Needs Some Little Editing [ILLU]

Last week, I finished editing a friend's book project that will be released next month.  As I was talking to my wife about it, I was explaining how much I enjoy that task.  Spotting grammatical errors and inconsistencies, throwing out ideas to help an author polish their text, or arguing about capitalization in sub-headings, all of it is just plain fun for me.

While this sounds mind-numbing to everyone else in the world, I've found that I enjoy getting to see texts in their unfinished form and offer some help to move things along.  Maybe that's the teacher in me.  By the time my students get to fifth grade, they have definite personalities and learning styles, so I'm not building foundations.  Yet they aren't the finished versions of themselves that later teachers get to see.  I'm somewhere in the middle of their educational spectrum and get to introduce new ideas, correct misconceptions, and if I'm lucky, get them to think in new ways.  In a much smaller sense, that's what I feel like I'm doing when I am editing.

Somewhere along the line, I've transitioned from more of a Sherlockian writer to a Sherlockian editor.  (Make no mistake, Charles Prepolec has the Twitter handle @sherlockeditor and is the undisputed king of this.)  I wrote a pastiche six years ago and contribute articles to journals and anthologies, but think I do more editing at this point than writing.  Just off the top of my head, I am in the throes of editing an anthology to be released in January, I co-edited The Monstrum Opus of Sherlock Holmes and The Finest Assorted Collection books, edited The Rise and Fall of an Eighties Sherlockian, am associate editor of two newsletters, Timelines and Sherlock's Spotlight Gazette, and have gladly looked over numerous articles for friends before submission.

So why do you care about this?  Well, I want to do more.  Do you have a project that needs a different set of eyes on it?  Aren't sure if the possessive form of "Holmes" should have an "s" after the apostrophe? Have you looked at that draft so many times you can't see what you're missing?  Send it my way.  Articles, short stories, research, non-fiction, I'm interested.  (Sorry, no long form pastiche, though.)  

I'm here to help and I like to help.  Let's get more Sherlockian writing out to the world!