see all sorts of new bits of recordkeeping I can shift over there. Very pleased.

Have you fallen into a black hole of office debris and battled to rise above the clutter, rather than drown before you can finish writing that opus to the literary world? Did you accidentally come across that reference book that the library made you pay for when you didn’t remember having ever seen it?

What about that brownie that disappeared from your desk three weeks ago that you accused your five year old of absconding with? Does any of this sound familiar?

If not, you’re either fanatically organized, blessed beyond measure, or not a writer.

This past year I’ve been trying desperately to keep my office area organized and easily accessible. With my life in constant flux at the moment, keeping my work space organized is becoming a nightmare. Living in limbo, as we are, doesn’t make for a well-ordered life.

Take my desk, please! I’ve lost control of it. When we moved into the apartment complex a couple of years ago, I didn’t have a desk. To remedy the situation, I purchased an eight foot Formica countertop at the local home improvement center and added six thick table legs with mounting brackets. The unit is sturdy, easily cleaned, and can be disassembled when necessity demands a move to another location.

Plenty of work space is provided for computer, layout work, bins of office supplies, etc. What more could I want? Two—2-drawer file cabinets nestle nicely beneath, within easy reach from my desk chair. So handy. A large trash can has a home where I can toss odds and ends for later removal. The printer caddy, all-in-one printing machine and bookshelf table resides perpendicular to the computer end. Great set-up, don’t you think?

I thought so, too. A few weeks after installation and working appreciation, that fantastic work area became a catch all for everything that entered the room; library books disappeared under current working project files, mail, magazines, minor office supplies, brochures, you-name-it. When frustration during a hunt for materials became too much for me, organization blazed with flames fanned by a clean-up whirlwind.

Except when we were on our country tour during the winter of 2010-11, I’ve fought this Battle of the Debris every couple of months since creating this work space. Ask any of my writing buddies. They’ve heard about my efforts on a few occasions.

This week’s clean-up effort, I’ve decided, will be my last. I discovered black mold growing up the outside corner wall of my closet. I think I found the cause for our continuous allergy problems.

Maintenance is tracking down the problem outside before developing a real solution. I’m learning patience today. In the meantime, everything stored in that end of the closet clutters the living room and the rest of my bedroom.

You ask “What does that have to do with organizing your office?” I answer “Everything!” I’ve finally arrived at that point where I can no longer ignore the clutter, no longer blame work/life circumstances, and no longer believe that I’m actually not hoarding useless “stuff.”

The campaign to permanently organize my office life began with the removal of all those boxes from the closet. This morning I went through the first set of bagged debris and boxed minutiae, sorting out that for which I had no need. Everything not needed for my file cabinets, but necessary to keep, will g

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By Michelle Rafferty

Last week we received a message from Miki Matoba, Director of Global Academic Business at OUP Tokyo, confirming that her staff is safe and well. This was a relief to hear, and also a reminder that although many of us are tied to the people of Japan in some way, our perspective of the human impact is relatively small.  So I asked Miki if she wouldn’t mind sharing some of her experiences, and she kindly agreed. When she responded to my questions she wrote: “Hope my answers reflect a part of how we view the incidents as Japanese.”

1.) Where were you, and what were your thoughts as the earthquake hit?

I was in a meeting room with a visitor from OUP Oxford and my staff having a meeting when the earthquake started. You may find this weird but we all are very much living with earthquakes from a young age. So little shakes here and there are just a part of our lives. But not the one we had last Friday as that was the biggest one in some hundreds of years. What I normally think when earthquakes start is when shall I get up to secure the exit and go under the desk. Most of the time, you do not have to do either as it does not last long. But not this time. As the building started to shake for a while I opened the door of the meeting room thinking that this is a big one but should stop soon. But it did not. So we put ourselves under the table hoping for the shaking to cease. When it did not, I thought then that this is a serious one and something really severe will happen as a result.

Then we saw some white stuff coming down in the office (it was not fire – just some dust coming down from the ceiling) and someone shouted that we should leave NOW. So we did. I did not take anything. Just myself and those who were meeting with me, running down from 8th floor to the ground. Even when we were running down the stairs, it was still shaking. After a while, we went back to the office to get things as the decision was made very quickly to close the office for that day. Almost everything on my desk had either fallen over or was on the floor, and it was still shaking.

2.) Was anyone prepared?

Yes and no. As Japanese, we all are prepared for earthquakes but not for something of this size and the aftermath of it.

3.) How do you continue to manage your group at such a difficult time? Is it possible to work?

Try to communicate well. We email and also have set up an internal Twitter account that we tweet to, including who will go into the office and what they are doing as we are still mainly working from home. The situation is still very unsettling making it difficult to concentrate on work (power rationing, aftershocks and the nuclear power plant situation) but we try to process day-to-day things as usual.

4.) How would you describe the city right now (the business activity, the state of mind)?

Interesting question. I think Tokyo is normally one of the most vibrant cities in the world. Now the city is very quiet compared to normal. The weather has been clear and nice after Friday so it feels odd to be in this peaceful, quiet Tokyo under the sun after all that.

5.) I’ve heard radiation levels are higher than normal – is everyone staying inside?

We have lots of information going around including rumors. We live almost as normal – just listening to TV and radio all the time, watching the progress of the nuclear plant situation. I do not go out if that can be avoided.

6.) What do people outside of Japan need to know?

What pictures do you keep on your desk?

Well, book one is officially available everywhere. Book two is written, being edited, and the chapter illustrations are done.

So what am I missing?

Yep, a cover.

I did one a while back, but honestly it didn't quite sit right. The characters didn't work for me, and honestly it didn't capture the absolutely bonkers, surprise the poop out of you, and leave you shaking your head in disbelief nature of of the second book.

So I've started over.



I like this new version. I like it a lot in fact. Granted, it's still in the early stages, but I think it'll capture the intensity of book two much better. Things get much darker, much crazier, and much more unpredictable. I need the to make sure the cover reflects that.

If you haven't yet ordered a copy of "Fathers and Sons" I'm not exactly sure what you're waiting for.

What else are you going to do with your money? Pay bills? Save for retirement?

You're smarter than that.

Spend it needlessly on things you don't need.

Come on, all the cool kids are doing it.

Steve

P.S. Please ignore the messy desk - you know, because I'm messy.

Treadmill Desk

What sedentary lives we writers lead. When I heard about the treadmill desk, I decided to try it out. Here’s the update on how it’s working.

This is my treadmill desk

Here’s my setup. I bought a used treadmill and accidently found out the most important thing: the noise level of the treadmill. This one is very quiet, so you barely know it’s running. After I bought this, I tested others and found them to be very noisy; I got lucky without even knowing it. The wire shelving I used can be found at The Container Store. We removed the side-rails for it to fit under the shelving.

During the first four weeks, I walked 70 miles. That’s in addition to my regular exercise of walking, spinning, biking, stretching and Pilates. End result? Two pounds off. It’s the first time I’ve actually managed to lose weight in a long time.

I’m finding that I’m sharper mentally, especially in the mid-morning hours. By late afternoon, I’ve been more tired, but I expect that to get better.

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1. August
2. changes

Right guys, I promise, I PROMISE, this is the last you'll see of this drawing. I have no choice in the matter anyway, the the doodles are the only thing holding the paper together.

To anyone who fancies completing one of these step by step drawings, before the eyes of the world, it's really simple. Just follow these twelve easy steps;

Step one. I think I'll start a step by step drawing.
Step Two. Yeah, that's a good idea.
Step Three. Yes, I'm loving this.

Step four. I knew it was a good idea.

Step Five. Of course, now I'm committed to this.

Step Six. I couldn't just give it up now.

Step Seven. How long exactly have I been doing this?

Step Eight. Seriously.

Step Nine. I AM getting rather irritable now.

Step Ten. I'm losing the will to live.

Step Eleven. I'm considering murder.

Step Twelve. Finished. Thank f**k for that.

I have noticed that Illustration Friday's theme this week is 'Opinion'. So, as I finished this yesterday, I'm calling this my contribution. Some might say I should have given up on this drawing a long time ago. But as you can see I'm of the opinion - I mean the naughty kid who drew on desk is of the opinion -that it's better to burn out than fade away. Me and this drawing. Totally burnt out. Never again.

Right guys, I promise, I PROMISE, this is the last you'll see of this drawing. I have no choice in the matter anyway, the the doodles are the only thing holding the paper together. It's falling to pieces, but still, at least I feel better about it than I did a while back.

I have noticed that Illustration Friday's theme this week is 'Opinion'. So, as I finished this yesterday, I'm calling this my contribution. Some might say I should have given up on this drawing a long time ago. But I'm of the opinion, I mean the naughty kid who drew on desk is of the opinion, that it's better to burn out than fade away. Me and this drawing. Totally burnt out.

So, that's it. I'm calling this one Done. Finished. Finito. Doneski.

Done.

I am more nervous about posting this than any other drawing. I had something completely different in mind for the larger doodle but when it came to it it just didn't seem right. I just had this compulsion to draw this. I am so nervous because I rarely draw people. Plus, I know it doesn't look like the person it is meant to be. But, get this, I have an excuse. And, it's a pretty good one, I reckon. This is not my doodle. This is a drawing by the naughty kid, that draws on school desks, that I was channeling at the time. So, it's not mine at all. I did not draw it. Nope. Nothing to do with me.

By the way, these step by step drawings are pretty cool to watch on slideshow mode, which you can do HERE.

Now for the varnish.

Ok, boys and girls. Settle down, please. This week we will be learning how to draw a battered old desk. In the style of Andrea Joseph. For no apparent reason.

Yep. I haven't done one of those step by steppy things for a while and this subject would make a good 'un. So, here's the start.

It's going to be a very busy Wednesday for me. I've got a lot of work to do and will most likely spend the vast majority of my day hunched over my drawing table in my dark studio with the blinds drawn. I won't take a shower until well after lunch which will make my hair slimy, and my skin greasy, and my teeth still covered with that pasty morning tooth film for most of the day.

That's right...I'm a bridge troll.

I'd tell you to "ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS THREE" before you continue reading, but I'm much to busy to come up with three questions, so instead I'll just wave you through.

The above sketch is yet another rough from the very same recent project the last rough was produced for.

Steve

Here are all the things that I really need to work. Click on to the picture to enlarge it and see the small secret details. :))


Íme az asztalom rajta a festéshez és egyéb munkákhoz szükséges és nélkülözhetetlen tárgyakkal. A képre kattintva nagyobb méretben megtekinthetôek a titkos részletek. :)

Amazingly self -deceptive, Chandler thought he would be well hidden on the cluttered desk behind the old clock, candles, and decorative box. But, alas, he was "spotted."