finishing

The last several weeks have included a roller coaster of a concept note. Don't feel like going through the whole narrative but basically I had misgivings about it from the beginning, then struggled to get coherence in the first cut, then after the second cut tried and succeeded in getting my boss to pump the brakes and say let's try again next year despite his powerful political motivation to proceed, then learning the deadline had been extended and we had to do the best we could with basically two extra days, then organizing an emergency meeting to try to bring the missing coherence and basically failing, then working late several nights in a row to try to get it to some semblance of non-embarrassing shape.

And I did it. Just now, I sent a pre-final draft to London that will not essentially be us throwing egg on our own faces. Among all the challenges and constant learning, it's nice to do something that I'm good at and comfortable with, and cleaning and clearing up language is one such thing. A core competency.

At the same time, the whole process was a learning experience for me. There are going to be serious growing pains in getting the agencies here to work -- and, more difficult, think -- together. Some of the things I tried this time around I will abandon next time, and that's useful.