Dear readers,

I apologize for my unannounced absence last weekend. I am currently dealing with a family emergency which is paralyzing this blog for the time being. I will most definitely return; I just don’t know when. Please be patient with me during this difficult time. Thank you all.

As a business owner constantly trying to obtain clients, I am active on LinkedIn.

I read many, many posts about editing and about science. I also read many about running one’s own business and about freelancing.

However, in recent weeks, I have seen a new kind of post often showing up in my feed, often near the top when I log in.

These posts are made by people who have been unemployed for a long time and are desperately looking for work because they are down to their last few dollars. Many have families to feed. They are educated people. They are IT folks and engineers and scientists. Many of them describe how hard they have been trying to get a job. They have been pounding the pavement, tailoring their resume for each application, carefully writing their cover letters, and using whatever connections they have. They either hear crickets or hear that they are one of the top five candidates and then are not chosen.

Lately, I have seen such unfortunate souls post links to their GoFundMe pages. This is how desperate they are, and this is how horrible the job market is.

I know how they feel, and I feel their pain.

I was once unemployed for eleven years.

That’s right—YEARS.

I had been a lab technician working for years at a major research university when my principal investigator’s grant funding ended, so I was let go. I knew this was going to happen months before it did, and so I began job hunting early on. I landed a job as a research technologist at a different research university a month after I had been let go from the previous one. I took a HUGE pay cut in the process.

When my three-month probationary period ended, I was informed that the university would not be keeping me around. This was for incredibly ableist reasons (I have mild cerebral palsy), and I was thrown to the wolves.

I went through the process over and over again—the grueling applications, the unsuccessful interviews, the rejection letters—for eleven years before starting Fiedler Editorial. Were it not for my marriage and my husband’s income, I would have become homeless.

Now I have an income again, and I am very grateful for it.

If you come across a post by a desperate job seeker, please, for the love of Pete, repost it. And if you are able, please donate to their GoFundMe page. Nothing in life is guaranteed, and if it’s not you, it could be you someday.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Next weekend will be incredibly packed for me, and so I will not be posting next weekend. I will see you again, dear reader, on March 2.

I often ask myself what I  have accomplished lately just so I can answer that question myself and feel proud of what I have accomplished.

In December and January, I edited two catalogs from an outdoor furniture company. Each one was approximately 122 pages long. One was called “Trade” (it was aimed at institutions, gardens, museums, and such) and the other “Retail” (it targeted residential customers).

The catalogs were sent to me as PDFs and I used Adobe Acrobat to edit them, placing virtual sticky notes wherever there was an issue. I verified the text, the SKU numbers, the prices, and (in the case of Trade) the dimensions of the products. I have to say that the furniture company did an excellent job putting the catalogs together, because neither one had many issues that needed correcting. I finished Trade on January 6 and Retail on January 24 (they were not sent to me consecutively).

Besides putting out its annual catalogs, the furniture company is in the process of revamping the online descriptions of its products. The descriptions for every single product, which are given to me in Word documents, are run by me before they go live on the company website. Besides editing the text, I must also verify each product’s SKU code on the existing website (the codes are not changing). I also have to check product dimensions if they are given in a description.

What is unique about editing these product descriptions is that I was requested to not, repeat, NOT use the Track Changes feature in MS Word, because my liaison at the company believes it makes things too messy. (There’s something to be said for that…) I am currently plugging away at the product descriptions. Some are one or two pages, others 20 or 30, depending on the sizes of the furniture collections.

What have you accomplished lately?

Does anyone like working at their computer while it’s dark outside? I certainly don’t.

Of course, there are days (nights?) when I must do so despite my preferences.

My husband works from 1:00 pm to 9:30 pm, so my time with him is in the mornings. Thus, I get most of my work done in the afternoons and evenings. The afternoons are the easiest time for me to work (as long as I have my coffee and/or Diet Mountain Dew). Psychologically, the evenings are another story.

In the dark winter months, the skies darken around 5:00 pm (if not before), which means that if I work just before dinner or any time after dinner, I work with blackness outside the window of my home office. Granted, there are vertical blinds on the window (thank Heaven) which I close to minimize this effect, but I am still aware of the pitch darkness outside. I don’t like the dark. In the winter, I have more lights on in my condo at night that I probably need, but that gives me comfort and the peace of mind I need to work effectively.

It doesn’t matter that I live in an area with a lot of light pollution. I know it’s dark, and the eerie hum of the HVAC behind my office wall and loud sucking sound of the noisy vent above my workstation do not help at all.

If I must work in the evening, I prefer to do so in the spring and summer months, when it is light outside then. It is much more comforting. There are a few disadvantages to working in the bright evenings: the noise of kids playing outside, the cars going by whose drivers insist on sharing their music with everybody, the lawnmowers. (Actually, the sound of lawnmowers soothes me. So does the sound of propeller airplanes overhead.)

How about you? Do you prefer to work when it is dark or light outside?

I am extremely grateful to God for being able to be a self-employed editor for many reasons. However, one of the most important reasons is that I can be there for my elderly parents.

If one of them has a crisis, I can drop everything, reschedule it quickly, and drive the hour to where they each live. (My father is in a memory care facility that is located in a different town than my mother’s condo, but which is thankfully only about ten minutes from her home.) I can reschedule work for any time I want, including weekends. (Like most people, I do not particularly like working on weekends, but I will do so to meet a deadline.)

For example, this past October, my mother was a victim of credit card fraud. When she told me about it, I quickly cleared the next day of work. This required quick but careful thinking. This task could be done the day after tomorrow, that task could be done Monday, et cetera. Prioritizing was key. I was able to travel to my mother’s place the next day to help her deal with the phone calls that come with being a fraud victim. (Shame on whoever did that to her, by the way.)

One thing to always remember is that family comes first. In August 2023, I was scheduled to leave for the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA) conference in Alexandria, Virginia on a Thursday. The previous Tuesday, my father suffered a severe fall. After checking in on my parents, I said to my husband, “If I have to miss the conference to help them out and lose [X] dollars, I will. Family comes first.” He agreed without hesitation. It turned out that everything was taken care of that Tuesday and my father was all right (thank God) and so I was able to attend to the conference later that week after all.

A traditional job would not afford me such flexibility. Sadly, I know a woman who worked in a lab at a research university that I had worked in before. She was fired for spending “too much” time caring for her ailing mother while she was working there, and not enough time in the lab. Talk about kicking someone while they are down.

If you are self-employed, how do you manage your schedule? I am especially interested to hear your answer if you have children.