NAIWE writing prompt: What looks to be your big project of the week?

Well, I’m glad you asked, because I’ve actually got two big projects this week.

One is a copyedit of a scientific grant proposal. Grant proposals are top secret, so I will say no more about this one other than that its subject matter is very interesting.

The other is a copyedit and proofread of a company website. Last fall I proofread three consumer catalogs for this company and they were so happy with my work that they decided to have me do their website. Their website is beautiful but has a ton of pages, so the process is very time consuming. However, I am learning a lot about this company’s products. I am even starting to want to buy a few of them.

These two projects are keeping me very busy; in fact, the company website project has no hard deadline and will most likely occupy my time until June. But when you are a freelance editor, you live for times like these. Busyness is pure gold!

 

NAIWE prompt: Write about something in your life that is “worth it.”

I’m actually not about to write about something that’s “worth it,” but someone who is.

That would be my husband.

It’s long been my belief that in a marriage, a husband and a wife should each look for ways to serve the other. Now, by “serve,” I don’t mean giving them breakfast in bed every morning or doing every ounce of the housework so that they can watch football on TV. What I mean is that a husband and a wife should do things for each other mutually and be ready to step up when the other is in need.

For example, some nights I cook dinner and other nights my husband cooks dinner. The person who does not cook the meal washes the dishes afterwards.

Sometimes I empty the dishwasher and sometimes my husband does. Sometimes he takes the trash out and sometimes I do. Sometimes he goes grocery shopping and sometimes I do. And every Saturday morning, we both clean the condo.

Now, I absolutely hate grocery shopping. I don’t like cleaning the bathroom (with the exception of the fact that I get to listen to music while I do it) or washing dishes. I see cooking as more of a chore than anything else, and vacuuming frightens me (ever see Mr. Mom?). So why do I do these things?

Because my husband is worth it. His comfort and happiness are worth it.

And I know I am worth it to him.

(If you are judging by this post that my husband and I live like a kid-free version of The Waltons, please stop. Like every other married couple, we occasionally have spats and annoy each other. But he is worth getting over–and not dwelling on–those nasty moments.)

 

NAIWE prompt: Write a story on your NAIWE blog about the holidays. At the end of your post, note the subject of the most complicated sentence you wrote.

The week before Christmas (a Friday this year), I was elated.

I was looking forward to exchanging gifts with my family, spending time with my husband, indulging in some tourtiere and other great food, and not working for a few days.

Christmas Eve Day, my husband and I had both taken the day off, and we celebrated with a noontime meal of pizza. The pizza made me sleepy, so in the afternoon I took a nap–a long nap. Just before I woke up, I found myself dreaming of someone I had met only once. She was the only daughter of a gentleman and his wife whom my husband and I knew from church. The gentleman, who was good friends with my husband, had passed away a year ago, and we had attended his funeral and met his adult daughter there. Through her tears, she managed to be very nice and to smile, but my fashionista, judgmental self could not help but to be inwardly critical of her for wearing open-toed shoes with pantyhose.

This young woman showed up at the end of my dream, coupled with a techno song which I know from the dance mixes that I use to work out to. I dislike that particular song due to its foul language and drug references, and the song had nothing to do with the woman, but there they were together as I woke up. And I found this very creepy.

Christmas Day was very pleasant at my parents’ condo and found us exchanging gifts, eating, and having nice conversations.

The next day was anything but pleasant. My husband and I went to Walmart to use gift cards that we had received, and found crowds aplenty and technical difficulties using one of the gift cards. In the afternoon, my husband wrestled with our cell phone provider over the phone, to no avail. In the evening, we watched part of Tommy, a movie which I had seen before and found deeply disturbing. Ugh.

The following Tuesday, the bomb was dropped. BAM! Just like that.

My editing business suffered its first professional blow, the ins and outs of which I will not go into. This incident cast a large, dark shadow on the whole holiday season, and I still have not recovered from the blow to my business. My mood is very dark right now, and I certainly did not want to start 2021 this way.

Most complicated sentence in this story: “I was looking forward to exchanging gifts with my family, spending time with my husband, indulging in some tourtiere and other great food, and not working for a few days.”  Subject: I

 

So we can all agree that 2020 was a horrific, terrible year. (The heck with euphemisms like “challenging.”) That having been said, I am going to be glad to see it go back to Hell where it came from. And I am certain that you, dear reader, are as well.

Now that 2021 is almost upon us, I wanted to (as promised before) share my goals for this year with you all.

1. I wish to end 2021 posting a profit (as I have the previous two years) in my editing business.
2. I wish to save enough to be able to put aside funds to travel to San Antonio, TX for the 2022 ACES conference. (The 2021 conference is virtual.)
3. I wish to do well in the Advanced Copyediting class which I am taking in the spring.

I also have some goals which are not related to my profession, which I will share with you in order to give this blog some humanity:

1. I wish to survive the cicada swarm that will take place in May and June in my home state of Maryland.
2. I wish to spend a day in Hersheypark again. I have not been there in too long. (Yes, it really is spelled as one word. Look it up if you don’t believe me.) 🙂
3. I wish to mend one of my close friendships so that it is healthy again. (That’s all I wish to say about that here.)
4. I wish to be able to care for my aging parents.

I definitely prefer having goals for the new year to making new year’s resolutions. Goals are so much better, in my opinion.

What are some of your goals for 2021?

NAIWE writing prompt: Describe your favorite holiday food.

My heritage is French-Canadian and my mother is from Quebec province, and my absolute favorite holiday food is a traditional French-Canadian dish called tourtiere (which should have an “accent grave” over the first “e” but I don’t know how to make those on WordPress). What on Earth is tourtiere, you ask?

It’s a meat pie, and it’s delicious.

To begin, tourtiere has a warm, flaky pie crust which covers its top and forms the bottom. The crust is golden in color, and practically melts in my mouth with every bite. When the tourtiere is served (i.e., sliced), the crust often falls apart and the meat spills onto the plate, but who cares? It’s still scrumptious.

The inside of the pie is a cooked mixture of ground pork, veal, and beef, which is seasoned with a generous amount of spices. Oh, how I wish I could remember what the spices are. They make the pie spicy, but not excessively so.

The consistency of the pie is a little bit dry, but not too dry. One will not see liquid on one’s plate when one has a slice of tourtiere.

I have helped my mother make tourtiere before, but it has been years since I have, and I confess that I’ve never made it myself. I am very skittish about using the oven.

Maybe someday, when I get braver and am less neurotically afraid of house fires.

 

Hello again, dear readers. I know that last week I said that this week I would share with you my goals for 2021. Well, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that I will not be sharing my 2021 goals this week. The good news is that I will share them two weeks from now. You see, I decided that it would make more sense to share goals for the new year on the cusp of the new year. Resolutions? Who needs those? Goals are the way to go. So, for those of you who were looking forward to seeing my 2021 goals this week…your gratification will be delayed. It gives you two more weeks to anticipate. 🙂

How often do you update your website and professional profiles? Do you update them regularly? Oh, dear reader, if you don’t, shame on you. I update my NAIWE profile, EFA profile, LinkedIn profile, and website once a month, either on or near the 15th day of the month. I also update my resume, which serves as a template for my other updates and which is accessible on my EFA profile, and my client list (an Excel spreadsheet for my own records). The thing to which I pay the most attention is the “Works Edited” section on my profiles and resume. Anything new gets added…as soon as I receive permission from the author. That is highly important as well–even more so than updating!

Of course, I blog every Sunday. If you have a blog, you should write in it at least once a week.

How often do you update your professional profiles? Do you think that I should update mine more often? What say you?

Hello, everyone.

Today I would like to showcase my accomplishments from the last couple of months or so.

For every quarter this year so far, I have come out “in the black.”

I am on track to finishing 2020 “in the black.”

I completed the EFA course Intermediate Copyediting.

I have nearly completed a sizable project for the company for which a good friend of mine works.

I just signed the service agreement to become a contractor with a major research university. I will be editing scientific grant proposals for their faculty.

I have maintained a good relationship with the church who was my first client, and the church continues to send work my way.

I became a contractor with a second major research university and have begun editing grant proposals for their faculty as well.

Whew!

I have some big goals for the whole of 2021, and next week I plan to share them with you in this blog.

What are your goals for 2021? Feel free to share them in the comments to this post.

Every person knows about the holiday crunch, a time when there is too much to do and not enough time. One must buy gifts, decorate, bake, plan a holiday meal, et cetera.

I finished buying gifts in mid-November, decorated the Saturday after Thanksgiving with my hubby, and have a holiday meal in mind. (I do not usually bake for the holidays, and when I do, it consists of cookies from pre-made dough. Using the oven makes me anxious.) Besides, Christmas (the holiday that I and my family celebrate) will probably only be my hubby and me (as was Thanksgiving) due to COVID-19.

Why did I do so much so early?

I am about to enter an editing holiday crunch, which will last until about December 11. I was prepared for this, since I knew of the project ahead of time. It was given to me the day before Thanksgiving, and I planned things out so that Thanksgiving weekend I would work on Black Friday but not again until the following Monday. Planning, as we all know, is highly important.

I have followed my schedule thus far, and come December 11, I should be able to enjoy Christmastime.

When I was in school, particularly high school, I noticed that seemingly all of our teachers threw as much work as possible at us before the holiday break started. Right now is kind of like that (only not nearly as bad, since I love what I do).

Are you in a holiday crunch right now?

That would be my current advice to anyone. We are never too old to learn.

Take my mother, for example. She learned how to use a computer with a Windows-based system when she was in her 50s. When she was in her late 70s, she got her first smartphone, an iPhone 6s. When she got the phone she quickly learned how to make and receive calls, set up her voicemail, and send and receive text messages–all of the essentials. She wanted a smartphone, she said, because she did not want to fall behind on the current technology. She has never stopped learning.

Neither have I. I may be good at editing, but I still have a lot to learn. Right now I am learning to edit on PDFs. I downloaded Adobe Acrobat Reader DC and a friend from one of my professional organizations sent me a couple of PDFs and instructed me over Zoom. This was only last week, so am I good at editing PDFs? Of course not. Or should I say…not yet. One has to do something poorly before one can do it well. Practice makes perfect.

In the recent past, I took some copyediting classes, not because I wasn’t already good at copyediting (I was and still am), but because I wanted to learn more and get even better. See? When you are good at something, you should keep learning about it so that you can become even better at it.

What are you learning right now?

Hello, readers! Yesterday was my 47th birthday. It’s hard to believe that I have entered my late 40s. Yikes! No offense to those of you who have had more birthdays than I have, of course…

As I reflect on my 40s, I can honestly say that editing has become the profession of this particular decade of my life. I began editing as a volunteer around the age of 40 and launched my freelance editorial business at 44. The profession of my 20s and 30s was biology–specifically laboratory technician work. Why is that not the profession of my 40s, then? The increasingly complicated technology proved to be a little too much for my coordination disabilities.

I am, however, completely able to type and use a computer mouse. I also love to write and edit. Hence, my career change.

I suppose you could say that I “finally found” myself at 44. And in the years since, my business has grown and expanded.

Here’s to turning 47. I wonder what this year will bring?

(A COVID-19 vaccine, I hope.)