“Vivian’s index of Too Dumb for Democracy? is excellent. She broke down a complex subject into its essential parts and helped make the book accessible and, above all, useful.”
—David Moscrop, Author
“Thank you for your skilfully devised and very useful index—not easy for an edited volume especially!”
—Bronwen Wilson, Edward W. Carter Chair in European Art, Department of Art History at UCLA
“WOWWWWW. This is an incredible index! So intuitive and sensitive. The indexer captured difficult concepts and clearly mapped how kids could learn more about them.”
—Patricia Ocampo, Editor at Kids Can Press
I did my indexing training in 2016 and 2017, and landed my first professional project in 2018. The year after that, I won the Purple Pen Award for New Indexers.
Winners don't actually receive a purple pen, just $100 USD. However, this piece on Indexers.ca shows me wearing a purple shirt. I don't think I did that intentionally; it was just one of my favourite shirts.
My winning index was for Too Dumb for Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones by David Moscrop.
I was fortunate enough to meet David in person. I don't know how many Indexers have the opportunity to meet their authors, but he just happened to come to my city to give a lecture, probably because his publishing house was here. I now have an autographed copy of his book. He's a lovely man.
I have indexed scholarly, trade and children's books. I can do hyperlinked indexes for e-books as well as static indexes for print books. Lately I've been carving out a little niche for myself in embedded LaTeX indexing. Very satisfying to my techie-geek side. I even wrote a few scripts in Ruby to help me do it.