How I helped Tablet Magazine by copyediting a longform article in two days Situation In November 2022, Tablet Magazine, whose daily newsletter I edit, asked me to copyedit an unprecedented project: a 24,000-word story that would be published just after the Jewish holidays. (FYI, that’s the size of a novella. The…

Coming at success from another angle. Plus, my 2023 word of the year. Year 2022 looked very different from Year 2021. (And Year 2021 looked very different from Year 2020 — isn’t freelance fun?) Before I dive into all that, I want to acknowledge that January 8 was my freelance…

Conclusions I’ve come to January 8, 2023, marked my fifth anniversary as full-time freelancer. In January 2018, I left my role as national copy chief of Time Out North America in NYC. I had been freelancing on the side for a few months but decided to retry it full-time; freelance…

Nuggets of wisdom from writers and editors to other editors — ACES Accelerate was a virtual conference held by ACES: The Society for Editing, of which I am a member. There was so much to take away from the sessions at this conference that I could write many a blog post in reaction (coming soon!), …

My aggressive growth plan paid off. Here’s everything I put in motion. — In August 2020, after more than two years working as a full-time freelancer, I realized that my business had become stagnant. Since I had begun independently providing writing and editing services to clients in early 2018, my business had not changed. My client base largely remained the same, as did…

Access me for advice at BuyMeACoffee.com As with trying to start any new side gig, breaking into freelance editing can be daunting. While there’s a wealth of online courses and books that share how to be a successful freelancer and editor, true confidence in your skills comes with practice over…

And the recent etiquette mistake I made even though I knew better Let me tell you about a recent mistake I made as an editor. I was doing a developmental edit of a 3,000-word blog post for a tech startup. This startup did not have its own writers; instead, it…

There’s an unspoken pact between writers and editors. Recently I rewatched Mary Norris’s Ted Talk—for possibly the 20th time—and, as always, a new gem stood out to me. Norris, former New Yorker copy editor, touched on the writer-editor relationship: There is a pact between editors and writers. The editor never…

Yes. Here’s why being a “sometimes writer” makes me a better editor. Acquaintance: “What do you do?” Me: “I’m an editor and sometimes writer.” That’s been my response for a few years now. Editing is my main gig. Most of my work over the past decade has been focused on…