My editing skills have been used on articles, speeches, letters and essays written by others both English-speaking and for whom English is a second or even third language. In recent years (since 1995) much of my work has been intended to be used on websites, some in letters and some in magazine articles.An example of my editing skills on web articles written by a third party can be found at the website of Pete and Lyn Foreman - Scuba-Ski.
Even at school I won prizes with my essays and have always enjoyed writing. The efforts for which I have been paid include:
A series of different projects on which I did all the original writing can be found on my own domain. Most of the links leading to external sites have nothing to do with me and some of the sites I have built for clients and are housed on their own domains linked to from my domain may have been altered a great deal over the years since I created them).
Writing as a freelance provider of:
for clients from a wide variety of disciplines and fields.
Under annual contract (officially from 1st April to 30th October) to the community of owners in an exclusive enclave of 204 apartments in Mallorca, Balearic Islands, in charge of turning the premises into a viable locale and organising the working days of a chef, a cleaner and two waiting staff, as well as running the bar/ice-cream parlour, from 10:00 to 22:00 seven days per week.Together with my colleaues I grossed more than any other outfit in the 21-year history of the Anchorage Club, in both years.First season the length of contract was extended by three and a half months, so that I worked from the beginning of April 2006 to the middle of February 2007.The second season was as per contract and I worked from the beginning of April 2007 to the beginning of November 2007.My responsibilities included:
This was a thoroughly enjoyable contract but totally exhausting. Many an evening I stayed on until the early hours of the morning to serve clients who didn't want to go home and, much as I enjoyed getting the business off the ground, enough was enough!
Website designer and contributor. Creating original websites from scratch on FrontPage for a wide range of small-business clients from Scuba instructors to furniture stores whilst travelling around the Atlantic on the 22m schooner that has been my home since 1996.My work included:
Joint owner and second-in-command aboard a 22m schooner run as a charter vessel and floating restaurant, including a year in Spanish waters and a trans-Atlantic crossing to Trinidad. It was having a website built for the yacht at vast expense and badly that made me decide that I should teach myself how to build websites.
The schooner Leopard Normand III stopped chartering in 1998 and the Internet became a part-time occupation, side by side with catering at various marinas around the Atlantic.
Hoevener Properties was in the business of buying ruined houses in Andalucia and selling them to foreign buyers, along with planning permission and reconstruction services.My job was to manage up to five construction sites at a time and to act as interpreter between the director who spoke only German and the Spanish architects, town halls, construction workers and clients, mainly English.My duties also involved dealing with Spanish lawyers, Public Notaries and families selling property, sometimes involving more than twenty individuals, each with a share in the property, negotiating often quite complicated deals.
The company moved inland and I moved aboard the schooner upon which I currently reside.
ARC or the Action Resource Centre, in London W1, UK, (Nothing to do with the modern organisation of the same name, started in 1999 in Whitechapel) was a secondment agency, putting people from the private sector into the public sector for a year and vice-versa, to help individuals and organisations to understand the 'market' into which they were 'trading', so to speak.As manager of the London branch, working from an office attached to the headquarters, I was involved in placing candidates from both sides of the equation and assessing their progress. Unfortunately, as one might have guessed, most companies are only too pleased to offload an irritating employee for a year but will very rarely part company with a useful member of staff for so long...Whilst at ARC, in 1985, I helped to create a major conference and exhibition at Wembley the first 'Self-Help' exhibition and was credited in the brochure as sole Co-ordinator. My duties, amongst many others, included organising a string of seminars and helping small voluntary organisations from all over London to plan and design their stands.Much of my work was with ethnic minority groups, which I enjoyed very much.
Day-release course whilst working as assistant herdswoman on Hagg Hill Farm, a 200-cow dairy farm in Wiltshire, UK as a teenager. This entailed going to college one day per week (as the only female in a class of 40) to learn about: a) The technology involved in the process that begins with extraction of milk from cows and ends with the packaged product being made available to the public, including hygiene, transportation, uses of milk to create other products. b) The study of all cattle breeds and the selective breeding of cattle to maximize milk production.
I came 4th out of a class of 40. Unfortunately, I learned more about why I didn't want a career in agriculture after all than any other topic. It was, nonethelesss, interesting and I have always enjoyed learning about pretty much anything.
In 1998 I created an online nautical 'magazine', building a website on Front Page to house it and producing a 300-page issue within eight weeks working almost around the clock. The original name of this 'publication' cannot be disclosed here because, when the 'magazine' was a couple of years old, I received a threat of litigation from the owner of a printed magazine with a fairly similar name, in that the word 'Sea' was included in the title, and I was obliged to close down the domain which, although annoying was, in retrospect, rather flattering. The host server I was using at the time was expensive, somewhat complicated and not very helpful but I managed to get the wretched site closed down before the deadline imposed by the rude attorney. I was in the Azores when this happened, and had been just about to leave for Portugal (I live on a schooner) so, for a while there, my efforts simply disappeared from the 'net, and then I found my current server, far less expensive and incredibly helpful.Subsequently, I thought up a new name that nobody could threaten me over - my own! I created a domain bearing my own name (linnetwoods dot com) and put my MarineZine site there, along with a few others. A second edition, created in part with the help of a few friends, came into being and was added to the site in 2001.Later I registered the name marinezine.com and pointed that domain name at the site. Gradually I have been adding articles to a third edition offline that seems to be taking forever to build, mainly because there has been so little time available to put into it. One of these days, when I can afford the leisure time to do it, I will finish the third edition and put that online as well... My abilities as a website creator are probably dreadful - it is my capacity as a writer and editor that I wish to showcase here... If you are still reading at this point then QED, I guess!