Thoughts of a magazine editor

I'd like to claim I've been saving this post until the first edition of the quarterly magazine which is now under my joint-stewardship had gone to press.
It wouldn't be true, but the fact that I can only now pick up my blogging pen speaks to how much the magazine has taken over my life in the past few weeks. Pages to proof (and re-proof and re-proof and re-proof once again), features to write, articles to ghost-write, masses of marketing information to pull together, arguments to have, deciding which articles to pull out when the magazine bust (that's 'had too much to get into the space available', for my non-journalistic readers), delivering the highlights on to the website...It's all part of a journalist's life but on a scale I'd never previously dealt with, having never edited anything bigger than a 14-page broadsheet sports section - and that only as a holiday stand-in.
Now that I've experienced it and the 80-page magazine is due to start dropping through members' letterboxes in the next few days, I can look back and say I've loved it. Nothing beats the feeling of seeing a newspaper or magazine come together from scratch and as I write, 36 hours since the electronic version of the magazine hit the web, I've had more reader reaction than I did in years in some of the places I've worked.
When I last experienced anything like this, in August 2008 before the Birmingham Post & Mail underwent its' first great upheaval, I was battling the effects of ill-health and, looking back, was in no state to handle the stresses and strains of journalism.
Now, God willing, I can do so and it was instructive that on the two or three occasions in the last few weeks when I felt the pressure rising, I stepped back, took a deep breath and worked through it.
And now that the magazine is done, I have a month to fill with other things before we pick up the baton for the summer edition. I'm not wholly sure what they are at the moment but my life has changed so radically in the last six months that I am convinced it has done so for the better and that something will work out.
Tomorrow afternoon, I hope to speak to a former university colleague who I haven't seen for years but who now works for a TV production company and is interested in the magazine. It may not lead anywhere but this whole thing has brought sparks like that into my life that were not there six months ago.
As a Christian, I believe things happen for a reason; if I had not been made redundant, the opportunity to work on the magazine and forsake a daily three-hour commuting round trip for an office in my spare bedroom at home would not have arisen.
I am sure there are other surprises out there; I am sure they will lead my life in the right direction.