Thoughtful editing starts with understanding the story you’re trying to tell.

Growing up, I was always surrounded by stories. From family tales passed down from generation to generation, playground banter with friends, and nights spent with my face buried in the latest Goosebumps book I picked up at the Scholastic Book Fair, reading shaped who I am.

I just love how powerful stories can be: how they can evoke all kinds of emotions, how they can transport you through time and space, how they can let you live a myriad of experiences, and, most importantly, how they weave us into the larger tapestry of the human condition.

I came to editing the long way around: through an English degree, a high school classroom, a stint in corporate America, and my own unfinished drafts.

As an English major, I learned to read like a student of the craft, not just following the plot but noticing how a voice is built, how a chapter earns its ending, how a character’s choice lands or doesn’t. Then I spent years teaching high school English, watching teenagers engage with literature and discovering that the right story at the right moment can change how a young reader sees themselves and the world. That never stopped feeling like a small miracle. My time in the corporate world revolved around performance metrics, data, and audits; this taught me how to read like an auditor: everything has to reconcile, and when it doesn’t, you dig until you find out why.

Somewhere along the way I started writing fiction and other pieces of my own, and that’s what taught me the other half of the work: what it feels like to live inside a draft, to lose all perspective on pages you’ve read a hundred times, to hand your private imagined world to another person and hope they treat it gently. I beta-read for other writers now, partly to sharpen my editorial eye, but mostly because I remember what that vulnerability feels like from the inside.

That’s why I do this. I edit because I believe every manuscript is trying to become something specific — a particular emotional experience for a particular reader — and that the editor’s job is to help the author see their own story clearly enough to get it there. Not to rewrite it in my voice. Not to sand down what makes it strange and particular. To understand the intention, protect what’s working, and name what’s in the way.

If you’ve ever finished a book and sat quietly for a while before you could pick up another one, that’s the feeling I’m trying to help authors create. The craft is learnable: structure, pacing, character arcs, the thousand small decisions that make a story land. My work is helping you make those decisions with clear eyes, so the story becomes more fully itself.