I write. I edit. I teach. I mentor. I recommend books like it’s my job (I’m a book critic, it’s my job). I help writers to find the piece they didn’t know they could write. I’ve worked with authors on promotional essays for six years at Lit Hub and Crime Reads. I also work with writers who have imagination and drive but need structure. I specialize in helping academics write for a broader audience and helping non-writers to get their stories into word. My goal is for you to produce work you are obscenely proud of (and I will be obscenely proud of you).
Writer
I have had a lot of odd writing jobs: in college I wrote questions for a Trivial Pursuit-esque board game that was never produced. I wrote fundraising letters for a major civil rights organization. I was a ghostwriter at Angels on Earth magazine, responsible for a column called The Collector (one of my favorite subjects was a woman with so many display cases for her Gone With the Wind paraphernalia she could barely move around her trailer). I ghosted stories about a heroic squirrel named Blaze; a fly who gave a woman in an overturned car hope; and many doctors and cops whose heroism made them angels to our readers. At Entertainment Weekly I wrote 200 word book reviews; and for the Believer I wrote 10,000 word essays on my various heroes (here’s one on the obituaries of Susan Sontag, whose journal I also wrote about for LARB).
I have experience copy writing for websites and doing taxonomy and content strategy for small sites as well. Though my main beats are books and publishing, I learn quickly and write to specifications. If you are looking for sophisticated copy which does not talk down to the reader, you have found your writer.
Editor-For-Hire (Rent Me)
Writing is hard; hiring me as your editor is not going to make it easier. No shortcuts, no prodigies, and plenty of tears in writing: to write you have to get your butt in the chair. Once it’s there, I swoop in and sprinkle fairy dust as I force you to question your word choices, vary your sentences, strengthen your paragraphs, and look at your work to make it as strong and as distinctive as you.
Some essays I edited I particularly like: Michael Koryta on a craft book that tortures him, Deborah Shapiro on soap operas, Jason Pinter on The Shield, and Sarah Weinman on the women who edited crime fiction.
I have worked on editing projects ranging from a dissertation on robotics to a performance art piece on football and toxic masculinity. I am interested in being your alpha reader; I do both line and developmental editing for essays and longer works, and I am an excellent matchmaker between pieces you want to polish and publish and the publications they could call home. My approach is tailored to your needs but can include breaking down large writing projects with interim deadlines, accountability check-ins, and ideas for reading and research to deepen your thinking and inspire you to do your absolute best work. I love to work with artists and academics looking to broaden their audience and do more personal writing. I’m also clearly the person you want to hire for any crime-related nonfiction project.
How I am different from other editors-for-hire: I will help you with the stuff *around* writing as well as working on what you produce. I’m a combination editor, coach, problem solver, and taskmaster. We will make a schedule and build in the accountability/check-ins you need to stay on track. If you are blocked, we will talk about how to work around it. If you are not making the time to write that you need to, we can talk about how to make a writing practice that works for you. And we can set the pace wherever you feel comfortable. The advantage to this arrangement versus a class is that you can decide how much work is reasonable for you (but with a schedule so you will have a timetable and a breakdown of what you need to do and when). I believe in designing a program that works for you.
I’m not a shrink, but sometimes you don’t need one. You just need another writer to talk to.
Volunteer Mentor
When the pandemic hit, my steadiest freelance gig was cut in half. I knew I would have to make up for the lost income but I also worried about the people just getting started. Writing is a tough business, and as a 20-year veteran I have seen a lot of changes but never the kind of panic that COVID produced.
In order to make myself feel useful and to help out writers who were just coming up, I volunteered as a mentor through several ad hoc organizations and an internet writing group I belong to. I have now mentored a handful of young and early-career journalists, helping them to break into book coverage or just to expand their horizons during this crisis.