Monday 10 November 2025: Editing

I forgot to pre-write the blog on Friday again. Tut, tut.

Not a lot happened…well, I was very busy, but it was all the same kind of thing. Editing, pet play, editing, pet play, editing, pet play…I also forgot to do my weekly finances, so those have been moved to today, and I forgot to do my weekly backup, so that will be done today as well.

Yes, I fed the birds and the dogs and ourselves, as usual. I may even have emptied the dishwasher. But the biggest thing that took up most of the day was the editing.

I’ve found out that I can do my initial edits in LibreOffice Writer because the comments and tracked changes translate to Word if someone else is using that. What I can’t seem to do, though, is read other people’s comments when the file originated in Word, but I can see the tracked changes.

If this book was a straightforward copy edit, that would be fine. But the author, if you remember, sent back a new version of the book. Only when I worked through it all did I also notice that he didn’t respond to any of my queries in my first review email. I had hoped we could skip a stage as he’d been over it once already and I’d sent him feedback. The book is already late and won’t be published on time. But now I have to ask him the queries again.

Another thing that Word did to the original file, for some reason, was suddenly continue the book in the notes section…This was easy to correct in Word as I could see the section change and only had to delete that. But in Writer, there was no way I could pull it back. The notes function is one of the things I hate about Word as it seems to have a mind of its own and I tend to avoid it like I try to avoid the dentist. 

Of course, a lot of Word has a mind of its own, but at least I managed to get around the irritating Co-pilot rubbish. And, of course, every time I open Word it nags me to upgrade to the latest version. Nope, you’re not scraping anything of mine, nor sending a Trojan off through my system, because that’s what it is. A Trojan. But if clients are happy to have that happen to their material, then more power to their elbow.

I DO have an old Windows laptop that I COULD put just Word on and not connect to the internet at all. But as I refuse to put anything in the Cloud as well (for the same reasons – and for all the cyber hijacks and break-ins), I have to either make the laptop internet connected again or use the old Seagate hard drive, which Mac doesn’t like. (Because it’s formatted for Windows.) 

I could also just turn off the internet while I’m working, which is probably what I’ll try first. But in the meantime, I still have several client edits to work through and they’ll all be on Word.

On Friday, when the poet had finished work, he went and did the weekly shop. I’d done it the week before, while he gave me pet respite, and he did it on Friday. This gave us the entire weekend to ourselves. He announced his retirement from both the band and live performing on Friday, so he was also busy responding to comments regarding that.

One day last week he ordered a new carpet cleaning machine, and that arrived on Friday. On Saturday he tried it out in the hallway. The carpet came up beautifully. He did some mats as well, but those didn’t dry out well enough to be used yet and had to be aired before they went back on the floor. Meanwhile, I entertained the animals and kept them occupied.

On Sunday, we went for a bit of a drive, which meant both dogs were in the car with me for a couple of hours. We went to the supermarket to pick up some more carpet cleaning fluid, and we went to the pet superstore to get car restraints for Alfie and some puppy shampoo. We have 3 bottles of dog shampoo, but we didn’t have any puppy shampoo.

On the way home we took them to see the poet’s mother and to introduce her and the puppy to each other. When we got home, the pup was tired out but the drive was a success. Next challenge is to have them both on the back seat at the same time. Although we may do the leaving-them-at-home together challenge first. We don’t use crates, neither of us ever has, and we don’t intend to start now. But we do need to be able to leave them at home together.

Today it’s more editing, plus the admin jobs I didn’t do on Friday, including today’s blog post. The last edit I sent back to the author is on today’s list, so I can incorporate the author’s comments, preferences and responses to my queries. But I may crack on with the one mentioned above, just to get it off my desk and invoiced. I’m technically in the middle of that one and I don’t really like to interrupt one job with another unless it’s an emergency, and I don’t particularly like it then either but sometimes it has to be done.

I was dismayed this morning to hear the latest news coming out of the States. I am heart sore for my American friends and will be finding out more as the day progresses.