From the Editing Desk — July 2026
(Or, the Month My Own Book Came Back Marked Up and Four Other Manuscripts Kept Moving)
A monthly note on the real work — the book I am publishing, and the manuscripts I am helping other people finish. Client names and details stay private. What I can share is the shape of the work.
July had two spines running through it. One was my own book, which came back to me copy edited for the first time. The other was four other people's manuscripts, all moving at once.
I have been editing other people's work for years. Being edited myself is new. July was the first month both of those sat on the same desk, on the same days.
The book
Synchronicity in Grief went into production with Routledge on July 7, and by the 10th I had the full schedule: the copyedit out to me, corrections back, page proofs in August, and proof corrections plus an author-built index at the end of the month. If you have never published a book, this is the stage where the manuscript stops running on your clock and starts running on someone else's.
The copyedit was due on the 24th. It arrived on the 28th. I wrote about it while it was happening, because the waiting is part of the work and nobody tells you that either.
What came back: 31 author queries across roughly 102,500 words. I answered 22 of them in three days, and the last nine went back in the first days of August, four days ahead of the deadline. One of those queries caught a name I had read a thousand times and never once actually seen.
A copyedit is a gift, not a verdict. I knew that as an editor. In July I finally believed it as an author.
None of it is mine alone. It takes a village to raise a book — a copyeditor who read closely enough to ask thirty-one careful questions, a production team keeping eleven files in order, the scholars whose work the book rests on, and the participants who trusted me with their experiences. I am one small part of it.
The month's client work
Doctoral dissertations
A CIU candidate's first chapter went through all four phases of my process and came back to her two days early and under estimate. The hardest part of that job was not the prose. It was getting the file to travel between her computer and mine without the styles breaking — a problem that had blocked her for weeks and took a seven-page plain-language guide to solve. Round-trip file damage is one of the most common invisible obstacles in doctoral writing, and almost nobody teaches it.
A five-chapter organizational-leadership dissertation came aboard mid-month for a full edit. The first day went almost entirely into Word: 544 paragraphs restyled, 113 reference entries rescued from a heading style they should never have been carrying. The document looked formatted. It was not formatted. That distinction is invisible on the page and it is the one that decides whether a university's style office passes your file and releases your signature page so you can graduate on time.
A defended dissertation being prepared for its ProQuest submission started with a single test chapter, so the writer could see the work before committing to the whole of it. Nearly all of the changes were mechanical. The thing worth knowing here is the order of operations: your university's own template and policy govern approval, and the repository submission (often, ProQuest) is a separate step that comes after. Most candidates have it backwards, and it costs them weeks.
Coaching and writing support
A clinician I have worked with for a few years had an article turned down in July — not on quality, but because the issue was already full. We spent the rest of the month re-aiming the piece at a different venue in his professional association. He revised it himself; my part was the read and the go-ahead. A journal’s decline on capacity is not a verdict on the writing, and finding the right home for a piece is a craft skill, not luck. When a client is rejected I help them pivot rather than give up.
Editorial work
I am also on the editorial side of a special issue on grief for The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies. July was decision letters — four of them — plus a reusable letter template and a settled policy on how peer reviewers get contacted. Editorial management is mostly this: making an invisible process legible to the authors waiting inside it, and never promising anyone a publication date.
What the month taught me
I expected the two halves of July to compete with each other. They did, on the calendar. They did not in the work itself.
Answering a query about my own book and rescuing 113 reference entries in someone else's turn out to be the same act: a small, true fix, made by somebody who read the thing closely enough to notice. Nobody sees most of it. What the reader sees is a page that behaves.
That is the whole job, on either side of the desk. Small true fixes, made patiently, until the document is ready to be read.
The patience of publishing.
If you are working on something
If you are not sure whether your manuscript is ready for an editor, the free Are You Ready for Editing? quiz takes a few minutes and tells you plainly. If you already know it is ready, here is what editing with me looks like. I am always glad to read your file first and give you a real estimate, built from the document itself, before you commit to anything.
Warmly,
~Jennifer