July Update: Endings Come With New Beginnings

So, I've been busy, but I'm back!

As a few of you have noticed, my online activity has decreased overall since roughly February/March; I should have expected it, but I didn't realize how demanding my final undergraduate semester would be. I pulled more all-nighters in that one semester than I had for my entire first three years of college. It was rough, to say the least.

But I plowed through it.

After four long years, I earned my Bachelor of Arts in English in both Rhetoric & Professional Writing AND Creative Writing Hybrid Forms. Magna Cum Laude honors, too. Since I was nominated by English faculty to be an Arts & Sciences Marshal, I was lucky enough to wear red rather than black! I also got to sit in the front row.

It was a day I'll never forget.

Most college graduates tend to take time off, celebrate a little, once they finally finish. Immediately following graduation, however, more work began. Two editing projects, to be precise.

The week of graduation, I started developmental edits on Danielle Koste's next book, What the Flower Says of Death. In late June, after she applied my suggested edits, I conducted line edits. This past week, I proofread the book one last time before sending it off into the wild (a.k.a beta readers). You can pre-order signed copies of What the Flower Says of Death now, and I've included the blurb below:

​Violet Holt has already met Death once. 

After a failed suicide attempt, she finds herself dumped by her callous mother on the doorstep of her family’s desolate oceanside estate. With only the company of her estranged grandmother, comatose grandfather, and the monsters in her head, at least there was no one to interfere with her plans to try again on her eighteenth birthday.

No one, except maybe Jack: a skeleton of a boy who says he’s there to rake her grandmother’s leaves, yet seems more experienced at stalking than grounds-keeping. She knows he’s keeping a secret behind his gentle smiles and aloofness, but it’s difficult for Violet to be put off by his untimely thin-air appearances when figuring out the mystery of his true identity makes for such a good distraction. 

Violet’s trauma is deeper than the wound on her wrist though, and it cannot be simply whisked away in a whirlwind of guessing games and pleasant gestures. She struggles to reconnect with her grandmother, find forgiveness for her mother, and closure with her grandfather’s dire condition, all while battling the strain of it all on her family. Even with a flicker of something hopeful blossoming within herself, Violet knows her birthday plans must be inevitable. 

Death wouldn’t be there for her if it wasn’t. 

I'm absolutely bias, so I love the book. It also challenged me as an editor to remain emotionally distant due to the content and themes; it's easy to identify with Violet as a reader. 

​The cover reveal is on July 31st, but as editor, I may have gotten a glimpse of it. It may be absolutely gorgeous. Possibly. So, be on the lookout for that!

I enjoyed working on another one of Danielle's books these last few months, and I'm thrilled to be able to work on her next novels as well. As I've expressed to her on multiple occasions, editing her writing makes me a better writer. It's truly an honor. She was also kind enough to work with my schedule as well, because her book was not the only one I have edited so far this year.

Some backstory: my final course for my Rhetoric & Professional Writing major at the University of Cincinnati was a Rhetoric & Professional Writing Capstone. While my Creative Writing Hybrid Forms Capstone included only undergraduate students, my Rhetoric Capstone included undergraduate and graduate students. I ended up working with mixed group of students to complete a client project (creating a website, some civil war panels, a few articles, and so forth) but I became close with our lovely group leader.

She ended up inviting me to work with her on a nonfiction book project. 

Aside from my education and personal dabbling in nonfiction, I never had a professional opportunity to work on a nonfiction piece. Naturally, I couldn't pass it up. 

The untitled book, now planned to be called "They Call Me Nemo," is a hybrid memoir. The story is told in three ways; chapters detail his life story until the day he went to prison, letters display his daily life while incarcerated, and artwork depict his attempt to stay connected with his loved ones. 

This project was both hands-on and hands-off. Our client, the author's mother, gave us the handwritten "draft." I put the quotes around draft because the content was more than 250,000 words; at the onset, this was not your typical draft for a nonfiction book. So, after transcribing the author's life story before and during prison, my partner and I constructed the 96,000+ word book (I suggested a braided structure similar to Anne Carson's lovely book ​Nox) before lightly editing it based off of our client's wishes. We also drafted the mother a proposal and query letter so her son could begin to research agents/publishers in the hopes of pursuing publication.

I can't even begin to express the journey my partner and I had. There were many late nights filled with the never-ending tap of our keyboards as we transcribed this man's path towards prison, and eventually, his experiences within prison. 

As someone with a previously incarcerated family member, I had a personal interest in this man's prison stay. Some of the daily letters were quite revealing, and I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to work with my new friend on this project.

Actually, I feel immensely grateful overall to have worked on a fiction and nonfiction project directly after graduating with my B.A. in English. I'm so fortunate to have these new experiences under my belt at my age, and more than that, to be allowed to work on these personal pieces to begin with.

Hopefully, it's only the start.