No editor is an island: The follow-up

It was a dark and stormy night when I met with fellow editors at Editors Toronto’s coffee-shop event last week at Boxcar Social. We were a small group with varying levels of experience and comfort with social media. These meetings are a great way to alleviate the isolation that sometimes comes from working from home. Plus, it’s good to see the real-life faces behind the online names!

Janet MacMillan and I are both active on social media, with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogging. Marg Anne Morrison and Alicia Peres, not so much. Admittedly, these platforms can be time-consuming, but they also help you connect with people who you would most likely never meet, especially if they live abroad.

Marg Anne raised the question of what “working remotely” meant. We agreed that it most often means working from home. However, there are those who work in remote regions or rural towns, which underscores the role social media plays.

Alicia said it was good to talk shop without having to explain yourself. That’s why editor meetups are so good! They’re not so much to learn something as they are to let off a bit of work-related steam.

Having drained our wine and drunk our beer (kudos to Boxcar for having Dieu du Ciel and making me one happy editor), it was time to return home. For me, it was good to meet people and reconnect with colleagues.

If you couldn’t make it out, we hope to see you at the our next event: “Oh, the Places You’ll Go: A Bookstore Crawl” on November 19, 2016.

Carol Harrison is editor-in-chief of BoldFace and freelance editor and writer at Muse Ink. When she isn’t focusing on words, she’s focusing her Nikon D3200.

This article was copy edited by Nicole Osbourne James.