How Mum’s ‘office’ (our living room) looked at the end of the project

There is a watchword in our family for stressful projects – utter the phrase ‘FT Guide’ and shoulders shudder (not in a good way).
In 1981, my mother was a freelance writer working from home, bringing up two school-age girls in a flat in north London with her schoolteacher husband.
She toggled between non-fiction journalism, novel-writing, and memoirs. Now and then a paid travel-writing job would come along; if you’re in the writing game, you’ll know those jobs are few and far between. But some of them, unfortunately, don’t end up being as advertised.
As it was with the impossibly scheduled, bombastically titled Financial Times Businessman’s Guide to Great Britain. The Herculean task of writing this detailed travel guide in a matter of months would have been so much easier if TripAdvisor, Wikitravel, and Google had been in existence. But in the days before the Internet, journalists like my mother (and me) had to fact-check every tiny detail by dialling a number and talking to a person on the phone.
In many ways, it’s a process that’s lacking in so much of our current editing methods. But it’s a beast of a job. Mum soon realised that, like the fabled Sisyphus, she was knee-deep in an impossible task involving researching minute location-based details.
Where might you find a drycleaner in Bingley? A taxi firm in Leeds, or a florist in Whitstable? The expectation in the timescale given was unrealistic at best, horrendous in reality. Dad still describes how Mum woke every night in a cold sweat, spreading panic through the whole flat. My sister and I have uncomfortable memories of playing our own parts, which amounted, chiefly, to staying out of the way.
In the end, it took a village. As the deadline loomed like a huge wave on the horizon, they ‘hired’ a team of friends to help. Our living room became HQ, piles of papers stacking up, empty bottles of wine on windowsills, mugs of coffee refilled as everyone worked around the clock to steer the ship into port. That they managed it and remained friends afterwards is a testament to the firm relationships my parents always made.
When the thing was done, everyone drove out to the Knebworth Capital festival to see Chuck Berry live, alongside Muddy Waters on his last UK tour. Dad says it was the best ending to the worst of times.

I didn’t expect, when I signed up to my MA in Creative Writing, to be running a similar gauntlet. Step forward, module CRD707, all about the business of publishing.
“Put together a student anthology,” they said, “and do it in seven weeks.” Actually six. No, five, because we needed two weeks to check, annotate and upload our own individual versions.
Like members in a TV reality show acting out a very real chore against a very real clock, we split into teams and quickly became a wobbly publishing house. Editorial was full (not a surprise, we are after all a group of would-be writers), so I ended up in the Design house, where the task was to build the thing. None of us had designed more than a Canva flyer, yet InDesign was the prescribed program and we had to learn it.
We all had at least one piece in the anthology, and we worked harder than ever to get everything edited, designed, and marketed. At one point, some members of our small Design team found ourselves staying up until 2am, grabbing four hours’ sleep, waking at 6am to do it all over again. That went on for a few days before I sobbed on a Teams call and we received essential backup.
We communicated via a hail of WhatsApp messages; I would step away for 15 minutes and come back to 48 missed notes, all of them important.
“I’m splitting the atom,” I told a friend in the middle of the maelstrom, weeping into a glass of red at her kitchen table – my one brief social event that week.
“What is going ON?” Mr L hissed as I wailed at the computer screen, but he stopped asking after a while. I had no time to explain, and the chaos was fairly obvious. I didn’t see the kitchen for a long time; food simply appeared (that I’ve chosen to marry someone as supportive as my dad is really no coincidence).
My son, to his credit, has begun to show similar supportive traits. Home from uni, he stepped in for a few days as tech expert, bringing to the party the best of his Software Engineering skills. He won himself £30 and a happier mum. Unsurprisingly, he’s not shown any wish to become a book designer.
In the end, we birthed the book ahead of schedule, alongside a shiny, inventive plan written by our brilliant Marketing team, which I hope we get to use. With any luck, the book will appear on our shelves one day. For now, the make-believe printing presses are cooling, like our brains.

At the end of our project there has been no festival, just lots of sleep, a spot of reading, beautiful silence, coffee, mental space, a return to healthy home cooking.
As with all tricky things there have been positives. I’ve made some special friends, first and foremost. I learned a lot, not just cynical stuff but useful things about contracts, and the business of publishing, and about editing too, which I always thought was ‘my thing’. You think you know stuff but there’s always more to learn. The book looks great; if it ever gets printed I’ll be proud to appear in it alongside my fellow writers. I’m confident the next module will be more in keeping with the sort of thing I signed up for, we’ll have to see.
But if anyone suggests constructing an ‘anthology’ again, I’ll be diving overboard and front-crawling to shore. And I don’t even know front crawl.