Bear Essentials
Editing
(essential edits
essential bear)
The Harrietta Lee series
Stephanie had already written the first book of the Harrietta Lee series and self-published it. She came to me because she had never drafted anything as long as Bloodbath, which came in around twice as long as Deadline, book one; she was nervous and unfamiliar with how working with an editor would go.
I provided developmental editing for both books, identifying points in the plot that needed clarifying and explaining why I loved what Stephanie had written already, always detailing my reasoning based on my years of literary analysis. When I did the copyedits, I suggested a few tweaks to the writing, always keeping in mind Stephanie's writing style and especially Harry's unique, strong voice.
The forthcoming fourth book, Cutthroat, also came across my desk! It's still a work in progress, but it called for the most extensive overhauls to date. Still, we were always open to communication, especially when it comes to the next steps in editing.
The Varian Pike series
by Jack DeWitt
Crime and noir writer Jack DeWitt is an established poet and essayist, but he came to me with his first novel series about P.I. Varian Pike. The first novel in the series, Delicious Little Traitor, had been published by a small press that went under, so he wanted to self-publish it and the previously unpublished second and third novels on Amazon.
Delicious Little Traitor had been edited by the small press already, but it was full of errors. I fixed the formatting and the errors in grammar and punctuation that made it to print in the first book to create a clean manuscript for re-publication; I also provided copyediting for the second and third books. All three books are now error-free and consistent.
Taking a manuscript that had been neglected and treated as "good enough" by its first publisher and polishing it to a level that DeWitt deserved is something that I take a lot of pride in.
