​Last week, I wrote about some of my thoughts on the importance of sleep to our health, focus, and creativity, and I promised to talk this week about the changes I’m making in my own life.
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Whether you’re writing or editing, anyone who works in publishing and the written word needs to be reading. Reading within your genre is important, sure, but broadening your range has all kinds of benefits.

I love fiction. It’s my way of unwinding at the end of the day, but I try to balance that with at least some nonfiction. I may not read as much of it as I do fiction, but it’s still a part of my routine.

So, what am I reading now? So glad you asked!

I just finished Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, and it’s made me reconsider a simple, essential part of my daily routine that I routinely neglect: sleep. It’s also been eye opening to consider how regularly shorting myself on sleep could be having a negative effect on my concentration and creativity.

The internet abounds with memes and social media posts about the funny and often horrific results of autocorrect. It comes installed as the default setting on most of our devices and almost never fails to reduce us to screaming or tears. Or both.

As a matter of fact, every time I get a new device, autocorrect is one of the first things I switch off.
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However, the autocorrect feature of Microsoft Word is the only time I’ll tolerate it. It can actually be a valuable asset when you’re typing. What makes autocorrect in Word an asset is the fact that it is customizable, the same as the dictionary. (For creating a custom or exclusion dictionary, see my earlier blog posts.)

When someone mentions copyeditors, the first things that come to mind are probably books or magazine and newspaper articles. But we work on so much more.
If it involves the written word and is presented to the public, chances are it could benefit from an editor’s touch.
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Admittedly, there are some things that just aren’t worth paying a professional for, but what about your website?
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