Don’t Hire an Editor Like the Editor I Was Back Then

By Lillian Yates Duggan

Back then was about ten years ago. I was a mother of two squeezing in freelance editing work while my kids were at school. My editing career had zigzagged all over the place—from computer books to textbooks to translation to whatever came my way—but copy editing had become my sweet spot. I felt safe putting periods inside quotation marks, changing “which” to “that.”

Yet I was desperate for more creative work, for projects I could sink my teeth into—to move into “...