Writing is one of those skills that actually gets harder the better you get at it. The more you know, the more you fret over every word choice, every comma placement, every paragraph structure. Will readers understand it? Will they like it? Sometimes, the anxiety and self-doubt can be crippling.
Eventually, you will need professional help.
Despite what you may have heard, editors are not monsters hell-bent on mangling your manuscript. Sometimes the news isn’t what you want to hear, but a good editor will tell you what you need to hear—the good and the bad—to improve your work and further strengthen your skills.
For my non-fiction clients, I edit legal texts, financial reports, Canadian history, and academic theses, among other things. Here, the focus is typically on logical structure and clarity, reducing jargon, and presenting information in a way that is easy to navigate.
In fiction, I specialize in speculative fiction, particularly science fiction and mythic (mythology-based) fantasy. Stories in these genres tend to be somewhat idiosyncratic and may include lingo and languages of their own; mythic fiction in particular often feels like a fairy tale or an epic drama, according to the mythology drawn from. It is critical that these unique features be preserved while still making the stories accessible to the reader.
Whatever you write, my job is to make sure your writing is precise, concise, and captivating.
“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.”
― Neil Gaiman
Quills and Queries Editing 