Technical Editing in the 21st Century

Just published by Prentice Hall, Technical Editing in the 21st Century is the title of a new textbook I co-authored with Nicole Amare and Barry Nowlin. ISBN 978-0131196773. Available from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk (where the title and the description still include obsolete subtitles) and other sources.

No end of writing

Revised second draft of 4 more chapters of my book on self-publishing with OpenOffice.org and sent them off to my editor, who is going to get a surprise when he checks his mail in the morning. Getting there... slowly.

Writing, walking, sewing - a balanced life

Alternating between rewriting my book and editing Lyn's has its strange moments. If the sheep become examples in the computer book, that's why...

This afternoon I managed a slightly longer walk than usual. At one point an older woman overtook us. Eric said, "Walk faster, Jean!" and the other woman said, "Ignore him." :-) I'm going for distance, not speed.

You know it's time to quit when, while sewing a long straight seam in the side of a garment, you sew the armhole closed as well.

New book on technical editing

I have a chapter in a forthcoming book from Baywood, New Perspectives on Technical Editing. My chapter is titled "Copyediting and Beyond". I was allowed, even encouraged, to include some of my opinions on editing, which many editors find heretical—and others find liberating.

Progress on OpenOffice.org Calc Guide

First draft of OpenOffice.org Calc Guide is now complete, and some chapters have been reviewed once. I have more topics to add, including new features for OOo3.1. Then on to the indexing, my least favourite activity.

One writing project leads to another

I'm using the OpenOffice.org 2.x Writer Guide as source material for much of my new book on self-publishing, reorganising parts of it and adding new material more specific to my target audience. Parts of the Writer Guide have not been updated in over a year, so I'm finding lots of little (and not so little) mistakes, including info that became obsolete some time ago but was never spotted and updated. Since I'm updating that info for my own book, I feel obligated to update the Writer Guide itself (both the source files and, in some cases, the wiki version) as I go. I'm also referring to the new edition of the Draw Guide (which has been translated from German and not fully edited and published yet) for tips to help me create some graphics for my new book. Of course I'm spotting editorial corrections needed for the Draw Guide, and distracting myself from my main task by making those corrections. None of these are very onerous tasks, but they do mean that one writing project spawns several others, all of which take some time. It's amazing how a day can disappear on what started out as a small, apparently simple, task.

Technical editors' website redesigned

After months of off-and-on work on my editors' website (setting it up in WordPress), I've finally got it to the point that I'm ready to reveal it to the world. And so I have! http://www.jeanweber.com/newsite/ The design (template) breaks in Internet Explorer. I don't have the time or energy to figure out how to fix that. I'm no longer doing this professionally, or with a view to attracting clients, so I've decided to be bloody-minded about it. I put a note on the first page that says "get a browser that supports standards". Some pages are out of date, so I still have a lot of maintenance work to do, but at least the major conversion work is done... except for the old newsletters, which will gradually be converted or absorbed into the main site.

AODC - Melbourne

Unpacking after the last trip was hardly worth the trouble, as we were heading off to Melbourne on Tuesday for me to attend the 8th AODC (Australasian Online Documentation and Content Conference) being held at the Hilton on the Park hotel. This is the second AODC I've attended, though I was a vendor at one before than. Last year I was a speaker; this year Eric and I ran a bookshop one day and I attended sessions the other two days. The bookshop was organised by Sue Woolley of Monarch Computing Services, who has gathered a selection of books on technical-writing related topics, many self-published or from small press in Australia. I had several books in the collection, so was highly motivated to help out. The conference was informative and enjoyable, with good food (morning and afternoon tea and lunches) complementing the good talks. The organisers include Joe Welinske, who runs the WritersUA conferences in the USA, and Tony Self of HyperWrite in Melbourne. Evenings were, of course, social events, including the popular "Uncle Dave's Trivia Night" featuring Dave Gash of Hypertrain dot Com.