AKA: The life of a freelancing editor

typewriterI had grand plans to blog regularly in August, and then several things happened that sort of interfered. Most of them are actually word-related so they’re worthy of sharing here, though as you can see from last week’s post, not much of it was reading-related.

Sadly, not much of it was writing-related either, though I will have a post next week relating to a recent writing course I took. Because I’m participating in BLOWS: Blog at Least Once a Week in September. It’s a thing I made up.

Anyways, most of the busy-ness can be attributed to editing and tasks associated with those clients.

My primary client for the past couple of years, Allvoices, launched a new website and also changed up their business model a bit. All at the same time. Either one on its own would be a big deal, but both at once meant a whole lot of excitement for awhile. This in addition to juggling my usual campaigns for them – one major campaign ended mid-month with a 2-day live event while another major campaign launched the following week alongside the new site. Add feedback for the new site, assisting writers with the new site, etc., and that ate up a lot of time.

During the same period, I received a request to edit a novel. This was for an author I hadn’t worked with before and the description caught my attention. It was a mystery – one of my favorite genres to read – so I was excited when I was able to start work on that as well. I can’t/won’t say much about the story itself except that I found it very interesting and engaging. It kept me moving along as a reader. And as an editor, thank goodness, because I agreed to a quick two-week turnaround for an 110k-word novel.

Lesson learned – no more two-week turnarounds for something of that magnitude. Only if the author is my very best friend and they pay double my usual rate and Oprah is reviewing it personally for her book club.

So that’s what happened to August.

What about September and beyond? I have at least half a dozen campaigns in the works for Allvoices. One of my favorite authors is getting ready to launch another manuscript my way with a December publishing date. I’m making plans to participate in NaNoWriMo and I still have a reading goal of 45 books to blow out of the water (I’m currently enjoying #35).

And I probably wouldn’t have it any other way.

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