When I first began marketing my freelance editing business, I focused on editing biochemistry-related student theses and dissertations, mainly because I studied biochemistry and wrote a thesis on said subject many years ago.

Now, two years later, I have edited exactly one biochemistry master’s thesis (with the approval of the student’s department and advisor, of course).

I’ve also edited more than one science-related grant proposal, a scientific manuscript, two social science manuscripts, a number of government documents, and trade and retail catalogs for a consumer products company. And I have done well at all of them.

Have I become a “Jane of all trades”?

Not really, because I have not edited any fiction, memoirs, or educational materials. Therein does not lie my expertise. Would I be willing to try editing these? Yes, but for now, I do not consider myself qualified to do it.

Going back to the part about marketing my thesis/dissertation editing…I found in doing so that not many department heads or graduate program directors are fond of the idea of their students getting help on their writing. Meanwhile, people were asking me to edit their research manuscripts and grant proposals, which I gladly did. Hence, my experience took off, but in an altogether different direction.

And I could not be happier about it.

What about you? Did you ever stumble upon an editing genre “by accident?” What was that like for you?

A recent NAIWE prompt: How do you handle it when you are not motivated to work?

I just have to push myself into it.

Oftentimes that means threatening myself: “Do you want to end the day with unaccomplished tasks in your daily planner?” or “Do you want to have the awful experience of missing a deadline for the first time?”

Sometimes taking a walk will do the trick; the fresh air clears my mind for the next task.

Sometimes working out will do it; the blood flows to my brain and gets me wanting to do something.

Most days, my husband works from home due to COVID-19, and I sometimes imagine him thinking negative things about me if I am being lazy: “Hmph! She has no work ethic.” (I don’t know if he actually does think such things–he never actually talks that way– but the thought scares me enough to make me want to work.)

The vast majority of the time, I don’t need motivation to work on my editing, truth be told. Instead, I need motivation to do housecleaning.

The thing that works best to motivate me in any case: Coffee!

I’m not going to mince words. This week in my life was so horrific that I’m wondering if the week was cursed.

In a nutshell: I had a car accident (which I caused by way of a costly error in judgment); my 89-year-old father fell in the hallway of my parents’ apartment building and skinned his knee (not the first time he has fallen); my husband fainted at the breakfast table one morning and landed hard on the wooden floor of the dining room; and my family let me know that, due to COVID-19, they do not feel safe having my husband and me over during my birthday and the holidays, which means we have no one to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with. Neither do they.

You would think that all of this would distract me to the point where I cannot work on my editing, and that I cannot work on the nice big project that was handed to me at the beginning of last week and is due November 9. You are wrong.

I have found that this project, which is very tedious but necessary, is a welcome distraction from all that’s been going on in my life lately. Throwing myself into it helps me forget my problems by focusing on the task.

I am so grateful to have this current project. Sure, I am looking forward to the day I finish it, but in the meantime, bring it on.

How about you, fellow editors? Are your big projects a welcome distraction from your problems, or do you find that you cannot concentrate when life hurts?

There’s a prevalent idea among freelance editors that the business is “feast or famine.” In other words, an editor will get a whole bunch of jobs one right after another, or even overlapping (eek!) and then no business for a too-long while.

I have definitely found that to be the case, at least with my business. In late August and early September, for example, I had two overlapping jobs, both of which were pretty sizeable. I worked my tail off, but I made quite a bit of moolah. Then there were no major editing projects on my agenda until late September, when I edited a grant proposal that was due in three days. After that, only my small weekly and pro bono projects until today. I’ve now got a project that will keep me busy until mid-November. Woohoo!

Some editors, however, say that “feast or famine” is a myth. These editors have much more experience freelancing than I do, so I respect their opinion, but I respectfully disagree. I am totally seeing “feast or famine” in my editing business. And I don’t understand how the business can be anything else.

Perhaps I will learn someday why they say it’s a myth.

What do you believe about this?

There are those times when a new prospective client appears, looks promising, and then…[insert sound of bomb falling here].

I’ve had a few instances like that. A prospective client contacts me and expresses sincere interest about working with me in the future. I immediately respond and let them know that I would love to work with them.

Then there is some back-and-forth emailing which usually ends with the client saying, “We will get back to you when we have work,” or, “We will get back to you in a month or so,” or something to that effect.

After the prescribed time period, I hear crickets, so I ping the prospective client with an email saying that I am still definitely interested in working with them. They ask for more time, so to speak.

I ping them after that time with another email. Silence again.

At one point does one give up and stop “pestering” the prospective client? I once threw that question out to the members of one of the professional organizations of which I am a member. The answer I liked best was, “Tell them you need to know by a certain date whether they intend to work with you. If they don’t answer by that date, move on.”

Fellow editor, what do you do when this happens to you?

Let’s face it–in order to keep working well as writers and editors, we all need to preserve our sanity. This is especially true in these horrific times* in which we find ourselves in 2020.

To keep from going crazy, one thing I do is take walks in my neighborhood. I live in a suburban community which happens to also be close to cow pastures and farms, and I like to walk and enjoy the sights, especially the flowering trees in the spring and the colorful leaves in the fall. Seeing the Holstein cows in their fields is also really neat, since the sight of farm animals is not something with which I grew up.

I also exercise. It’s weird because I always seem to put off working out, yet while I am doing it and right afterwards, I feel fantastic. Music (particularly 1990s Eurodance) is essential to my workouts, and YouTube contains a plethora of such music mixes, which have been uploaded by DJs from around the world.

Finally, I throw myself into editing. Any piece which I am editing is a welcome distraction from the news about COVID-19 and other world problems. Editing actually makes me feel better.

So, dear reader, what do you do to keep your sanity?

*I do not like euphemisms, and I can’t stand it when people say, “these challenging times,” “these uncertain times,” et cetera. Let’s call these times what they are.

As an editor who works quite a bit in the sciences, I have had the experience several times of working with multi-language authors.

Multi-language authors were formerly called “nonnative English speakers” by me and many other editors who worked with them. The proper terminology has recently changed. I have to admit that at first I sniffed at this, since I thought it was the editing world’s attempt to be “politically correct.”

Ah, but since then I have been educated.

First of all, multi-language authors are just that; they speak English and at least one other language. I personally speak conversational French and can write at maybe the seventh-grade level in it, so technically I am a multi-language author. I hesitate to bestow that title upon myself, however, since my command of French is somewhat limited.

How many English-language authors can write in another language? (Notice that I did not say “foreign language.”) Quite a few, I am certain. But I am also certain that there are several who cannot.

The one thing you should not do if you are editing an English-language document written by a multi-language author is laugh at the author or put them down because they “don’t know how to write.” Ask yourself this: Can you write in their language? I always remind myself that my Chinese (or Russian, or whatever language) isn’t nearly as good as the author’s English.

Humbling thought.

 

Every editor, like every worker, needs tools. The tools may belong to the person (like mine do) or to their institution.

I became a freelance editor (and an editor, period) two years ago. Since then, I have acquired a number of tools for my work.

One is my laptop computer, which I obtained at the end of June and which I got because I simply could not do my editing on the five-year-old desktop which my husband and I share. There had to be a machine that was dedicated to work. The desktop equals fun (which includes music for my workouts).

Another of my most valuable tools is Microsoft Word 2019 for Dummies, a book through which I went earlier this year and from which I learned a great deal. Although it is meant to be a reference book (and I have also used it as such), I found that reading it from cover to cover when I first obtained it and following its instructions on my computer was helpful as well.

Then there is The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition. This tome is the gold standard of writing and editing for many. Though not meant to be read from cover to cover, CMOS is a valuable resource on grammar, punctuation, the way numbers should be written, and such. My only concern is that I am wondering what to do with my copy when the 18th Edition of CMOS comes out.

I also have The Copyeditor’s Handbook and Scientific Style and Format: The CSE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers. Since I often edit scientific material such as research manuscripts and grant proposals, this book gives me the rules for doing so. And let us not forget the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, or “APA.” Many social science research papers, a few of which I have edited, use APA as their style guide.

Is my tool kit complete? By all means, no. I am certain that I will acquire more books and pieces of equipment in the future.

But let us always remember my most important tool:

My daily planner.

Unlike many writers, I actually like punctuation…to a point.

I think my fondness for punctuation began when I was a preschooler watching The Electric Company on PBS. I loved their singing and dancing and acting out of the period, question mark, and exclamation mark. (Who else remembers the Short Circus singing “I Want You” while the exclamation mark noisily formed at the end of that sentence?)

Alas, The Electric Company never taught me the rules regarding the colon, semicolon, em dash, en dash, and oh-so-troublesome hyphen.

The rule that I follow for the semicolon is a rule I learned in junior high (aka middle school). Don’t use a semicolon unless you could substitute a period for it and still have two complete sentences. That was easy enough to follow.

Now, about the colon…I learned (also in junior high) that one must never use it unless one is making a list using “the following.”

For example,

INCORRECT: These cookies are made of: flour, oil, sugar, baking powder, and chocolate.

CORRECT: These cookies contain the following ingredients: flour, oil, sugar, baking powder, and chocolate.

ALSO CORRECT: These cookies are made of flour, oil, sugar, baking powder, and chocolate.

Of course, The Chicago Manual of Style (CMoS) lists different rules for using the colon, which I am committing to memory now and with which I will not bore you here.

I am also committing to memory the CMoS rules regarding the hyphen. I keep having to look those up. Eventually the rules will be tattooed to the inside of my eyelids, as my college chemistry professor used to say. The hyphen is my nemesis. Do I hyphenate “smartly dressed”? No! I am not supposed to use a hyphen with an adverb ending in -ly when it comes before the adjective that it is modifying.

Which punctuation rules are your nemeses, dear readers?

On August 25, I jumped into a crunch time which lasted until September 3.

This was my first time doing two major editing projects at once. One was a government document of over 120 pages. The other was a research manuscript in the social sciences. Can you say “Crunch!”?

I learned the importance of triage when it comes to editing, and I made good use of my planning skills.

And I worked and worked…but managed not to burn the midnight oil and to get a good night’s sleep every night.

I finished both projects ahead of their deadlines, and I was very proud of myself.

My only regret is that my workout time and my spiritual time both suffered.

How about you? How do you, as an editor, handle a crunch time?