Sometimes I am needed by people other than my clients.

I have loved ones who live an hour away from my residence and sometimes need me. Their health is questionable, and one of them is in a senior care facility. As their closest family member, I need to be consistently aware of their well-being and safety.

Everyone who works and is in the same situation knows that it is often difficult to juggle working and looking after their loved one(s). I consider myself blessed in this case because I am self-employed. The authors are my respected clients, but I am “the boss.” I have known unfortunate people who worked a staff job (i.e., non-freelance) and were fired for taking too much time off to care for an ailing loved one. Talk about kicking someone when they’re down.

This is not to say that caring for someone while freelancing is necessarily easy, however. If an emergency arises, I must be prepared to quickly rearrange my schedule so that I can respond in a timely manner and still meet my deadline. If I suddenly need to travel to my loved one(s) today, then the work planned for today can be rescheduled for tomorrow, and tomorrow’s scheduled work can be done another day. If I must work on the weekend, I will. There’s a Ravens game Sunday afternoon? Too bad, so sad.

This is one of the many reasons why it is important to plan ahead of time what you will do each day and divide the tasks realistically. After all, if you have no idea what you will do on Tuesday, what exactly will you reschedule to Wednesday (or another day) if you suddenly need to go and take care of your loved one on Tuesday?

This is also why it is important to leave yourself some “wiggle room” when planning out a project that has a specific deadline. Pretend that the deadline is the day before the actual one, and you have a time cushion in case there is an emergency.

If you are caring for a loved one while working, God bless you. What advice do you have for others in your situation?

Well, 2023 was quite a year for Fiedler Editorial.

My editing workflow increased, particularly in the late summer, which was definitely an excellent thing. I also learned about Word styles and templates from Hilary Cadman, an MS Word expert and teacher in Australia. I began editing PDFs in Adobe Acrobat. (I’m getting better at it and have been doing it for the last four months—and I love it!) And, of course, I attended EFACON 2023 in Alexandria, Virginia in August, where I met a whole lot of awesome people, several of whom with which I am still in touch, and learned a whole lot more about editing and running a business.

Now that another year is about to begin, it is time to set goals again.

What are my goals for 2024?

1. I want to increase my workflow even further, to the point where there are few, if any, “dry spells.” The last four and a half months of 2023 have been like this, and I want to keep the momentum going.

• I want to learn more about editing PDFs using Acrobat and have more opportunities to do this kind of editing.

• I want to set up a business savings account. Experts at EFACON 2023 advised us attendees to do this in a panel session. Ten percent of every payment will go into it, and I will be able to save for editing-related things of which I want to be a part, such as the 2026 ACES Conference in Atlanta. (Unfortunately, the 2024 and 2025 ACES Conferences are in cities which are too far for my budget—San Diego and Salt Lake City, respectively.)

• One very personal goal that I cannot share on this blog but which means the world to me.

What are your goals for the new year?

Happy holidays, dear readers. Since I celebrate Christmas, I am taking this weekend off from blogging in order to reflect on the spiritual significance of the holiday and spend time with loved ones.

I wish that you enjoy good health and happiness during this time and in the new year.

A lot of people don’t know this, but French was my first language, not English.

My parents are both of French-Canadian origin and spoke French exclusively to me until I was about three years old, even though we lived in Maryland. However, they knew well that they would eventually have to teach me English if I was to function in the United States. My mother did this by speaking and reading to me in English. I have to admit that Sesame Street and The Electric Company helped a lot with this endeavor.

Many people my age who took a foreign language in middle or high school began learning it at the age of twelve or later. Although many of the students who did so were extremely intelligent, they struggled to learn French or Spanish.

I always got A’s in French. (I took it so that I could learn to write it and not just speak and understand it.)  I credit my parents for this. Because they spoke it to me at such a young age, learning to read and write it came almost naturally to me.

The time to start learning a foreign language is in early childhood. Preschoolers’ minds are like sponges; they absorb everything and can learn quickly.

Today, living still in Maryland, I do not have many opportunities to speak, read, or write French. When I speak with my mother on the telephone, I speak it to the best of my ability, but my vocabulary is limited. I often text with her in French as well and send her the occasional French email. (I am frustrated that I don’t know how to make accents in Gmail.)

I am proud to say that I do not have an English accent when I speak French; I can roll my r’s as well as any Quebecois. My accent, I have heard some people from France say, is Quebecois. “Pardonnez-moi!”

Have you learned a foreign language? How easy or difficult was it for you?

A weird thing happened last Tuesday. I turned 50.

Doing so feels weird mainly because I feel that at the age of 50, I should be more mature than I actually am. Sure, my body is getting weaker, but I can watch Disney cartoons and play old-school video games with the best of them.

What makes me really feel old is what I remember about how the world used to be.

The technology, for example. I have written a couple of posts in the past about the now-ancient technology that I remember. Like 5 ¼-inch floppy disks, one of which I was made to buy in high school for my Computer Applications class. We worked on Apple IIe computers—anyone remember them?—back in 1990, and I think they were out of date even then. In 1989, my high school obtained a lab full of IBM PS2 machines, which were considered top-of-the-line back then and on which I learned to type. That’s right—I did not learn to type on an actual typewriter. And for my typing class, I had to purchase a 3 ½-inch disk. How advanced!

These days, of course, I save my work to the cloud, like everyone else does. I do occasionally use USB drives, but even they are out of “fashion” now.

And I remember being in college in the early 1990s and hearing about this new deal called the internet (lowercased “i” according to The Chicago Manual of Style). At that time, I could not even grasp what it might be. I remember seeing internet addresses for the first time around 1995 or 1996 and wondering what the heck this “http://” thing was. I remember loading a web page on a computer in college and the page coming up S-L-O-W-L-Y and how impatient I got with it. I didn’t even really learn how to use the internet until I was in graduate school. However, I know that Google launched the same day I defended my master’s thesis, so I can honestly and proudly say that I passed school without Google.

However, it’s the music on the radio that makes me feel old the most. Not long ago, I was listening to a local classic rock station and heard Evanescence. “Evanescence, of all bands, is classic rock now?” I thought. Then I remembered that the song being played was, in fact, 20 years old. It was all over “new rock” radio when I was 30 and living in the Baltimore, Maryland area.

If you are 50 or over, what do you remember the most?

Fellow editors, I have a question for you.

What do you do when a client decides to ghost you?

You all probably know what I mean. In the professional sense, ghosting refers to not returning your emails or calls, being silent when you make attempts to communicate, and vanishing from your life.

First and foremost, do not be insulted. Clients ghost editors for many reasons.

One reason might be embarrassment on the client’s part. I have heard of scenarios where the client takes quite a while to pay. When the editor sends a friendly reminder via email, the client pays and the editor communicates their gratitude and says they would love to edit more work for the client. The client says nothing. Months later, the editor sends a simple “Hi! How are you doing?” email containing nothing about soliciting work. Again, crickets.

In this case, the client might be embarrassed that they took a while to pay and might be avoiding the editor because they associate the editor with their mistake. Or perhaps the client thinks the editor was being pushy. Sending a polite, friendly email reminding a client to pay is not being pushy, and any client who thinks it is pushy is someone with whom it is risky to work.

Another reason may be that the client is just very busy and, whether the editor likes it or not, having their work edited is not at the front of the client’s mind. This is neither the editor’s nor the client’s fault.

Whatever the reason, the editor needs to know what to do.

Do not contact the client any more frequently than every six months—maybe even once a year. Any more than that and you will be classified as a pain in the fanny. Please think about companies that send spam to your email or make junk calls to your phone. You don’t want to be like them.

If you have contacted the client three times and are still not hearing anything from them, it is time to cut bait. You have done all you can. Leave their name and contact information on your client spreadsheet (you do have a list of all your current and former clients on a spreadsheet, right?) but make a note saying they have ghosted you and include the date of your last contact with them, even if it was years ago.

If you are an editor and have been ghosted, what was your way of dealing with it?