Brass Tacks Season
Before becoming a full-time editor, I went out and picked up Sara Horowitz’s The Freelancer’s Bible. I had taken many contracts but had never strung them together as my sole source of income. Horowitz’s insightful book introduced me to the regular beats of an editor’s day: early-morning emails, the job hunt, marketing, marketing, and marketing, followed by the nitty-gritty of editing. But importantly for this post, the Freelancer’s Bible taught me how to calculate my rates.
A Long-time Guild Member’s First ACES Conference
This year I joined ACES: The Society for Editing just in time for their annual conference in Providence, RI, on March 27-30, 2019. I pictured the trip as a pilgrimage to the New England of my youth, complete with grime on the streets, weeds growing up through cracks in the sidewalk, a vague smell of fish . . . Nope, nuttin’ like that.
Instead, it was about putting faces to institutions, such as Peter Sokolowski to Merriam-Webster or Helen Eby to the new Spanish Editors Association. Experiencing the buzz around AP style, particularly this year’s “gasp moment”: cutting hyphens from common constructions like “third grade teacher.” (I am sure glad most of my own clients prefer Chicago style!) The event was also about finding one’s place in the world of editors and freelancing. I definitely had the feeling of being among my people! Both Boston and Providence have seen major renovation since I lived there. A bonus: delicious food.
Red Pencil Conference 2019: Voice & Voices
The Red Pencil conference is a gathering to share in a day of making connections with fellow editors and puzzling with words. This year’s lineup features over twenty professionals from a variety of backgrounds, some whose names you will recognize and some who we are thrilled to welcome into the Red Pencil community for the first time. We’ve designed a mix of sessions to help us tighten our craft, strengthen our business and self-care skills, and stretch our understanding of our place as intermediaries in a dynamic and evolving field.
Our theme, Voice & Voices, explores how we as editors engage with the concept of voice at its many levels. Beyond the daily practice of editing voice on the page, the conference examines our part in championing the unique voices of the under- and unheard and our role in fostering communication rather than acting as gatekeepers. We will look at how we can do this and why it matters. Most importantly, we will look at how editors can better support the voices of a greater range of writers, publishers, and readers, with a professionalism and polish that lifts and honors their words and needs.
Giant Pencil Interviews Mary Norris, the Comma Queen
Our own mascot, Giant Pencil, met up with author and copy editor extraordinaire Mary Norris at the ACES 2019 conference in Providence, RI, to chat about her latest book, Greek to Me.
Cooking with Adverbs
Many writing experts agree that adverbs can weaken rather than strengthen the point being made. “The adverb is not your friend,” states Steven King, one of the leaders of the movement to avoid adverbs. Some go so far as to say it is the mark of the novice writer to use adverbs when they are not necessary and even redundant: to have someone “shout loudly” or “stomp heavily.” A few advise avoiding adverbs in dialogue altogether to avoid such errors.
Overuse of adverbs can also make a writer lazy. It’s easier to throw in an adverb instead of providing enough description that the reader can imagine how someone is behaving.
But there is a middle ground between overuse and avoiding all adverbs that most writing mavens fail to address!
Pleased to Meet You
The enthusiastic volunteers who guide the Northwest Editors Guild kicked off the year with a daylong board of directors’ retreat on January 13. To ensure a smooth transition, departing, returning, and incoming board members, along with Guild administrator Jen Grogan, joined together at this annual event.
Four volunteers—Christina Johnson, Roberta Klarreich, Pm Weizenbaum, and Polly Zetterberg—wrapped up two years of service, making way for new board members: Alison Cantrell, Erin Cusick, MariLou Harveland, and Alicia Ramos.
The team is looking forward to meeting up with members at our bimonthly member meetings, regional gatherings, and, of course, the September 21 Red Pencil conference. Until then, here are brief introductions.
Collaboration and Relaxation at the Oregon and SW Washington Editors Retreat
In early 2018, fellow Portland editor and Guild member Julie Swearingen and I took over planning of the happy hours for the Portland contingent of the Northwest Editors Guild, hoping to bring our local editors together and continue to provide them with a space for communication and collaboration. We’ve enjoyed the relationships and connections this experience has forged for us. When a conversation with former Guild president Pm Weizenbaum sparked the idea for an editors retreat, we were eager to help create a learning-based experience that would build upon the happy hours we’d started hosting.
So, during the last weekend of September 2018, twelve editors gathered in small Rockaway Beach, Oregon, for the first ever Oregon and SW Washington Editors Retreat.
2018 State of the Guild
By joining the board, I got to step behind the curtain and learn about all the backstage activity that goes on in support of our members. One of the very first things I learned about the board was that each one of these people takes our mission to heart, weighing decisions against these words:
“The Northwest Editors Guild connects writers with professional editors of the written word in the Pacific Northwest. We also foster community among our members and provide resources for their career development.”
Unique Holiday Gifts for Editors
What kind of holiday gifts would a discerning editor enjoy? How about the editor who seems rigid but has a secret sense of humor? The basic go-to coffee shop gift cards and sets of red pens are appreciated, but you can do better than that for your closest edibuddies and word nerds.
Below is a list of unique and memorable gifts—arranged alphabetically by store name—suitable for just about every age, size, flavor, and type of editor, plus the tiniest editors-to-be. You might even find something you’ll want to treat yourself to after making that big deadline!
A Dev Editing Handbook with Novelistic Empathy
Imagine for a moment you’re an editor in a publishing house, perhaps one of the local presses like Wave Books in Seattle. As you sip your morning coffee, two of your colleagues (frazzled editors in their own right) collide in the hall and mix up their manuscripts.
One of these manuscripts is a sly and meticulous instruction manual on the craft of developmental editing. The other is a novel about books, a story driven by conflict and (sometimes) resolution between editors, writers, and publishers. To aid your colleagues, you accidentally shuffle several chapters of each book into the other like a poker dealer with a stack of cards. One would expect the new hybrid manuscript to bewilder the narrative, but the shuffled whole catalyzes so harmoniously that the publisher rejoices in the happy accident.