On the Basics: Tips for starting the new year off right

© Ruth E. Thaler-Carter, Owner

An American Editor

Hard to believe — but a relief for many of us — that 2022 is over! I have a few random thoughts for a strong start to 2023, some of which are updates of similar past posts.

The new year means an opportunity to revise or improve some of our work habits to make our lives easier and more efficient. Here are some things to do in the first few days of 2023 that should make your work and personal life better.

• Update or change passwords for all accounts — banking, blogs, social media, associations, subscriptions; anything and everything, but especially anything related to finances and personal security.

• Remind clients to update the year in their document templates, website copyright statements and any other elements that might now be out of date — and do that for your own materials, website, etc.

• Review the style guide(s) that you use and check for any updates, revisions, additions and other changes that might affect this year’s work for current and new clients. If you don’t already subscribe to the online versions of the ones you use, do it now.

• Establish or refresh a connection with a family member, friend or colleague to back up passwords and access to phone, e-mail, social media, banking and other important accounts — your own and theirs — just in case. Think of it like giving a key to a neighbor or building super so you can be found/reached in an emergency.

Business resolutions

The new year offers the opportunity to learn new things and do things in new ways. Here are a few suggestions.

• Instead of relying on the luck of clients finding you, make an effort to seek new clients on a regular basis, through cold queries, responding to membership association opportunities, social media resources, updating (or creating) your website, etc. This is especially important for colleagues with only one major “anchor” client.

• Find a way to be visible in at least one professional membership organization or social media group to enhance your credibility and expand your networking activity. Even I do that, and I’ve been crowned the Queen of Networking! If you already belong to an association, look for a new one to join as well.

• Learn a new skill, something new about the topic area of a client or an entirely new topic to write about, edit, proofread, index, photograph, illustrate or otherwise work on to expand your career or business.

• Draft a few potential posts to use for your own blog, if you have one, or as a guest on colleagues’ blogs. Having drafts in hand makes it easier to get ahead of deadlines and actually publish new articles.

• Look for new projects or services to offer to existing clients.

• If you have regular editing or proofreading clients who haven’t gotten the memo yet about only needing one space between sentences, or have other writing habits that appear in every document and are easy for them to change, consider doing a “Welcome to the new year” note suggesting that they incorporate such things in their drafts before sending anything to you. Emphasize that doing so will cut down at least a bit on the time you need to handle their requests, as well as free you up to concentrate on more substantive aspects of their projects. Whether this will work depends, of course, on the nature of your relationship with those clients and won’t work for all of them, but could be a relief as you work with those who would be amenable to such suggestions.

• Save toward retirement!

• U.S. colleagues might not have to file taxes until April 15, but getting going early on this nerve-racking task is always a good idea. Among the many resources for end-of-year tax planning are the Freelancers Union blog and ones from experts such as my own invaluable tax person, Janice Roberg (https://robergtaxsolutions.com/st-louis-tax-expert-jan-roberg/). Two useful tips: There’s a relatively new simplified process for deducting a home office, and if you delay invoicing from December until January, it’s easier to manage those late-year payments that reach you in January with a December date and/or for December work.

• Start or return to non-editorial creative projects to give yourself the occasional “brain break” and a way to refuel — write poetry or short fiction, make something crafty or artistic, even just spend time at a museum or art gallery (or library/bookstore).

Perks of the new year

• I’m clearing out some of my bookshelves again. I’m donating half of every January 2023 sale of my short story, “Sometimes You Save the Cat …,” to the Humane Society of Missouri. Contact me at Ruth@writerruth.com for information about getting your copy (the print version is $10, including postage/shipping, and the PDF is $5).

I’m also offering my “Get Paid to Write! Getting Started as a Freelance Writer” booklet at $5 off the usual $20 price through January. Again, contact me by e-mail for details.

What are your new year’s plans and aspirations?

Should Editors Eat Donuts?

Not too far from where I live is a Dunkin’ Donuts. I rarely eat donuts these days. I find them too sweet and, more importantly, too fattening. Needless to say, like many Americans who work at sedentary jobs, weight is a problem. I’m a bit more than a tad overweight.

Regardless, there are times when I crave donuts — maybe twice a year. My wife takes the position that I eat them so rarely, if I have a few, it will do me no harm. Of course, that is the argument I give whenever I want to eat something that I know isn’t good for me.

The problem is compounded by the donuts being sugar coated — take a bite and the sugar is everywhere — over the keyboard, on my fingers, on my shirt, even on my black cat! Which brings back memories.

I wish I could say the memories are fond memories, but they aren’t. They are memories of when I first started freelancing and worked on paper. What a nightmare the combination of coffee, donuts, and paper was. Especially the jelly donuts that had a tendency to leak out the opposite side from that I was biting. I still remember trying to catch the jelly before it hit the manuscript only to also knock over my coffee cup (that was in the days when I drank coffee, before I wised up and began drinking only green tea).

There it was — manuscript that I had to return to the client quickly coated with a brown stain topped with red jelly and a dissolved sugar coating that could no longer be simply brushed off. And because the manuscript was in a pile, the brown stain was rapidly making its way through the stack.

As you probably have guessed, I never did get repeat work from that client. But I did learn a valuable lesson: donuts and editing didn’t mix when editing on paper.

I rapidly transitioned from editing on paper to editing onscreen. In fact, the transition was complete within 6 months of my beginning freelancing. I admit that fear of recurring jelly catastrophes was one motivating factor to my transition to onscreen editing only, although the major reason was that in those days very few editors were willing to edit onscreen and my doing so enabled me to get more work and charge more, something I considered a winning combination.

But the transition didn’t solve the problem. In those days, too, I was in great physical shape and didn’t worry about extra pounds (30 years later, I worry about everything I eat), so I could indulge my donut cravings with abandon. But the jelly donuts didn’t cooperate. I’d bite in one and out would come the jelly from the opposite end — kerplunk on my keyboard. It didn’t take long for the jelly to become like a superglue and keep keys from working.

Cleaning those old keyboards was virtually impossible so I did the next best thing: I bought a large quantity of keyboards at wholesale so I could junk a sticky keyboard. Given the choice, I’d scrap the keyboard before I’d give up my donuts. Of course, coffee and soda spills also occasionally happened, but at least no manuscripts were getting destroyed — just keyboards.

I finally had to rethink my priorities when the manufacturer of my favorite keyboards went out of business (Do you remember Gateway Computer’s programmable keyboards?) and I couldn’t buy any more of them. Sure there were other keyboards but these were special because they were programmable.

Eventually I gave up eating donuts while working. I still like a cup of tea, but I haven’t spilled any tea on my keyboard in a couple of decades. But then came last week and I had that craving for a donut. Should I give in to it? Should I just take a break from work and eat it away from my keyboard? Should I gamble and continue working while enjoying a donut or two?

My questions got me thinking about the overriding question: Should editors eat donuts? Let’s face it, donuts aren’t particularly healthy, especially not for an old-timer like me. And no matter how carefully one eats a donut, some of it will end up on the keyboard. Besides eating while working is a distraction. Concentration is broken with each bite and it is so very easy to put sticky fingers on the keys.

After due consideration, I have come to the conclusion that an editor like me should not eat donuts while working, and probably not at all. There just isn’t an upside other than the fleeting sensation of sensory satisfaction. Having thought that, however, didn’t stop me from lusting after a sweet. (I think it was just an excuse to stop reading about hematology!) So I decided to poll the family and see what advice the family would give.

Alas, the “family” these days is my wife, my dog, and my cat. My dog almost never speaks and I haven’t got telepathy mastered, so she didn’t give an opinion. My cat was sleeping and protested at being disturbed. No advice there. That left my wife. In her case, action spoke louder than words — she gave me a donut.

I took the hint, ate the donut, drank some tea, lamented having eaten the donut as it repeated for what seemed an eternity, and swore an oath that there would be no donuts in my future. And to demonstrate the firmness of my decision, I threw away the coupon for free donuts.

I wonder how long my resolve will last.

Richard Adin, An American Editor