My fourth anniversary as a PW editor was on Saturday! I can’t believe I almost forgot to blog about it. I sure picked four exciting years to spend here: multiple rounds of layoffs, near-closure, change of leadership (twice), change of ownership, change of offices… looking back on all the turmoil makes me even more glad for the relative calm of the past year, where the most stress I’ve had to contend with was closing down the mass market reviews section and creating the romance reviews section. And that was a very good sort of stress, to be sure.

On my first day at work, I wrote in my personal blog:

My desk came pre-equipped with the Chicago Manual of Style (14th ed.), a dictionary, and a thesaurus.

There is a cart of reference books labeled REFERENCE–DO NOT TAKE to distinguish it from the two carts of ARCs that are entirely up for grabs. I confirmed and double-confirmed that really, truly, I may take as many of those as I like.

My office has a library. A small one, granted, but still. A library. In my office.

I totally win.

Four years later, I still feel just as giddy when I look around my workspace. I love being part of this scrappy little 139-year-old independent publication. I love recommending books for a living. The work is great, my colleagues are great, and I feel like I really do some good in the world. Before this, the longest I’d ever spent at a job was a year and a half, and the longest I’d ever spent being happy at a job was about ten months. Now I can easily see myself staying here and doing this as long as they want to keep me around. That’s a very good feeling.