The Editor Is In

Having a little extra income is nice, especially when you’re retired and especially when, looking not too far down the road, you can see what the fascist corporate homophobic racist sociopathic fanatics who are now running (ruining, actually) our government are about to do to Social Security and Medicare. But don’t get me started on that subject.

For some years now I’ve been teaching cello privately, but at the end of this month I’m sending my students off to other teachers. I don’t know how many productive years I have left — a lot of them, I hope — but it’s time to get my priorities in order. Writing has emerged as a more important activity.

I can’t rely on my self-published novels to bring in any appreciable income. My sales figures are, at the moment, I’m sure, in the high single digits. Also, the cost of self-publishing is not trivial. So how about editing other people’s novels as a paid service? Sure, why not?

Getting one’s foot in the door as a freelance editor is not easy. Even finding the door into which to insert one’s foot is not easy. But I don’t need a lot of income, and I’m not in a hurry. So I’ve added a page to this blog (see the menu above) to introduce my editing services.

I’m looking forward to working with a few clients. It’s always interesting seeing what other writers are up to, and I enjoy exercising my skills. I use those same skills to critique my own work, and I promise to be less brutal with others than I am on myself.

Writing well is not easy! We all need a second opinion, a second set of eyeballs, in order to produce our best work and live up to our promise. That doesn’t mean the editor is always right. I might suggest something that a client finds totally wrong-headed or irrelevant. The author is the boss, the editor only a consultant. But you could certainly do worse in choosing a consultant. More than a few of the freelance editors of fiction whom you’ll find online are not published authors. A case could be made that I do in fact know what I’m doing.