Month: December 2025

Cutting back

Leave a comment

I plan to blog next week about my goals for 2026. I want that post to be written in the new year. But in this post, I will reveal one of said goals. I want to improve the quality of my blog posts.

I don’t mean improving the grammar, spelling, or punctuation of my posts—although I will not stop growing in those areas. I mean the content.

I will be the first to admit that some of my blog topics are lame. When I brainstorm topics, sometimes stupid ones are all that come to me. I recently turned to ChatGPT to help me come up with topics (but not to write the posts—I do that myself) and it does an okay job, but some of the topics it lists I am unable to write a whole post about. Still, its results are a lot better than some of mine. (Emphasis on some of. Most of my topics are at least decent.)

So I will both brainstorm on my own and practice prompting ChatGPT by having it continue to give me lists of topic suggestions. But that’s not enough. What else must I do to improve the quality of my posts?

I have to cut down on my blogging. Specifically, beginning this January, I will post twice a month, on the first and third Sundays of the month.

I believe that doing so will give me more time to turn out good writing related to my topics. I will be able to produce more intelligent posts that hopefully will be helpful to you, my readers. In the past, there have been times when I have gone on and on about something very trivial while looking at my word count to see if it has reached 300 yet. This cannot be helping you all. You deserve better.

Stay tuned next week for more of my goals.

No peaches for me.

Leave a comment

This week I had to do a big, grown-up thing. I had to deny myself something I had hoped for and wanted for over a year.

I decided that I would not attend the 2026 American Copy Editors Society (ACES) annual conference, which will be held in Atlanta this coming April.

One of my goals for a long time has been to attend an ACES conference, for I have heard that they are phenomenal. I have been a member of ACES for six years and during that time, many of their conferences were in US cities which were too expensive to which to travel, such as San Diego and Salt Lake City. I live in Maryland.

However, when I heard that the 2026 conference was to be held in Atlanta, I thought that city was much more accessible. I have a cousin who lives in its suburbs and I thought I could visit her during the same trip. Plus, I have never been to Atlanta, and I have heard it is a really neat city to visit. After all, the Olympics were held there in 1996.

I did research. I learned that the MARTA public transit would take me from the airport to the hotel, so I would not have to rent a car (yay!). Then I found out the conference admission fee (not cheap), the cost of a round-trip plane ticket to Atlanta for the conference days (eek!) and the room rates at the hotel where the conference was to be held (double eek!).

I just do not have the funds in my business banking account to justify spending all of that money. Yes, the funds for everything are there, but my account would be terribly drained if I spent it all on the conference. It wasn’t a good year for my business, largely due to the fact that medical researchers are very strapped for cash these days and are not hiring editors as much.

The only answer that made sense was no.

I can only hope and pray that there are better financial days ahead.

Did you ever have to deny yourself a big dream?

My most essential tools

Leave a comment

Some may ask, “What tools are most essential to your editing business?”

Honestly, I have too many to list in one blog post, so I picked five. This list is in no particular order. If you are starting an editing business, you may wish to look into obtaining each of these.

  • A laptop computer dedicated to my editing and my business functions. I certainly don’t want to get important files on which I am working mixed up with other people’s files. The awful truth is that for my first two years as a freelance editor, I shared a desktop computer with my husband. Although it was not often that he and I wanted to use it at the same time, it was not a good setup. I am ashamed to admit that I got my laptop only during the COVID-19 pandemic, when my husband had to work from home.
    • A Dropbox account. Any cloud storage would have sufficed, but I prefer Dropbox. Another shameful thing I must admit is that for the first year of my freelancing, I saved all of my work on USB drives. *cringe*
    • Toggl, the timekeeping system, and a website that converts time in hours:minutes:seconds to decimal hours. My use of Toggl is very basic; I use the timer to clock my working time. Performing an internet search will give you a choice of time-to-decimal converters. You can also convert time to decimal hours with Excel. But you can’t get paid without knowing how many hours you worked!
    • My daily planner, courtesy of At-A-Glance, on which I plan which days I am going to work on what. Some people prefer planners that are computer software, but when it comes to scheduling, I am from the old school.
    • The bank accounts and credit card which are dedicated to my business. It is very important to keep business money separate from personal finances. It makes things much easier at tax time—not to mention in general.

    If you are a freelancer, what are some of the tools you deem absolutely essential?