the bare essentials with an editing bear
BEAR Essentials Editing
editing portfolio
Notable Projects
The Varian Pike Series
by Jack DeWitt
Crime and noir writer Jack DeWitt is an established poet and essayist, but he came to me with his first novel series about P.I. Varian Pike. The first novel in the series, Delicious Little Traitor, had been published by a small press that went under, so he wanted to self-publish it and the previously unpublished second and third novels on Amazon.
Delicious Little Traitor had been edited by the small press already, but it was full of errors. I provided copyediting that fixed the formatting, the errors in grammar and punctuation, and provided copyediting for the second and third books to get them ready for publishing.
Taking a manuscript that had been neglected and treated as "good enough" by its first publisher and polishing it to a level that DeWitt deserved for his publication is something that I take a lot of pride in.
The Harrietta Lee Series
by Stephanie Ahn
Stephanie had already written the first book of the Harrietta Lee series and self-published it on Amazon. She came to me because she had never drafted anything as long as Bloodbath, which came in around twice as long as Deadline, book one; she was nervous and unfamiliar with how working with an editor would go.
I provided developmental editing for both books, identifying points in the plot that needed clarifying and explaining why I loved what Stephanie had written already, always detailing my reasoning based on my years of literary analysis. When I did the copyedits, I suggested a few tweaks to the writing, always keeping in mind Stephanie's writing style and especially Harry's unique, strong voice.