Editing

… A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
—William Butler Yeats, Adam’s Curse

editingMaybe there are writers who can produce perfect sentences effortlessly; I’ve never met any and hope I never will. The best, most professional writers tend to do a lot of revising —and almost all benefit from having someone cast a cold eye on their work.

In other words, from editing and being edited.

Credentials

My first editorial job was at Plenum, where I worked on Russian-language publications like “Magnetohydrodynamics” and “The Journal of Metallurgy.” Once you’ve tackled badly translated Soviet-era science, you can pretty much handle any subject. I then retreated to graduate school, which led to my editing The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn and Selected Poems of Paul Blackburn.

Travel publishing came next. As an editor in New York for Frommer’s (Simon & Schuster) and Fodor’s (Random House) and in London for Rough Guides, I did everything from copy-editing and British-to-American translating to line editing and project developing. I was the first series editor for the Paris-based Gault-Millau restaurant guides at Frommer’s, and oversaw the creation of the Wall Street Journal Guides to Business Travel at Fodor’s.

Since moving to Tucson, I’ve worked on numerous freelance editing projects, including guidebooks, cookbooks, short stories, novels, websites… you name it. My clients have ranged from well known literary authors to a local public relations firm, and my services include everything from copy editing and line editing to manuscript evaluation and development.

I’m happy to provide references—and rates. I use the Editorial Freelance Association Rates as a guideline, but — like editorial terms themselves — different projects warrant different approaches and editorial tasks may overlap. The quality of the manuscript also affects the time it takes to read a page, which impacts the hourly rate.

Get in touch via the Contact page and we can set up an appointment to talk.

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