Tara Moeller – Editing

…a copy editor to be specific, with 25+ years of experience working on construction specification and technical reporting projects for the Department of Defense (DoD). (Note: I did not work for the Department of War – I left BEFORE the name change.)

Having left my job at the DoD, I am now freelance editing – hence this lovely new website/blog.

I have also been editing fiction for almost as long, but only part-time. Some of the works I’ve edited have won awards for their authors (Tempie W. Wade, Pamela K. Kinney to name two). I like to think I helped them achieve that honor by helping them to refine their story. With their permission, I’ll be sharing some of the methods I use when editing their manuscripts. Follow along if you want more.

I can perform developmental editing, but I like to have a good repertoire with the author before I do that – or I need them to fully understand what a developmental edit is. I have had too many disagreements with an author about developmental stuff, so it is not a favorite type of edit for me. I don’t like confrontation; I’ve worked with authors who don’t like being told that their main character is a “Marie-Sue” or that they have a bog plot hole in their story arc. Other authors, of course, are absolutely lovely and appreciate being told the issues that I see in their manuscript.

Although, if I see something terrible wrong while performing a copy edit, I will provide that feedback to the author (usually in a comment). They can do what they want with that information.

I am also an expert user of Microsoft Word, and can format using custom styles that I have created. At some point I may make my templates available for purchase, but I don’t offer that quite yet.

I also offer ebook formatting using a couple of different applications that I have purchased. I use the formatted copy in Word (with all those styles I’ve made) to perform a lot of the work for me, then I just need to tweak it in the app itself. This works with varying degrees of success; Word updates can make the compatibility less than Ideal, and there ends up being a lot more “tweaking” to be done.

So, enough about me for right now. Follow along if you want to learn what life can be like as an editor or how editing can work.