Hey all! I’ve been off work for some time due to several upheavals in my life and being houseless for the past two months. It’s been a difficult time and I’m eager to get back to work, which will also help stabilize my situation.

I’ve focused on accessibility for authors with fewer means or less experience for some time, and it’s been a personally fulfilling way to engage with my business. I know I needed guidance and breaks when I was a newer author, and I want to help provide that for others. 

As part of this goal, I’m making special offers for new-to-me authors with limited means.

Editorial Services

Creative Consultation (Plot/Concept Planning and Book Doctoring)

Book consultation is my most recently developed service and is one of my favorites to perform. It’s also a great place to start for many authors who seek guidance in their work without paying a ton, want to get their feet wet with the editorial experience, or just feel stuck.

One of the great things about a consultation like this is that it often requires very little from the author up front. A few hours—maybe only one—talking through an outline or book idea with an editor is a small investment, but can provide a handle on a work that’s feeling slippery. It also takes little time investment from me, so I can do a lot more consultations in a short time. My experience has been that this approach demands little but can be surprisingly effective in helping an author keep the writing process moving.

This is also a service that isn’t typical for most traditional editorial processes, so authors may not be used to seeking this. Considering trying it out if you feel intimidated enlisting an editor or don’t have much money to spend up front.

There are two forms of creative consultation to consider.
🌸 Plot and Concept Planning: This is consultation at the planning stage of a work. Sometimes authors have reimagined older drafts, or just had a vision and a sense of the story they want to tell. Much of this stage involves evaluation of your desires, brainstorming, and troubleshooting creative concepts, all of which can be difficult at times even for experienced authors. I can help you bang out plot, character, themes, but more deeply, help an author identify what’s blocking them from writing a work they really want to write.

🌸 Book Doctoring: This is for when a book just isn’t working. My friend and colleague, KJ Charles, has written eloquently about this process here, in a detailed blog post related to a book I worked on with her. Rather chuffed by that, frankly. If you read her books you will know why.

With a book doctoring, the book is already partially written or at a completed draft stage, but something isn’t coming together. The author often doesn’t know why it’s not coming together, but somehow this isn’t the book they hoped it would be. Writing is a magical art, friends, and that means that to an extent it does what it will. This can also mean that it’s hard to see what’s happening in a writing process by oneself.

Part of what I do here is identify what the partial story is already doing and see if this is what the author really wants, and then discover possibilities and pitfalls around that. I’ve had authors come to me after working on a draft through multiple revisions and many rounds of feedback, only to feel that they no longer know which end is up. The key to finding that is not to be told how to write it, but to get back in touch with why you began this book, to uncover what you’re really working with.

I honestly love being able to do this for a book and would enjoy doing it more. There are few things more satisfying than that glow of excitement that shines from an author who is finally starting to feel good about their writing project again.

Developmental Editing (aka Content Editing)

This is one of the traditional phases of editing that most authors are aware of, and also the phase that many newer authors fear. What if the editor wants to change the concept of your book? Undermine what the book is about, make it less like you?

I can’t say that no editor ever will try to do that, but I can say what my approach to developmental editorial is, which is to see what the author is aiming at and help them reach it. A crucial skill for this process is witnessing authorial vision in the work itself, and then being able to advise about how that vision can be realized. This is as much a subjective art as writing itself and will mean different things for different books. But the goals is always to be moving with the story and with the authorial vision, not against them. An editor that tries to make your work into the book they would write just needs to go write their own damn book, thank you very much.

A good developmental editor is able and willing to meaningfully ask the question: “is that what you want the book to be doing?” The answer might well be yes, but now the author knows that more deeply than before.

Line Editing/Copyediting

I’m putting these two concepts together because while line editing and copyediting are different processes, many times they run together. Line editing is the phase of editing that occurs after the story structure is all set to go, and now the nitty gritty of the page-by-page, scene-by-scene texture needs tending to.

I’ve had clients for whom the line edit phase was not much more than a copy edit—cleaning up language, composition, clarity of usage, grammar and writing mechanics—because the finesse of their scene construction happened at earlier stages for them. I’ve had clients for whom the pre-line revision steps left a lot of loose material on the page to prune, tidy, or shape, such that a lot has needed touched on at the sentence level. Both of these kinds of clients have been talented, creative people who simply had different writing and revision processes, and therefore different editorial needs.

Line editing, like developmental editing, should be about moving with the story and not against it. A good line editor should never be rewriting the tone, voice, or style of the story to better suit their tastes, and should always be working to aid the author in manifesting their authorial vision. Whose book is it, anyway? A good editor always knows the answer to that question.

Sensitivity Editing (aka Artistic Ethics Consultation)

A important step that also has often not been a part of the traditional editing process many of us were primed to expect, but one that’s been showing immense emergent value in the publishing ecosystem. To be blunt, no one is an island and books have real effects on the people who read them, and they need to be cultivated with care and an understanding that making art requires responsibility.

A sensitivity edit entails looking at what the ethical and social implications are of the story content. Look, some story concepts are plain harmful at their foundations. Others are great concepts but they need to be executed with care. Nazi romances, books about predatory trans women, and stories that exploit Indigenous genocide are some zingers I’ve seen shoot out of a pipeline, and there’s always the question, “why didn’t someone intervene at the concept stage?”

My advice is to make sure you never write a book that someone has to ask that about. But moreover, even for a book you have true confidence and pride in, you want to make sure you ethically engaged with a sensitive topic.

I like to talk about this in terms of artistic ethics, because it isn’t merely a technical clean-up, but a way to really look head-on about who you want to be as an artist, morally, and to make sure you’re being that with everything you create.

Part of this is about perspective. Frankly, it’s hard to be objective about needs that we don’t have, and so we must heed those who do have those needs. White people are poor judges of what really impacts racially oppressed people; cis people are poor judges of what something will feel like for a trans audience; we all have gaps in our understanding about the ways society has programmed us or the ways we passively benefit from the denigration of others. Talk about it, and if your book involves a perspective that’s distant from your own in these ways, make sure you’re talking with someone who can speak to that perspective. And then listen to that person.

This also means I am not going to be the right sensitivity consultant for every job, point blank. Other than my more general approach to artistic ethics, my perspective-specific areas of focus are trans issues specifically and gender issues more broadly, autism and neurodivergence, fatness, queer identity, feminism, and class politics.

That said, I always bring an eye for the ethical dimension of any work no matter what kind of service I’m providing, and my goal is to responsibly comment on anything that can impact this dimension, even if it’s normally out of my wheelhouse. If an artistic ethics issue comes up that I am not the right person to consult, I will say that and can likely recommend someone who is the right person.

If I’m doing a developmental or line edit for you or a creative consultation, sensitivity editing is going to be built into that. But if you have a manuscript that’s already nearly finished, consider whether the artistic ethics dimension of it may need a finer inspection. Many authors benefit from doing this, especially since it also arms them for future writing.

Rates and Offers

My new standard hourly rate for all services listed is $50 USD per hour of labor. However, I also work on a sliding scale based on the situation. For authors with limited means or circumstances that make paying for editing difficult, please don’t hesitate to ask for a different rate or explain your situation and negotiate with me.

Options I’ve offered include switching to a per word rate for some works, or offering a reduced hourly rate.

A special offer I’m featuring right now is a discount on any creative consultation service for all marginalized authors: Black and Indigenous authors, other authors of color, queer and trans/non-binary authors, disabled authors, or authors of limited means. You don’t have to prove your identity to me! Just let me know what your needs are. The discounted rate for creative consultation is $35 USD per hour.

Editing Slots

Right now I have free slots for the entire remainder of November, all of December, and all of 2022. A slot is not an exact unit of measurement, because projects that are more time intensive mean more hours of work. Feel free to ask about how much time I think your project may require, and communicate about when you think you could work on it. Slots can sometimes fill up quickly, but I do my best to accommodate authors based on the size of their projects and the deadlines they’re working with.

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