After many years experience providing administrative and accounting support for small business owners, nonprofits, and corporations, I feel I’ve found my true vocation in editing. I’m motivated to edit pretty much everything I can get my hands on: book manuscripts, short stories, articles, blogs, interviews, dissertations, websites. More recently, I've also become the editor of the podcast Deep Transformation: Self-Society-Spirit, where I have the pleasure of playing with the words and ideas of the illustrious podcast guests when I write up the descriptions and Topics & Time Stamps for the podcast episodes.

 

I work easily with people, both directly and long distance. Highly detail-oriented, I enjoy editing in all its facets: from taking dictation by the author to then take home and edit, to structural and stylistic content editing, copy/line editing, proofreading, and indexing. I’ve always enjoyed jobs where I have the opportunity to make order out of chaos, and now I want to turn that skill into helping new writers get their voices out into the world in the most meaningful and polished way possible. 

 

It happens that even very intelligent and wise people whom I admire self-publish books that I want to read—but when the first several pages are chock full of mistakes and typos, I cringe and set the book down. I'd like to prevent this happening with the rest of you new authors, and have the opportunity to correct all the glaring mistakes and help make the words flow smoothly and the meaning be very clear. 

 

I like to work with authors whose first language is not English. I speak fluent German and a bit of French, a smattering of Greek, and am sympathetic to what international authors intend to say, even if the words they use are awkward at first.

 

I have a good radar for smooth-like-butter phrases, and when I’m editing, I simply turn on the radar, and it’s like magic: the moment something sounds jarring, uncomfortable, repetitive, out of place, or irksome, it sends off a small alarm, and I know that’s where I need to jump in and smooth it out. The same thing happens with grammar. My grammar radar shouts, “Comma!” every time I sense there’s a missing comma, and the same thing goes for semi-colons, quotation marks, italics, colons, dashes, and spelling mistakes. I know I am not alone in this; it runs in the blood of virtually all editors born to this work.

 

Editing makes me feel like a Victorian seamstress working on a dress dummy: just pull those stays tighter and tighter and eliminate the excess till the figure only retains what really counts, popping with curves and style.