This week I’m joined by two–that’s right, two–fabulous editors and writers of Networking for Freelance Editors, Brittany Dowdle and Linda Ruggeri. Brittany and Linda share how they picked the editors who worked on their book, the philosophy that drove all their editing decisions, and some really solid advice for how to vet editors if you’re not already in the editing community. Plus, Linda and Ariel talk drool-worthy marinade recipes.
Also be on the lookout for the second part of our conversation in Episode 31, when we discuss the importance of accessibility and give shoutouts in our Hot & Wholesome Gossip Corner!
Music: Harlequin by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3858-harlequin
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Show Notes:
Brittany: www.wordcat-editorial.com/@meowdle (IG)/https://www.linkedin.com/in/bdowdle/;
Linda: https://www.theinsightfuleditor.com/@lindaruggerieditor (IG)/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/linda-ruggeri-editor/@LindaRuggeri (Twitter)
Networking for Freelance Editors: Practical Strategies for Networking Success
www.networkingforeditors.com
Google Ngram Viewer: https://books.google.com/ngrams
Madeleine Vasaly, editor/proofreader: https://www.madeleinevasaly.com/
Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA): https://www.the-efa.org/
Professional Editors Network: https://pensite.org/
ACES: https://aceseditors.org/
Northwest Editors Guild: https://www.edsguild.org/
Patricia Collins: http://www.keen-eye-copyediting.com/about/
Marinade recipe: olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, lemon pepper, salt, pepper, honey. Linda recommends adding grated ginger and pineapple juice or brown sugar.
Maillard reaction
Transcript:
Ariel: Hi there and welcome to Edit Your Darlings, a podcast that tries to take the sting out of editing by talking with darling authors about their experiences.
I’m Ariel Anderson, and today is a very special episode because I’m joined by not one but two rockstar editors, Brittany Dowdle and Linda Ruggeri.
A freelance editor with over ten years’ experience in the publishing industry, Brittany is the owner of Word Cat Editorial Services, a founding member of the Editorial Freelancers Association’s Diversity Initiative (huge round of applause for that work!), and she helped design the Welcome Program, acting as its codirector in 2019 and 2020.
And Linda is a Latinx freelance nonfiction editor, writer, and authenticity reader in Spanish and Italian (hoo!), and she’s the owner of The Insightful Editor. Linda runs the Mentorship Program for the Professional Editors Network (PEN) as well as the Welcome Program for the EFA.
Together, they recently published Networking for Freelance Editors: Practical Strategies for Networking Success. This helpful workbook is geared toward any freelancer in the publishing industry, from dev editors to illustrators and everyone in between, and I’m thrilled to get a peek behind the curtain for how it was written! So Thank you so much for making time to talk with me, you fabulous, fabulous editors!
Linda: Thank you so much for having us.
Brittany: Yes, thank you for having us. We're so excited to be here.
Ariel: And for listeners following along at home, the first voice you heard was Linda, and the second was Brittany. The editing process for networking for freelance editors: it had to have been really straightforward, right? Because y'all already had a good handle on what the process looks like to begin with.
Brittany: You know, you're right. And this is Brittany speaking. As editors, we have a really good handle on the editing process and what is most important at each stage. So that aspect of editing our book was pretty straightforward. And in the early stages, you know, we focused on content and structural editing. And in the later stages, we focused on copy editing and proofreading, which is, you know, more mechanical and objective. But this was kind of a unique situation because the audience for our book is editors.
Ariel: Hello.
Brittany: That made things a bit stressful because not only did we want to communicate our message to our readers, but we wanted to keep our readers from getting sidetracked over grammatical quibbles or legitimate but idiosyncratic style choices that we sometimes all like make. We have examples.
Ariel: Yeah, well, editors can be such a judgy, judgy bunch.
Brittany: Yeah, we all have our own way of doing things. So even though we follow a style guide, we still have our own sort of editorial pet peeves that we try not to be you know, peevers, but still.
Ariel: Do you know what some of those examples were?
Brittany: Sure. So one example is, I wanted to use overwhelm as a noun as in, “don't let overwhelm keep you from venturing out of your comfort zone.” Yeah, and it sounds fine, right? In looking at the Ngram Viewer on Google, I saw that that's used as a noun quite frequently today, but in talking it over with our proofreader who we have absolute trust in, Madeleine Vasaly.
Ariel: Ooh, I love Madeleine!
Brittany: I know she's so wonderful and just amazing to work with. But in talking with her, I kind of had to face—because overwhelm was the word I wanted to use, and I had to face the fact that some editors might have a gut reaction dislike for that usage. So even though like I could prove that overwhelm has been used as a noun since at least 1742, according to my 10-pound OED (Oxford English Dictionary), so even though I knew that and it kind of annoyed me to have to change it, I knew it was much more important for us to be able to connect with our readers to have that foundation of trust.
And so for that reason, I went ahead and made the change. And so it was… I felt good about it afterwards, because I knew that I was just kind of holding on to that of my own little editorial crankiness.
Ariel: Ooh, it’s a darling!
Brittany: It is a darling, it is absolutely a darling, and I did not want to let it go! But Madeleine was wonderful about, you know, focusing on what the reader needed, on what the book needed, was always very considerate of our feelings as authors and was like, “Okay, it's your choice. I'm gonna let you make the choice,” so I was like, just like, okay, fine!
And I think Linda… Linda had some as well.
Linda: Yeah, I'm not really a stickler for holding on to words most of the time, but I had a similar issue because we were following the Chicago Manual of Style, you know, or “CMOS” as we refer to it in the editing world. And this is a style guide, you know, for American English, and it's one of the most widely used and respected style guides in the US. So in Chicago, basically, Chicago tends to favor down style or lowercasing words instead of capitalizing them. And for example—and this is really, I think, egocentric—but my business name is The Insightful Editor with the word “the” capitalized, but having my company name with the “the” capitalized and embedded in another sentence is a big no-no if you're following Chicago style, but I wanted it capitalized because that's my business name.
And you know, we went back and forth over this, and I was not budging until Brittany did her utmost best to let me see it from very different perspectives. And I basically had to make a choice, you know, do I go against the rules and keep a style that I personally prefer, or do I make a change so that nothing stops our readers—who happen to be experts at Chicago style— you know, from trusting our author voice and my author voice?
So you know, as every editor and writer knows, much of editing is subjective, and an important part of editing is consistently applying style conventions while respecting the author's voice and preferences. So our goal was to keep, you know, being focused on our target audience and do everything we could to make the content of our message accessible. So, in the end, I went against my ego on this one and I did accept the CMOS suggestion.
Ariel: Hmm, I… I would have kept my T. But maybe I’m a rebel.
Linda: I know what you mean, and I feel you, and I'm right there with you in heart, believe me. Brittany: Linda was really great because I had mentioned it and then Madeleine had mentioned it, and Linda stood fast and then we kind of revisited it and then you know, but it was just one of those things.
On the one hand, you know, as a as a writer, you know, what you're comfortable with, you know your style, your voice and your preferences. And there are times that it's just hard to let that go but for us with our audience being editors, we did we didn't want to make it difficult for them to kind of get immersed in our book. Because as an editor, you know, you're reading something you just can't help but notice, “there was no hyphen there. There should have been a hyphen there,” and then you lose the whole focus on the message of the book. So.
Ariel: Yeah. It's interesting to me that it got to Madeleine after you had already mentioned it, so it wasn't in a stylesheet for her to reference.
Brittany: Was it in our—
Linda: No, and I think even if it’d been in the stylesheet, I would have been like “eff that, going with my business name!” because that's my business name. But in the end of the word, it’s three letters. How long can you debate on something that's three letters long, you know, there's… you have to recognize as a professional editor or a professional writer, when it's time to, you know, let go and move on, or why am I fighting this to the very end? So yeah.
Ariel: On your gravestone, it'll say “The is capitalized.”
Linda: Yes.
Ariel: So you each did your own self-editing and then passed it back and forth to each other for critique, and then worked with freelancers for beta reading, dev editing and copy edits and proofs. So how did you find those people that you hired?
Right, we've already talked about Madeleine and how much we love her. I know her through the EFA. But it's particularly interesting to me because I do meet a lot of editors, and I'm still really picky about who would I recommend if I'm not available for my clients. So how do you choose people you trust versus people you know, when we're all in this vast sea of talent?
Brittany: Yeah, that's, that's a really good question. And I think that for us, it was a little bit of a different situation because Linda and I are professional editors, and we know a lot of editors. We work with editors on volunteer work. On client projects. So we kind of went into our project having a feeling for who we wanted to work with just based on our experience with people and, you know, who would be a good fit for our project and for kind of our own idiosyncrasies. Who would balance us out, in a way.
So that was kind of easier, but if you're a writer who hasn't worked with an editor before, I think that it might be more challenging to figure out, you know, who has the skills to help you, who's going to be a good fit ,and you know, in that case, our advice would be to, first of all, do research on the kind of editing that you need, because editors have different specialties. And it's really important to understand where you are in the editing process and what you need and who is going to be qualified to bring that expertise, right at that time.
Email with them, talk with them, you can ask for a sample edit, you know, they’ll give you two or three pages. And if you if you're able to get references, go ahead and talk with the references. I think that can be really illuminating and kind of like, as Linda might have mentioned, it will give you some insight into how they work. So just take the time you need to make the decision.
Something that we did even though these are editors that we know really well and completely trust: you should always work with a contract. That's just part of being professional and having that business relationship. Another thing that you can do is to consider limiting your commitments to milestones. So if you just make contact with an editor and you think they might be a good fit, but you're not entirely sure. Let's say you wanted to do coaching, maybe just sign on for four coaching sessions, and then that way, you're not committed to months and months worth of work or to a huge project, and you can reassess where you're at once that time is over.
Linda: Can I totally jump in here and add to what you just said, Brittany? This thing about having a contract I think is essential. I think just hiring an editor if you've never hired an editor before is a scary process. So having a proposal in place of what services you're going to be getting and then turning that into a contract, a signed contract by both parties, is important. But also make sure—this doesn't have to be in the contract maybe—but make sure to ask that editor, What services are not included? What are you not going to be getting?
Because I think sometimes, even though it's all laid out of what you are going to be getting, the stuff that's not going to be there—for example, fact-checking, permissions, you know, are… is the editor going to be editing your front matter, the back matter, the captions of your photographs, if you have them. It's important to know, as a writer, what your expectations are going to be and what you're not going to be getting so that you're aware of that or it might be something that you want to add to that editing package.
Ariel: Yeah, like for the most part, if I'm working with independent authors, I find that a lot of independent authors don't want to do the cleanup round that's involved in copy editing, even though I love doing cleanup and I think that it's in their best interest. A lot of independent authors want to take it in a different direction or do their own legwork to save money. And so I'll specify in my contract whether or not that round is included. You know, proofreading rounds after copy editing are under a separate agreement. Yeah.
Linda: Absolutely. That's a really great point.
Brittany: So just the last thing I would say on choosing your editor is to look for an editor who lifts you up and encourages you but who also pushes you to do your best work. Because editing is about understanding nuance, and balancing it with the need for precision and consistency. So you always want an editor who you feel like they're on your team, but they can put themselves in the reader’s place and give you solution-oriented feedback. So you're kind of hiring somebody could be on both teams, on both sides. And that's what a good editor should do for you.
Ariel: Yeah, I hear often from writers on here that they don't want the solutions. It might be helpful for them, but what they really want is actionable feedback, so they know exactly what they need to do with the comment that we've left for them, but they can figure out on their own how to do it.
Brittany: Yeah, one of the things that I tried to do is to explain what the issue is and how it can be fixed, but then I oftentimes what I'll do is I'll give them a sample like, “this is one way you could fix this problem.” But I always say this is just an example of how you can go about it. Your version is going to be so much better than mine because you are the author, it's your voice. So I find just giving those kinds of examples can help people understand how to put it into practice, but you always want to bring it back to the author because it really is, it's their work, their creation.
Ariel: Yeah, so the query becomes “How about this substitution or something similar?”
Brittany: Right.
Ariel: Yeah. And then, like, literally, you already knew the people? Did you search the EFA website? How did you know that they were the people?
Linda: So this is Linda speaking. We were kind of lucky because we move around in circles of editors so much, you know, with different organizations, and we're constantly meeting editors through the volunteer work that we do and the organizations that we support. So I kind of have that…that special gift box list of, you know, as I meet people, what box I put them in and, you know, what kind of project I'd like to give them in the future if I can, if I can pass on work to them. So I have met, you know, and literally been blown away by some of these editors that worked on our book. Like we talked about Madeleine and Kelly and some of the other editors. We knew when the time came to get this book, you know, edited who would be our top, you know, 10 choices to work with, and we were also really lucky that we were able to get all of them. With that though, let me preface this by saying that because we're editors, we know the cost of editing as well. And we had budgeted for that and we knew what it was going to cost to be able to bring some of these editors on board. So that is kind of a caveat.
We knew that by writing this kind of book and working on it for so long. It took us about a year, Brittany? I believe to write this book.
Brittany: A bit over a year.
Linda: Yeah, a bit over a year.
Ariel: Oh, just a year, ya know!
Linda: But we knew that we were just going to be too close to the material to see certain things, especially at the proofreading stage. There comes a point where everything looks the same, I think, and everything looks perfect to you. So you need to bring somebody else in who's never seen it before. And we wanted to have editors that could offer us a fresh perspective on our work and, you know, who could tell us exactly what was working, what wasn't working, or what could be improved and make it better. So, though we did hire editors for our manuscript, and they came, you know, some from EFA, some came from the Professional Editors Network, some came from ACES. So we had a lot of different feedback and a lot of comments to work through because of the editors that we've met along the way.
And I just want to clarify, too, for the writers in your audience that all of these organizations have free directories that any writer can access and search for their next editor. So if they're not familiar with them, I think Ariel you're probably going to have it in the show notes. But we also have it on our website, networking for editors calm, there's a helpful links page and these organizations are listed there with direct links.
Ariel: Yeah, just thinking as writer though… I am a member of the Northwest Editors Guild and we have a huge directory, and, you know, you can narrow it down by the type of editing that they do, and the genres that they're interested in, but you still get a long list, and it would be kind of overwhelming to try to vet 20 editors you've never talked to. And here I am, I know some really brilliant editors and unless I've worked with them, or have a client in common with them, so I know the rigor that they've gone through, I still wouldn't know who to trust without looking at a sample.
Linda: What you're saying makes absolute sense. For me—and I do this as a writer and as an editor—I will vet my clients. So for me the vetting process, I do this thing called triangulation where I will look for them online on three different places. So if it's an editor I want to hire and I just have their name, I'm going to look for them on Facebook. I'm probably going to see if they have an Instagram account and what they're posting. What helps, you know, what's their content like, their spelling? Are they using rules? You know, do they post on Twitter? What are they commenting on?
It seems maybe stalkerish, I guess, but I want to know, you know, who are the potential people I'm going to be involved with for this very long time and for the amount of money I'm going to be spending, so I think that's fair game and it's a different way of doing research and vetting the people that you're going to work with.
Ariel: Yeah, one of the ladies in one of my early mastermind groups, Patricia Collins, called it gentle professional stalking.
Linda: Exactly. Absolutely.
Ariel: And also, please don't judge me by my spelling on Twitter. There's not an edit button!
Linda: We know, we know.
Brittany: And you know, another thing in regard to that, having your social media presence is one thing and, like you said, especially when you get on social media, it’s hard to make sure autocorrect takes over, and you'll end up talking about like an octopus when you meant to be talking about something normal.
But the other thing that you can do as a writer is you can look at the editor’s website, if they have, you know, blog posts, or if they have downloadable booklets, things like that, and just kind of get a feel for how does it seem to you as a reader. Are you just as a reader picking up on things?
And then if you're an editor hoping to work with more editors, you know, volunteering is a great way to get your name out there, meet people, and then also let people see the quality of your work. So I know that goes up into networking. I'm sorry, that's the topic of our book and I tend to just stray over into that, so go ahead.
Ariel: No, no! Yeah, so I'm just going to take this opportunity to say that if you're a member of the Northwest Editors Guild, then you should look at the mentoring program as a way to volunteer I highly recommend it.
Okay. Back on topic. So once you had your team all set, how did you decide which feedback to take and what to stet? Especially because you already knew these editors, did you worry about hurting their feelings, and since there's two of you, who got the final say on all those decisions, big and small?
Linda: It all goes back to trust. And I have to tell you that before our editors even saw the manuscript, Brittany was editing me and I was editing Brittany throughout that whole first year so.
Ariel: And you’re still friends!
Linda: And, oh, more than ever, more than ever. You know, when Brittany is giving me an edit or making a comment, and Brittany, I have to reveal, has the most—you know, she's known me for a while now—but she has the most delicate way of prefacing things and I'm always more like, just tell me. Just tell me does it work? Does it not work? Just cut it out? You know, cut it, tell me if you don't, if I don't need to have it there and you want to take it out, just take it out. You don't have to like, advise and give me… you know, walk me through the edit. Just do it.
And she's always very careful in how she prefaces things to me because she never wants to hurt my feelings.
So that goes back to you know what I was mentioning about trust. You have to trust the spirit—and we did—in which the edits were being offered. And you'd have to trust the skill of the person who's offering them. When you're getting edited, it's the time for you to let go absolutely, just really let go, and let the editor you've hired do the work.
Brittany: One of the things, and we remind each other quite often, is that we're focusing on our readers. We're holding ourselves accountable to them. So it became pretty dynamic process because regardless of which of us had written a passage or who was content editing it or whatever, we were really mindful to let our personal preferences take a backseat to this idea of what does the reader need to know here? What's the best way to present this information so they can take it in and really use it? We would always come back to, okay, at this point in the book, what do we want the reader focusing on?
Instead of it being, you know, one of us having the final call, it was more like an invisible reader who had the final call in a way.
Ariel: I really want this invisible reader to not be invisible. I kind of want it to be like a teddy bear or a pet rock or a leaf.
Brittany: We would just have this idea of, okay, we're going to really upset this imaginary editor if we do this, and we don't want to get them sidetracked. So we want to be a little more faithful to Chicago than perhaps we feel is necessary.
Linda: I don't know how invisible that silent editor or invisible editor was or how visible it was at times as well, because I think we did have some people in mind that we knew we were going to get scrutinized, you know, top to bottom, and that was fine. But what I did want to add is that when we started writing this book, and one of the things that I advise the writers that I'm writing with or that I ask is, “What is the purpose of this book and what does success mean to you?”
And that was kind of our mantra going through the book in terms of cutting. Does this serve the purpose of the book that we set out with at the beginning, and that we agreed upon? And everything gets measured, you know, against that bar. And if it doesn't, you know, whether it be content related, rule related, style related, voice related…
You know, I have a tendency of using a lot of humor in what I write, and I love it, but it doesn't register with everybody the same way. And so I knew that that could become a distraction. So the first draft, I think, had all these things that were very funny to me, that I enjoyed. But then, you know, the first time they were funny, the second time I read them, they were still funny, the third time, maybe not so much in the fourth time, I realized I was the only one maybe laughing at that, so…
Ariel: Yeah, and Linda’s like, “They were never funny to begin with!”
Linda: They were never funny to begin with, exactly! And so having that goal of what we were trying to accomplish with this book, and what success meant to us, really helped us make some of the big editorial decisions, you know, at the developmental editing stage, at least.
Brittany: Yeah, definitely. Kind of coming back to your question: in deciding which feedback to take and what to stet, the bottom line for us was always audience over ego, just always.
Ariel: And so did you end up taking more of the feedback than stetting? Y
Brittany: Yes, we definitely took in a lot of feedback. And we were able to get all these wonderful perspectives that didn't occur to us on our first efforts. And so we just were like little sponges kind of hungry to take in all the feedback, and then sort of sifting it through our vision for what the book needed to be and what we were trying to accomplish with it.
The more mechanical edits like, you know, grammar and punctuation, for the most part, our own preference was pretty close to Chicago style. So anytime Madeleine caught something that we had missed, we're always happy for the catch.
But it wasn't really aside from, you know, the little things like capitalizing the or using overwhelm as a noun. There wasn't a lot that we really took a hard stance against Chicago, because I think as a copy editor, Chicago becomes ingrained. It's not a moral decision, but you still default to it.
That said, it's always okay to weigh your editors’ feedback and ask for clarification or for their reasons for making changes. It's fine to take, especially on a content level, to take what resonates with you and leave what doesn't. That's what we advise our own clients to do. Because as editors, we don't ever want to change someone's message or change their voice. So you have to really respect that.
But when it comes to things like punctuation and grammar, there are times when, you know, you may feel strongly about the serial comma, but the publisher you're working with that doesn’t, and, you know, they don't want to use it. It's fine for you to ask your editor why they made a certain decision and have a conversation about it. They always should be making corrections based on kind of the ground rules that you have in your style sheet, your style guide, or house style, and not making corrections based on just how they would have written something. So for every correction, there should be a good reason. And your editor should be able to explain it to you. And then if you want to reject it at that point, that's up to you. But at least you're doing it understanding the situation and being educated on it.
Ariel: I think that a lot of authors who are approaching the copy edit stage do have that fear that their voice is going to be erased. That has happened all too often, especially in cases where there's like AAVE involved and the copy editor has no experience with it. Differences in culture.
Linda: No, and I see that a lot with people that go into traditional publishing, that there seems to be a lot more of, I don't want to say a hostile environment, but a more tense environment, because you're getting corrections that the publishing house is asking you to make, which might not be, you know, the same kind of corrections you would get if you're deciding to self-publish on your own.
So I do think we have a bad rap as editors, but no, two editors are the same. And there's, like Brittany was saying, there're very different types of editors for every kind of editing process in every genre. So it's important to know what kind of feedback you're getting and who it's coming from.
Ariel: Yeah, I love that comment, because I do change up my approach for how, quote unquote, strict I am with enforcing Chicago. With independent authors, I'm less strict—not sloppier, but less strict—because I think that self-publishing has that extra wiggle room for voice, whereas traditional publishing, you are beholden to the house style. Absolutely not.
Brittany: Yeah, I agree. I think that's one of the important things that, when someone decides to self-publish or indie publish, is that they do get to keep creative control, but then they also have more control even at that editing stage.
It can be a little bit frustrating sometimes when a publisher’s style is very rigid. And occasionally, you know, you'll have a style brief from a publisher that really hasn't been updated, to kind of what our current… what's currently happening in the industry, and in a way that really validates and listens to the author.
So it's great whenever you can work with, you know, an indie author, and you can support them, but at the same time, you know, educate them as to, you know, why it was done that way, previously, and then say, but, hey, you're kinda on the vanguard. You’re a creator, you're an artist, and you have the right to do things your own way, so long as it's serving your project, serving your goal.
Arie: Yeah.
Brittany: There are some things that if we solely relied on kind of traditional publishing, it would take longer for certain changes to really become implemented, whereas indie publishing is kind of pushing that forward. And I love that because it's letting everyone's voice be heard and be valued.
Ariel: Yeah!
Brittany: In a way that just traditional publishing isn't really set up to move that quickly and be agile in that way.
Ariel: I love it. It is 2022. And I'm still finding publishers who are using Chicago 16th edition, which doesn't allow for singular they, and I kind of want to punch them in the face. I'm not a violent person. But.
Linda: Can I also answer that question, by the way about, you know, did we take the feedback, or did we stet? Because I personally don't question most of the corrections that our copy editor or a proofreader is going to make. I'm way more interested in content corrections, I'm interested in voice, in flow, and am I delivering what I said I was gonna deliver. So in general, I don't care about why a comma or an em dash was added.
Ariel: Gasp!
Linda: Most of the time, I know why it's added, but I don't want to be bothered with the information. Some of these things were important to Brittany. So when she goes, you know, and edits things that I've written, I approve 95% of them. And the other 5% that I might not immediately, you know, accept, are things that I want to take time to ponder, that I want to try to see from her point of view, that I need to marinate in.
Because, you know, if she's noted them on the page, and she's made that correction, there's always a really good reason for it. In some instances—and very few of them, I have to add—I might choose to rewrite a line just to make sure it's clear, and that it's in my voice. If an editor changes your text, you're always you know, it's always okay to ask them why. It's never going to be, you know, a personal vendetta against your capitalization or you know, your commas.
But I, specifically, I don't want to waste time on going over every single edit with my editor, I'll just pick the things, you know, that matter to me. And I'll address those and then I'll just move on.
Ariel: Yeah, I am surprised at how seldom I get, because I put it at the end of every single editorial letter, you know, “Let me know if you have questions about my markup here. If you want me to clarify anything, I'm into it”—in, uh, more professional language. I almost never, almost never hear back. And the few times I do, they are the most brilliant questions! But you said, you need time to marinate in it. And so I wondered what your favorite marinade recipe is.
Linda: I need to space out. So I need to be out of my office, it'll usually be you know, I'm either reading another good book, or I go to read stuff that moves me usually. And that kind of sets the tone for me to process some of these edits. So it'll take me, you know, 24 hours to sit on something that I'm questioning. And then if not, I like to go for a walk or I like to sit out in, you know, my backyard under the tree and nature and just ponder, you know, what that means to me and what's… what's holding me back from accepting it. And usually, I would say most of the time, it has to do with me. It has nothing to do with the edit or with what was written on the page. And so, but it's a good process not to make decisions right on the spot if you're not prepared to.
Ariel: Mm, yes.
Brittany: When you asked that, I immediately was thinking actual food marinades, because Linda is an amazing cook. And I was like, I was ready for like Linda's secret go to marinade, because we're always talking, she's a wonderful cook and baker, and she does a lot of cookbook editing. So I was just like, okay, gotta get my pen out here what her secret top marinade is. Linda: Now that you bring that up, Brittany, I do do a lot of thinking while I cook dinner. Like when I cook dinner, I'll pour myself a glass of wine and I'm in the zone and I am cooking, my brain is working at a different level on different bandwidth. And I will be thinking about things and work things, and I find, you know, so much clarity in doing that. I meditate in the morning as well, but in the morning, I'm just trying not to think about anything, but when I'm meditating in the kitchen, preparing dinner, it's a whole other process that lets me have access to information or feelings that I'm not allowing myself to have access to when I'm sitting at my desk in front of a screen usually.
Ariel: My favorite marinade is olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, some lemon pepper, salt. Super simple, delicious, great on, like, chicken legs.
Linda: I’m gonna bring you up to the next level and recommend some grated ginger. Grated ginger, a little bit of pineapple juice if you have access to that or a little bit brown sugar, because the brown sugar, if you're doing any kind of roast or meats or potatoes or vegetables result the Maillard effect.
Ariel: Oh, I forgot the honey. It's the honey.
Linda: Perfect. Well, there you go.
Ariel: We had so much fun recording this episode, we decided to make it a two-parter! Oh my gosh! Tune in next week to hear the rest of Brittany and Linda’s editing journey for Networking for Freelance Editors, plus their answers to the questions I ask every author I talk to, and their shoutouts in the Hot and Wholesome Gossip Corner.
You can find these ladies on Twitter and in their website, and you’re gonna hear all about their handles next week, and I’ve also got them in our show notes. But you’re gonna want to tune in again, okay? Okay.
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