I’m that rare beast, an editor who loves working with MS Word. It wasn’t always like that. For many years, Word and I had a troubled relationship and the program caused me a lot of grief. Luckily, I shared an office with colleagues who were younger and smarter. They kindly stepped in whenever I lost parts of my document, forgot …
Where is Jane Fonda when you need her?
It all seemed so simple when I offered to run a webinar about webinars for my local society of editors. We set a date, I signed up to a platform (ClickMeeting), the society found the participants, and I planned the session and practised it numerous times. Accompanying me at each practice session was my alter ego, Jane Fonda. I would set Jane up as a …
Benefits of co-working
Over the past 2 years I have gained a lot from Six Degrees, the co-working space in nearby Coffs Harbour. It’s been a great way to network with other people working from home in Coffs and Bellingen. And through attending events and giving a couple of pitches about my businesses at Six Degrees I have found: a web designer, who created …
Bringing aquaculture into the office
I love new toys, and I like to buy things that are locally made and environmentally friendly. Happily, my latest purchase, a desktop aquaculture system from Aquaponicals, ticks all the boxes. It’s a fabulous little system, in which the water is pumped from the reservoir at the bottom up to the grow bed at the top, where I have planted mint, parsley, oregano and …
Discovering what Edifix can do
Edifix is an online system for formatting and retrieving references. For medical editing jobs, I’ve been using Edifix to find references, which I then put into Endnote. For example, one document contained 10 chapters written by different authors, only half of whom had used Endnote. Edifix made it relatively easy to obtain the references for the remaining chapters from PubMed, and export the …
Co-author of Effective writing: plain English at work!
Had a great time last week at the launch of Effective writing: plain English at work, at Paperchain bookstore in Canberra. As I said at the launch, the project involved a bit more work than I originally anticipated — many hours of editing, more than 1000 emails exchanged and three face-to-face meetings with the main author, Elizabeth Murphy — but …
Making the most of LinkedIn
At the Australasian Medical Writers conference earlier this year, Sarah, a freelance writer, mentioned that she had been contacted by several new clients via LinkedIn after she updated her profile in line with advice from a webinar. Sarah kindly passed on the link to the webinar, and a couple of weeks ago I got round to watching it. I’m still only about …
Learning about e-books
I’ve just started an online course — Editors and e-Books — with the Editorial Freelancers Association in the US. The blurb about the course says that it will ‘help editors learn the ins and outs of e-publishing, so they can confidently guide self-published authors from manuscript to e-book.’ Which is exactly what I need, given that I’m currently working with …
An alternative to an infographic CV
This week I’ve been writing a newsletter article about my attempts to get myself an infographic CV (for those who aren’t familiar with the concept, this article explains it well). An infographic proved to be beyond my budget, but in researching the topic, I found some alternatives, such as Visualize.me and Re.vu, both of which can create a graphic from …
LinkedIn to the rescue
I’m currently editing a travel narrative, which makes a change from my normal fare of technical documents. However, I’m also formatting the document in MS Word, and yesterday I hit a snag. The author starts each chapter with a level 1 heading immediately followed by a level 2 heading. He wants both headings to appear on the contents page, but …