Thurmond Editing

Woke up to a bid acceptance on a CE of a novella in translation. I’ve edited a lot of books by folks whose first language isn’t English but I don’t think I’ve ever edited an actual translation before. Exciting.

If authors don’t sell books they can’t hire editors and things are already dire out here for folks like me. Support your bookish community!

Finished one editing job and booked another on the same day. Have another one due at end of month but I’m taking a few hours to cleanse my mental palate before I switch gears. This is what I consider a slow month so I’m enjoying the breathing room while I have that opportunity.

Life on the Fringe: Tales From the Frontier by George Allen Miller -- cover art depicting a spaceship in an asteroid field

Out now! Life on the Fringe: Tales From the Frontier by George Allen Miller. Find it on Kindle Unlimited.

Booked another copyediting job to commence tomorrow. This one’s slower turnaround, but it’s a uniquely complex project. Looking forward to digging into it.

Life on the Fringe: tales from the frontier by George Allen Miller cover featuring a spaceship and asteroids

Demon Summer by JJ Buffet -- shirtless dudes and sexy vampire girls., '80s style

Of Fear and Fae -- the Goddess's Daughter book 2 by Ward Parker, featuring a young dark-haired Caucasian woman with a sword strapped to her back

UPCOMING CLIENT RELEASES:

FEBRUARY 23: Life on the Fringe: Tales from the Frontier by George Allen Miller (connected sci-fi short stories)
MARCH 25: Demon Summer by JJ Buffet (teen horror)
MARCH 31: Of Fear and Fae by Ward Parker (urban fantasy, series book 2)

#BookSky

Elizabeth was incredibly thorough and saved me from making numerous embarrassing errors (large and small). I would not hesitate to work with her in the future. -- Joe La Croix, Reedsy client

Elizabeth is a savvy editor and an eagle-eyed proofreader. She turns the work around quickly and meets all her deadlines. She "gets" my genre and what my book is trying to accomplish. Very pleasant to work with and highly recommended! -- Ward Parker, the Goddess's Daughter series

Two more satisfied customers!

owwww, called out

“Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right”: Meta emails unsealed

A photo of Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) when he was 19.

Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of millions of pirated books. But details around the torrenting were murky until yesterday, when Meta's unredacted emails were made public for the first time. The new evidence showed that Meta torrented "at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and LibGen," the authors' court filing said. And "Meta also previously torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from LibGen."

Meta illegaly downloaded 80+ terabytes of books from LibGen, Anna's Archive, and Z-library to train their AI models.

In 2010, Aaron Swartz downloaded only 70 GBs of articles from JSTOR (0.0875% of Meta). Faced $1 million in fine and 35 years in jail. Took his own life in 2013.

this is what copy editing is like

What’s everyone working on this weekend? I’m proofreading a really fun urban fantasy, sequel to the last thing I worked on.

Don’t use AI to write your book.

Queer editor of sci-fi, fantasy, mystery/thriller and horror. 20+ years of experience. Rates and info here:

thurmondediting.com

OpenAI says it has proof that Deepseek used its work without permission to create something meant to undermine and destroy its product.

On behalf of all the authors whose novels and stories were taken as training data, oh no that must be so hard for you.

+by quietly deciding whether or not to ignore that reader, this author RANTED in public about how dare they and “go read something you like”.

Noticing typos =/= dislike. Notifying the author… is a case to case thing and there are ways not to. But that rant? I’m never reading that author again.

Today I was reminded of the time I read an indie book I enjoyed very much, but which contained many, many typos.

I was going to read the sequel anyway, and looked the author up on socials. This author had received a message from a reader pointing out the typos and instead of dealing with it+

So, with me you get fast and good. I wish I could charge what my own personal definition of “not cheap” is, but in this economy that’s likely to never happen.

You know the old saying “Fast, good, cheap: pick two”? I consider myself cheap because my rates are at the bottom edge of EFA average… yet most indie authors would think me expensive because there are editors (native speakers living in US, CAN, etc.) charging .005 cents a word. That’s NOT a typo. 😬

I am in the unique position of being available to work full-time as a CE and also being unusually fast thanks to learning my trade at a company that required 80pg proofread in an hour. This means I’m still available even with that calendar.

Current state of the editing:

Confirmed:
2 novel proofreads
1 novel copyedit
1 screenplay proofread

Pending
1 short story proofread
1 novella copyedit
Contract with editing service

The illusion of being busy: none of these things are happening concurrently, and two are at least six weeks out.

I’m also open to work outside of direct contracts with indie authors — subcontracting for publishers or editorial teams, corporate projects like offering memos, employee handbooks, etc. (Corporate rates are higher than fiction rates.)

Hi, Bluesky — still moving over here from Threads. Are you in search of a proofreader or copyeditor for your speculative fiction novel or screenplay? I’m available. Rates, experience and testimonials here:

thurmondediting.com