2022 in Review
A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.”
— C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
Indexing
I recently published a Substack and blog post that provided a listing of all the books I indexed in 2022.
It includes the title/author information of my nine published jobs, links to respective publisher pages with other book information, a brief abstract written by yours truly. It also includes the three unpublished indexes (available to view or download on my website) indexes that I completed, the first one was a project completed for ASI certification, and the last two books were that were published in 2006 and 2008, but due to some special circumstances, I only recently indexed them.
Conferences & Special Events — Professional Development
ASI 2022 Virtual Conference
The first conference of the year for me was the ASI Annual Conference.
Hosted completely online, it had a three-day line-up plus a pre-conference session for new indexers that served as a good introduction and laid the groundwork for the next two days, which went into details of the business of indexing, and other sessions for everything from e-publications and accessibility, the various approaches to indexing the metatopic, and a session on how to refine your index editing skills.
Berlin Conference
My second conference of the year was another online one, but this one had the option to attend in person. The International Indexing Conference is held every three years, and if I had planned better, I would have loved to have this opportunity not just to attend in person and meet some of the people I’ve only emailed with, but also to be a tourist in Berlin! Anyway, having the video recordings made available after the fact is a definite silver lining to this new online way of doing conferences…and I have definitely re-watched more than a few sessions.
This two-day event was full of interesting presentations by indexers from around the world, from developments in the publishing industry to indexing series (journals), embedded indexing, and Chinese legal thesaurus creation, there was no shortage of things to learn. View the full program, here.
ASI Special Event
The final conference was really a Special Event held in December. It provided another two days full of useful webinars on how to refine one’s indexing process, business practices, and even included a session on chair- or desk-yoga.
Publications
In the Spring, I was asked to write a short article on what it’s like to start up a freelance indexing business. It was published in the Summer Issue of the ASI quarterly journal, Key Words, which is available online for ASI members and subscribers. I started a Substack!
Substack posts are more frequent than blog posts, and include more newsletter-type information such as announcements of recently completed indexing projects.
In addition to the shorter Substack posts, any blog posts get automatically double-posted to Substack.
In Other News
On January 7 (2022) I announced my new logo on Instagram.
Developing that was completely outside of my wheelhouse but a lot of fun. Though maybe not something I’d prefer to repeat anytime soon.
During the summer, I moved and as a result of that move, was able to establish a very nice office space. :)
Thus ends my report on my first complete year of VFJ Indexing & Word Services.
Thank you very much for reading, and I wish you a happy, healthy, and productive 2023.
