The Concierge (Blog)

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Lessons from Rejection

I was turned down for an ongoing editing project recently, which hasn’t happened in a while. I’ve been focused on building Club Ed for the last year or two, so I haven’t been pursuing other projects. And most of my editing work has always come by referral and word-of-mouth, so potential clients tend to already…
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Novels Aren’t Movies

I encounter a lot of novelists and fiction editors who use movies as examples of various storytelling techniques they want to discuss. I understand this impulse: it is easier to assume that everyone has seen The Matrix or can easily find the two hours to sit through it than it is to assume that everyone…
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Freelancer Flexibility

When you first begin freelancing, it’s like being parachuted, blindfolded, into a ten-acre field you’ve never seen before and your job is to grow a crop. You have no idea where you are or what the soil is like or what the seasons will bring or what grows here. You’ve got a plow, or maybe…
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All fiction can be improved

Recently I read a LinkedIn post from a proofreader who is interested in becoming a developmental editor (DE). They said something along the lines of, “I’ve been studying classic works of literature and although I can’t practice development on them because they can’t be improved, they do teach a lot about effective writing.” And while…
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How to Handle Scope Creep

Setting expectations from the start helps keep the project you’re doing from becoming never-ending. If you agree to do one round of editing, that does not also include three hundred hours of personal coaching while the author is trying to finish the revision. It’s very common for the scope of an editing project to change,…
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Juggling multiple goals

This is the season where goals are on people’s minds, mine included. That said, it’s perfectly fair if your primary goal is “I would like not to be so exhausted by external circumstances in 2022” but sometimes it can be energizing to make a little pile of things that are under your control and do…
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