I've joined a new team to relaunch my village's newsletter, the K'nocker.

My initial offer was simply to proofread: I haven't even been living in the village for a year yet so to do such a 'personal' thing didn't seem right. But I didn't know there wasn't another editor on board and I can't help but bring in my experience.

A is for Agnes, still able at age 6 and waiting to be used at full capacity;

B is for Birch, not quite getting into fusion like she used to;

D is for Dochan, doing just fine, and also Darwin, who did a hell of a lot;

E is for Elder, living quite happily in a black and white world;

F is for Fennel, living in service for us all;

G is for Gentian, small enough to come out with us;

H is for Hyssop, the postie;

I is for Ivy, well connected;

J is for Jasmine, the traffic warden;

K is for Kowalski, 'the ghost of the machine', the founder, and the root of it all;

Last Saturday morning found me lucky. Someone had cancelled their place on a spinning workshop and I got their place at the last minute, 8.30 in the morning. Three hours later and I had travelled the 100-plus miles from home to Bonar Bridge (head of Dornoch Firth). 

I was musing on this over the weekend while warping up my loom: good project planning manages to avoid most snitches, just like keeping warp threads tidy. So I'm pushing the analogy: here is a list of must-dos for each.

Keep the warp tidy on the warping board, keeping an eye out for any flaws in the yarn.

Create a top-level plan of each stage from beginning to end, chunking into manageable items.

I spent Wednesday in London on the one-day course Efficient Copy-editing by Rosemary Roberts, organised by the Society for Editors and Proofreaders.

CPD means time out of the office, juggling the workload, travelling and being on the ball the next day. But however much we may dread making the commitment, my CPD day this week has proved how very important it is to make the effort.

Much of my work this week has been blending with new workflows in two ways.

(i) Less mechanical editing: because of the introduction of automated processing of reference/citation formatting and other mechanical tasks, my primary focus for one client has become checking language.

(ii) Using document management systems: a month ago, all of my work was sent and received by email. By this time next month, I'll be down- and uploading files with two systems.

There's a large set of ellipses since our last posts in February ... ... ... This is mostly because I've been engrossed in my role as voluntary director of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP) -- for marketing and PR, somewhat ironically in that Reedmace's marketing has been rather passive. But it's time to now juggle both at once.

The latest news: you can find me on LinkedIn, where I'm now connected with colleagues and friends old and new.

Calling all geeks: we are nearing 1234567890 seconds from the time when the Unix clock started ticking at midnight on 1 January 1970. This is almost as exciting as the turn of the new millenium, and double that with the fact it will fall on Friday 13 of this month, at 23:31:30 GMT. We're watching the countdown here in the office, though I'll probably be at home for the big event.

I have recently found an eloquent description of why writers need editors.

"You hold the whole text in your mind, and you have developed its ideas in sequence right to its conclusion. You can't now put yourself in the reader's place by somehow 'unknowing' any of this. A copy-editor, though, will bring fresh eyes to your text, helping you to reveal your concepts in a logical order."

I’ve been trying ebooks and reading software today. This subject can become very involved, so this post is focused what is available for those without a dedicated ebook reading device. The hardware I had available were an iMac, Windows XP, Palm OS and Linux (on an Eee netbook).

First, let’s take a look at the PDF format to justify why looking at ebook formats at all.