Utopian Editing

I coach and edit fiction, especially science fiction, dystopia, fantasy, urban fantasy, action/thriller (including espionage and technothriller), and all genres of young adult. I also edit nonfiction, depending on the type.

I offer a free sample edit so that you can assess my skills and I can determine how long your project will take me. You can also view samples of my work.

SERVICES

Writing Coach: If you’re anything like me, you want your project to be your project. You don’t want to hand it over to an editor with carte blanche—but at the same time, you need some help. You need feedback, critique, a solution for writer’s block, or simply a boot in the rear to get moving on the hard parts.

That’s where I come in. Whether you have a completed manuscript or just an idea or outline, I can evaluate where you are, listen to your goals, and help you meet them.

My help looks however you need it to look. For one client, it’s a couple hundred comments in the margin of a Word document. For another, it’s an evaluation of gaps in the story and a draconian revision calendar with accountability. For others, we bounce ideas around on the phone till their fingers are itching to pound the keyboard.

Don’t know what you need? Just contact me, and we’ll talk it out.

Developmental Editing: Developmental editing (DE) is similar to the writing coach service, but it tends to be more straightforward. Generally a client sends me a complete manuscript and I read through it once. I construct a simple outline and character charts to help me gauge consistency and spot large-scale problems.

In DE, I do not fix sentences, grammar, punctuation, or formatting. Instead, I make specific recommendations on plot, characterization, themes, point of view, balancing elements (ensuring that exposition, dialogue, actions, etc. make good feng shui), and whatever else I think needs to be improved. DE is about making a better story.

Once I’ve completed my recommendations, I will send them to you with a cover letter that provides my overall impressions. After you make revisions, if you wish, I will review your changes and provide further feedback.

Line Editing: Line editing (LE) deals with sentences and paragraphs. Rather than focusing on grammar and punctuation, however, LE focuses on style. Don’t fret about your dangling participles, repetition, and lack of parallelism. A tweak here, a flip-flop there, maybe a few reorganized paragraphs–a hundred or thousand subtle changes can transform a limping manuscript into a well-oiled machine.

Don't worry that I’ll eliminate your individual voice. While I do “fix” things to make them correct or better, I pride myself on having a sensitive ear for tone and personality. Whether you have an epic fantasy or a purple-prose romance or urban slang, I will carefully fit my revisions into the tone you have already established.

Copyediting & Proofreading*: Although copyediting (CE) and proofreading (PR) are two different things, I often do them simultaneously. PR deals strictly with typos, mechanical errors (punctuation, capitalization, etc.) and very light formatting issues (e.g., a carriage return in the middle of a paragraph). CE deals not only with grammatical correctness but also those issues you’ll find in a style manual, like which numbers to spell out or whether to abbreviate “United States” as “U.S.” or “US”. It’ll also explain why we normally put end punctuation inside quotation marks and why it’s correct that I didn’t in the last sentence.

For book editing, I use the Chicago Manual of Style. If your project requires a different style manual or an in-house style guide, however, I can work with that.

When I bundle CE and PR, I usually do them both at once and send you the revisions for review. After you’ve done your thing, I make a final PR pass to catch errors that slipped through the first time or that you might have introduced while revising.

NOTE: I edit in American English only.

* As with most editing terms, "proofreading" is used to mean different things. Another way it is commonly used is to refer to the last check of a manuscript that's already gone to layout (usually in PDF). I don't generally perform this service.