editing

manuscript editing
(including formatting and proofreading)

I offer a editing service for fiction and other manuscripts. My charges for this service are: [to be determined].

Okay, here’s the deal: you can laugh at my singing, you can scoff at my sound engineering skills and you can turn your nose up at my writing. But if there is one thing I can do is edit. My “day job” principally involves 10 or so hours of writing and editing and I’ve been doing this full time for the last 10 years. My old fashioned education also means I have a fairly good grasp of English grammar. If you find mistaks on this website they're deliberately there to test you - okay?

Anyway, take it from me that no writer can “get it completely right” by him or herself. No matter how objective you might be, you will miss errors and ignore stylistic issues: the closer you are to particular material, the more your eye skips over it uncritically. Editing issues range from the “straightforward” (eg. typographical, grammatical and spelling mistakes and the excessive repetition of certain words in close proximity), to the “structural” (eg. line spacing, margins, headings and indexes and how and when to paragraph), to the “stylistic” (eg. “show, don’t tell”, avoiding clichés and what my mate Andrew Burke (the writer and lecturer) calls “pathetic absurdities” — ie. inappropriate or nonsensical metaphors and similes). I am never brutal with my editing, but always honest and constructive. Remember that you, as the writer, don’t have to accept my suggestions, but they may give you food for thought.

I am presently editing work for Andrew Burke and my brother Nenad who has written an excellent motorcycle riding manual.