From the Editing Desk — September 2026
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 are kept private; what I share here is what my work was like this month.
September was busy as it always is. Dissertation season arrived, and I was in full swing with it; my book opened for preorders, and for most of the month I had more open files on my desk than hours to work on them, and I put in 60 hours a week all month.
When I read back through my work journals for the month, nearly every problem I solved was the same problem in a different place: Teaching clients about files and version control. I will come back to that.
The book
Synchronicity in Grief (Routledge) is finished on my side. I wrote about sending the proofs and the index back in The Last Thing I Will Ever Do to This Book. On September 4 the production team confirmed that my corrections were in. On September 10 the typeset index came back for one last look, and I signed off on it. That was the last file.
Then the book started turning up in the world. Early in the month I found it was already available for pre-order at most major booksellers, ahead of the date I had been given, and Routledge’s own site followed on September 15. I wrote about that in the pre-order post. I also published The First Death, the second essay in my Meaning After Loss series, which is based on the book.
Lots of housekeeping followed. My homepage still showed the wrong release and preorder date. I was sure I had fixed it the week before, and I had not. I finally fixed that mid-month. I set up or updated my author pages on Amazon, ORCID, LinkedIn, and Google Scholar. On Goodreads, my book had been attached to another author who shares my name and already has fifty-one titles listed, and it took the better part of a week to separate us. If you have a common name and a book on the way, claim your author pages early!
It takes a village to raise a book. In September, the village was a production editor closing the last loop, booksellers I will never meet, and colleagues who shared the link the same day I sent it to them. The book releases October 19.
Dissertations and manuscripts
The organizational leadership dissertation that came aboard in August began on September 3. The author then paused the project to work on mentor directed revisions. We restarted mid-month from the author’s newest file, and the edit has moved steadily since: Word styles rebuilt chapter by chapter, tables repaired, the APA checklists, a line edit, and a reference list checked entry by entry against the published sources. Reference lists are where errors hide. A volume, an issue number, or a page range that does not match the published article is more common than most writers think, and when I cannot verify an entry I leave a query for the author rather than guess. That edit is now complete and sent back to the author, whose defense is coming up next week.
A second dissertation from the same program came aboard mid-month, and I offered the client 3 priced options and a schedule up front. The lesson from this project, one I've encountered several times before, happened on a Monday morning, when table formatting I had finished on Friday did not survive the trip to the author’s computer. It turned out we were running different builds of Word, and the two did not treat the tables the same way. If you are trading a file with anyone — an editor, a chair, a style office — find out whether you are all working in the same desktop version of Word before the formatting begins. That author is still writing the final chapter, so I edited the chapters that are complete and will take the last one when it is finished, and fold it into the draft, then edit it as well.
The defended dissertation I mentioned last month (the one edited by someone other than me but still in need of about 30 hours of editing work to pass the university's style check before graduation) came back from its university style review with comments numbering in the hundreds, and its author chose to answer them personally before she returns the file to me. Another important tech lesson here: a reviewer’s commented file is a record, not a working copy. In Word, a comment can disappear when the text it is attached to is deleted or rewritten. So keep the reviewer’s file untouched and revise only in a copy. I now pull every comment in a client's file into a spreadsheet the day a reviewed file arrives: the page, the passage, the comment, and who is responsible for fixing it.
And the dissertation I delivered early in August is waiting on its own university review before a final round. A round after review is normal because further revisions authors make can introduce new errors. I always remind clients to send the file back to me before they send it to their university for final review and upload to ProQuest, especially if it has changed post-defense.
Coaching
A new dissertation-to-publication client came aboard in the third week of the month: a scholar with a finished dissertation and several journal articles to write from it. Before our strategy call, I read the dissertation in full, mapped the possible articles, pulled recent examples from the target journals, and built a journal ladder. Each article needs its own question and its own reader, and the fastest way to see that is to outline someone else’s published article before you outline your own.
A clinician I have coached for a few years is on to a conference proposal. I've been guiding the author's writing, and I read closely and ask questions that help shape the conference proposal and abstract. His work is deeply meaningful and I am honored to help in these small ways.
Editorial work and course design
On the transpersonal psychology special issue on grief, revised manuscripts came back from their authors. I read each one in full and wrote an evaluation for another internal journal editor, three evaluations in September, and logged a new set of submissions. We also settled a small convention: in decision letters, editors and reviewers are “an editor” and “a reviewer,” never named. I completed two peer reviews for other journals as well. See my Web of Science profile for more on my peer review activity.
I have also been doing program research and course design for a university I partner with: reading how other doctoral programs structure the dissertation, then designing backward — outcomes first, then the evidence that shows a student has met them, then the modules. I enjoyed this work all month, coming up with creative and structured ways to help doctoral students produce a dissertation.
What September taught me
File version control is something to continue to teach clients and students.
The patience of publishing.
If you are somewhere in this process
If you are trying to work out whether your manuscript is ready for an editor, the free Are You Ready for Editing? quiz is a good place to start. You can also read about my editing services or book a free strategy call for an assessment of where your document actually is.
Last month’s update is here: From the Editing Desk — August 2026.
Warmly,
~Jennifer