Hello, 

 

Let me introduce myself, I am Dianna-Lynn (Dee-Dee) Lundgren, and I am a freelancer with my contracting company Stellar Virtual Office  Assistance - Stellar VOA Canada. 

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I have a multi-faceted and varied background: including customer service, conventional magazine publishing, desktop publishing, photography, and small business management. I also have experience with providing several levels of editorial expertise: including structural, line/content, copy editing and conventional proofreading.

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As mentioned above, I gained my real-life experiences in a variety of ways.

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I started managing businesses at a very young age. At 19 years old in 1987, I took on the Store Manager/Studio Photographer position for the Sooter's Studio franchise. My store was in the little seaside town of Sidney, BC. I handled all business related to the managing and operation of the small retail location. The cash register operation, customer service, booking and taking all portraitures of clients and their pets, all bank deposits, and the month and year-end bookkeeping. I also had a co-op student that I hired from the local high school, so I trained her on the retail front-end, which gave me the freedom to book outside photoshoots with clients. I was solely responsible for her training and wages.

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In the late '80s, from 1989 - 1992, I worked on a magazine called, "BC Agriculture Magazine", where I was employed as a Staff Photographer/Production Assistant. It was my responsibility to provide customer service as the front-line Receptionist for the parent organization, BC Federation of Agriculture, that produced the magazine. I also booked meeting venues, and organized the annual AGMs, managed the subscriber database, and did cold calling to gain new subscribers.

 

As I was the staff photographer, all the article photos required I provided by going out to businesses and farms to get the shots we needed for the magazine, whether they were interior articles or cover photos.

 

Regarding desktop publishing, I created a section called, "The Olden Times" that we featured in all the magazine issues. To get the content needed for the articles, I visited the archives in the basement of the Legislature Buildings in Victoria, BC where all of our province's archives are stored, going back to the very first newspapers in BC, which are stored there on microfiche. I pulled relevant advertisements and print articles that would have been printed within the year I'd chosen to showcase. I then created a full-page layout for the monthly magazine. I also created numerous advertisements and occasionally was asked to provide photos for company advertisements to include in the magazine. Every month, I travelled to Vancouver and the press, Hemlock Publishing where the Publisher and I looked over the galley proofs and proofread them. In conventional publishing, you are looking for entirely different things than the word 'proofreading' has since become synonymous with; that is you are looking to see: if there were any widows and/or orphans created; if the margins remained the size you intended, or if they had shifted; if the four-colour registration of the CMYK layers had shifted; and if there were any glaring spelling errors. It is important to note that we were NOT doing any kind of editing at this stage. Editing takes place well before the proofreading stage, which occurs immediately prior to printing. It is intended to be the last-ditch effort to catch any FORMATTING ERRORS, not grammatical or contextual errors!

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From 2000 to 2003, The University of Victoria employed me where I worked in many departments.
I floated around in multiple departments, as I was in the Secretarial Pool, so they sent me to a variety of office environments. I had a term contract in the Psychology Department for almost two years, and during that time I worked closely with the Psych 100 professor, Dr. Martin Smith typing up all of his Psych 100 exams that would be administered to students, and with the Director of Clinical Programs and the Neuropsychological Clinic on campus, Dr. Catherine Mateer. For Dr. Mateer, I worked with her collaboratively on many multi-faceted and often cumbersome projects.

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Between 2007 - 2013 the BC Provincial Government employed me, in the Ministries of Education and Environment as an Executive/Administrative Assistant. During my time in the Ministry of Education, among my many duties was the creation of several different types of documents, including utilizing desktop publishing to create all stages (creation, inserting images and step-by-step instructions, editing, and finally publishing online) of technical manuals for many ministry-wide programs including BCeID, Personal Education Numbers (PEN), and others. These manuals are still in use today within the ministry.

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One of my key responsibilities in the Ministry of Education was to set up a Virtual Meeting Room, whereby participants located anywhere they might have access to a strong internet connection could participate in meetings with the ministry. I ran an Elluminate Virtual Room with a whiteboard and gave out links so the meeting participants could follow along on their computers and laptops with us, even though they could log into the meeting from anywhere. I was the moderator for these meetings and acted as a facilitator to help the others stay engaged with the meetings. I provided and ran the presentations and offered them as links to the respondents. I monitored the chat rooms and responded to the questions from those who were not speaking.

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From 2013 to Present, I have been a self-employed contractor. First, after I created a farm and garden structures business in 2013 - 2015, Furhlang Farm & Garden Products Inc. so my then husband could have a contracting company, and then later on as a Virtual Assistant/Editor for my current freelancing business, Stellar Virtual Office Assistance - Stellar VOA Canada from 2015 - Present.

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For the last few years, I have been engaged in the business of the publishing world once again.
I work from my home office, which is incredibly exceptional and rewarding; and at other times I felt cut off from the rest of humanity, limited by digital access, as I seem to exist in a mostly insular world of online interactions, which can be very lonely.

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My publishing clients, most of whom are Independent Authors, live all over the world. As I work online, it doesn't matter where someone lives, just that they can send me their projects to work on. I have been concentrating on offering content/line editing and copyediting. For more information on what the "Nine (9) Different Types of Editing" are, please check out my FAQs webpage.
 

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I mostly work on .docx files that are sent to my Gmail account as a link to the author's own Google Drive (GDrive), so that I can work on the project in Google Docs (GDocs) in the cloud online, and they can then see all the highlighted sections with the suggestions/comments for edits I've made to their draft.

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Or, sometimes the client will send me a .mobi or .epub file which I then convert into a .docx file, work on it in Google Docs and then send them a link so they have access to the file and can see all of my suggestions/comments for edits that match the highlighting of the text.

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Regarding timelines, for a 350-page document, such as a fiction novel, depending on what level of editing might be required, it can take me anywhere from two weeks to a month to complete a thorough edit. Unless you're asking for a single editor to take on all aspects of editing the entire work, which is not advisable. It's a good idea to have several sets of eyes looking over your work. And usually, one editor will do the structural edit, and then the line and copy editor takes a crack at it. Then it goes back to the author, they institute the changes, add in the suggested edits and/or the changes to wording required which sometimes results in a complete rewrite of that section, chapter or sometimes having to rework several sections so the continuity and flow don't suffer. After the rewrites and edits are all input, it goes back to the content and copy editor (sometimes that's one person, like me, and sometimes it's two separate people) and they make sure that it all still makes sense, even after all the changes have been instituted. If they give the okay, then it's back to the author who then completes the final, final, edits and ensures the formatting for online retailers and eBooks is correct, and then off it goes to be published.