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The Short Version:

The Long Version:

After graduation, I was hired to be a reference librarian at the Dayton and Montgomery County (Ohio) Public Library. There, my activities focused on researching business- and science-based problems and questions and on writing and editing a monthly annotated book review newsletter of new titles in those subject areas.

In the late 1980s, I left the DMCPL and became a staff researcher and the publications director for the Montgomery County Historical Society in Dayton. There, I was responsible for helping to research, write, and produce brochures, exhibit guides, and a variety of materials that benefited and promoted membership with the society.

During this time, I also started my first business: Freelance Library Services. FLS enabled me to make my skills as a librarian and researcher available to individuals, small businesses, nonprofit agencies, and government programs that needed them. My clients were located throughout the Dayton-Columbus-Cincinnati corridor.

In 1992, I moved south and accepted a position as a general editor with the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, North Carolina. My duties in that position included helping to research and coordinate the production of many different types of publications, from simple tri-fold brochures and promotional materials to lesson plans, audiovisual scripts, and classroom discussion guides to multi-page exhibition study guides and an eight-page tabloid newsletter.

Less than three years later, I was hired to be project editor, text editor, and design editor of Tar Heel Junior Historian magazine. Produced by the NCMOH, THJH is a history magazine for the Tar Heel Junior Historian Association, a free “club” of about 9,000 schoolchildren from all across North Carolina. My work with this publication revolved around researching and ghostwriting or fact-checking and rewriting the contributions for each topical issue.

Since most of the contributors were subject specialists, analysts, and professors, I often had to work with them to review, edit, and revise their material so it could be read and understood by the magazine’s audience. As a result of working with them, I discovered that I enjoyed planning and coordinating projects from conception to publication; I grew to find fulfillment in helping inexperienced writers to outline, draft, and revise their manuscripts; and I found satisfaction in redirecting content, language, and structure toward school-aged readers and general audiences.

And so, I began my second business, which has come to be known as “the-freelance-editor,” to help authors and writers to reach their audiences, to get their ideas into the heads of listeners and readers, to ensure that their messages are understood.

• plan and coordinate projects from conception to publication;
• outline, draft, and revise their ideas into manuscripts;
redirect their content, language, and structure toward school-aged readers and general audiences.