Well, $%^#, where’d the year go?

Well, clearly my plan to blog about my work every month went to pot. But as Fred and Ginger say: Pick yourself up, brush yourself off, start all over again.

I’m reevaluating whether this monthly tactic is best for 2022, or if another way will work better, but for now, here are some of the highlights that happened in the last quarter of 2021:

• Worked on several stories for the College of Education at the University of Maryland, one of my longest-term clients. After our interview about a lecture he gave, Professor Cam Scribner told me: “you really nailed down all of the exact sort of complexities that I would have brought up if we were teaching in a graduate seminar.”

• Wrote a story for Goucher College on alumni entrepreneurs in the food business. I used to write a lot of food stories in my newspaper days, then I wrote for the now-defunct food section of Paste Magazine, but I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to write content marketing or copy about food. It’s a topic near and dear to my heart, so I’d love to get back into it.

• My friend Melanie Padgett Powers, who is the managing editor of Dateline Federation Magazine for the Hemophilia Federation of America, recruited me for a piece on hemophilia families and adoptions. It was a pleasure getting to speak to the families.

• I wrote a piece for marketing recruitment agency Torchlight Hire on what to know about paying a freelance writer. Writers are notoriously undervalued, and I hope marketing directors will pay attention and heed my words. For example, promising “great exposure,” but no/meager pay just doesn’t work. You wouldn’t expect your plumber/dentist/hairdresser to work for “exposure,” would you?

• Wrote two pieces for ASJA Magazine, and continued my work as editor of the Weekly newsletter. One member described it as: “Lots of meaty information told in a brief, breezy style.”

• Continued working as blog editor and strategist with designer Christy Batta. I love helping a business, whether a solo business or a large corporation, tell its stories. And as much as I enjoy doing the actual writing myself, I love the process of guiding and supporting someone else through the process of just as much.

In 2022, my goals include doing more content strategy, diving back into the food niche, continuing to build a niche in ad tech, writing even more stories about interesting people doing fascinating things, and building great relationships with clients and fellow writers and editors. You can email me at hello@redpeneditorial.co, or find me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Wishing you a happy, healthy New Year.

June is Bustin' Out All Over

God bless any opportunity for a good classic musical reference.

June started out rough. I did that thing where you take on ALL THE WORK, thanks to the feast or famine mentality that many of us independent business owners are trying to shed, and found myself very much — cue up your best Paul Hollywood — overworked. Fortunately, all’s well that end’s well. Here’s what happened in the month of the pearl and the rose.

• Completed work on my current project with Client Z, editing a sustainability and DE&I report.

• Wrote a story for the University of Maryland College of Education, a longtime client, on graduating during a pandemic. Publication date pending.

• Wrote a story for another longtime client, Northern Virginia Magazine, on something that’s on the mind of every parent of a baby or toddler — tips for finding good daycare.

• In honor of Pride Month, supported editing client Christy Batta as she explored five LGBTQ+ designers she admires.

• Through ASJA, the Association of Journalists & Authors, where I serve as editor of the weekly newsletter, I was referred to marketing recruitment agency Torchlight Hire. This referral resulted in an assignment, writing a blog post on what hiring managers need to know about paying a freelance writer.

• Completed a story for CASE, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, on advancement offices’ plans for the September return to on-campus work.

• Got my second COVID-19 vaccine shot. If you haven’t done so, get vaccinated, get vaccinated, get vaccinated.

What's Going On... and what will be

So, it’s been a while. Between client work, marketing, and parenting an increasingly active toddler, actually doing work on my own content seems to be the thing that falls by the wayside. I would really like to fix this.

Last week, I was listening to the 100th episode of my favorite freelancing podcast, Deliberate Freelancer, hosted by fellow writer and editor Melanie Padgett Powers (who also happens to be a neighbor and a real life friend). She was interviewing another freelance writing heroine, Jennifer Goforth Gregory, and they were talking about keeping portfolios updated. Melanie, who as a managing editor, often hires writers, made a good point that she wants to know what folks have been publishing recently. It makes perfect sense.

I, you may have noticed, organize my clips by topic. And since I have more than a thousand bylines to my name, and no one wants me to share all of those, I limit my clips to highlights. But after listening to the Deliberate Freelancer episode, I’ve decided to add a “Recent Clips” section to my work page. So that’s something new coming up here at Red Pen Editorial Services.

But here’s the tiny glitch (besides the fact that I’m not always good about diligently updating my portfolio). As the company name suggests, I provide additional services beyond writing, i.e. editing. Even when I am writing, not all of my work is bylined. And some of my clients don’t even allow me to state publicly that I’ve written for them, or edited their work. That’s a whole ball of wax we’ll dive into at a later date. Frankly, I think it’s a lot of piffle, but with clients and toddlers, you learn to pick your battles.

Which leads to Goal #2. Each month, I want to write a post to share what I’ve been up to, in a way that doesn’t violate any of my contract terms. For instance, this spring, a few of my projects included copy editing DE&I and sustainability reports for a major media company, writing a feature for an education association and a couple of profiles for alumni magazines (all of which I can link upon publication), writing a blog post on addressable TV advertising vs OTT advertising for an ad tech company (which earned a featured snippet on Google), publishing a piece for one of my regular clients, Northern Virginia Magazine, on preparing children for the return to school, and have continued to serve as the volunteer editor of the ASJA Weekly newsletter editor for the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

I also hope to share interesting articles I’ve read, learning experiences (such as attending the ASJA virtual conference), and maybe even some lessons and frustrations. I’m excited to keep you updated! In advance, thanks for riding along with me.

All the best,

Holly

Future Teacher Never Stops Learning

“Many of these young people are not receiving the educational resources they should, and they don't even know that they should receive these resources. I believe education should give young folks the ability to critically question and engage with the world around them. I've been very fortunate to have had opportunities to work with young people who are able to say, "I don't like this. What if we did it this way instead?"

- Landon Wilson, University of Maryland College of Education Class of 2019, Philip Merrill Presidential Scholar 

A Purpose-Driven Couple

On its face, this was a pretty straightforward assignment I received from Goucher College: Write a short profile of an alum. He founded a strategy risk and insurance advisory firm. He's married to another Goucher alumna. Go to. 

In reality, working on the story was a good reminder of some of the lessons I've picked up in my years as a writer and journalist:

• Don't be afraid to ask the dumb questions: I have no earthly idea what "strategy risk and insurance advisory firm" means. 
• Don't be stymied by the assignment. Find a way to make the story interesting to a wide readership. He works in risk management. Okay. I could ask him some very dry, technical questions ... or I could ask what sort of role risk has played in his personal life. Hey, it's not a trade magazine. 
• Find the romance. Who's not a sucker for a love story? The fact that the story set up my primary subject's partner to be an equal participant was fortuitous. And with a line like "we disliked each other immediately," I knew there was a good story there. 
• Find the humanity. I don't care for stories that are just about someone's job. I want to know about the person behind the job. I had a colleague who used to ask subjects "what's your origin story?" I shamelessly stole that move, and I use it in as many interviews as I can. I don't want to just know what you do, I want to know what drives you to do it. 

I'm fairly pleased with how the story turned out. But read it for yourself. 

https://blogs.goucher.edu/magazine/living-lives-of-purpose/

Family Planning: Helping Baby Boomers Age in Peace

There are certain things we just don't want to think about. Like the fact that most of us will grow old, plenty of us will get sick, and all of us will eventually die. 

And now that I've succeeded in thoroughly brightening your day, here's the point: While the aging/illness/going down the back side of the hill part of life can be an intimidating prospect, with some open communication and good planning, it doesn't have to be so overwhelming.

The emotions are complicated, but the main question is pretty simple: What do you want? What kind of health care? What are your financial plans? What are your desires for your life? 

Writing this story, Protecting Our Parents, for Northern Virginia Magazine was educational for me. Like many of you, my Baby Boomer parents are ... well, they're not getting younger, despite the fact that they're both strong and in good health, knock wood, and the fact that my mother looks better than a lot of you 40-somethings out there. Seriously. 

And that's the time to have the conversations discussed in this article. So I hope this article, and its accompanying sidebars, is enlightening, informative, and genuinely helpful to some families. 

Hitting the Accent

This is an interesting article from the June 23, 2018 Sunday New York Times. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/insider/mexico-world-cup-spanish-accent-marks.html

Paulina Chavira, an editor at The New York Times en Español in the Mexico City bureau, lobbied to have proper accents added to the jerseys of the Mexican National soccer (fútbol) team. The lack of accent, the article clarifies, is akin to a spelling error. 

"A simple accent may seem trivial for a lot of people, but its presence or its absence changes the way we pronounce a word, and sometimes even its meaning," Chavira is quoted as saying. 

Indeed, if we are as dedicated as we say we are to representing people as they wish to be represented - such as using a person's pronoun of choice - shouldn't it be just as important to be certain we're spelling that person's name correctly? It's a small change, but it can make a big difference to someone. 

Women Who Break Things

Okay, not "things," like dishes. Codes. Women who break codes. 

I had the pleasure of writing about "code girls" for Goucher College. In the 1940's, young women from a number of schools, including Goucher, were recruited as code breakers to decipher complex messages from the German Enigma machines. Their work, often overlooked, contributed directly to the Allied victory in Europe in World War II. 

If you watched The Bletchley Circle on PBS, it's a little like that but with less murder (hopefully) and fewer English accents. 

See the full story below or link here: Goucher's Secret 'Code Girls' Helped End World War II

Note: This story is not bylined. 

Discovering Unknown Women Writers

One of the best ways to become a better writer is to read more. While the deluge of social media certainly spoonfeeds (and sometimes force feeds) us plenty of options for reading, sometimes we need to seek things out, rather than just reading what's readily available.

I was intrigued by this obituary in the June 22 New York Times, about Nina Baym, a professor who dedicated her career to the discovery of unknown women writers. In college, I chose a major in women's studies because I was interested in looking at history, literature, culture, etc. through a lens that was different from what I'd always studied previously. (And because I was flunking statistics, which pretty much screwed my psych major. #brutalhonesty). 

From the obituary, by writer Neil Genzingler, a quote from Professor Baym:

“Today we hear of this literature, if at all, chiefly through detractors who deplore the feminizing — and hence degradation — of the noble art of letters. A segment of literary history is thus lost to us, a segment that may be of special interest today as we seek to recover and understand the experiences of women.
I have not unearthed a forgotten Jane Austen or George Eliot, or hit upon even one novel that I would propose to set alongside ‘The Scarlet Letter.’ Yet I cannot avoid the belief that ‘purely’ literary criteria, as they have been employed to identify the best American works, have inevitably had a bias in favor of things male — in favor, say, of whaling ships rather than the sewing circle as a symbol of the human community; in favor of satires on domineering mothers, shrewish wives, or betraying mistresses rather than tyrannical fathers, abusive husbands, or philandering suitors.”

Please read Professor Baym's obituary in full here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/obituaries/nina-baym-who-brought-novels-by-women-to-light-dies-at-82.html
 

Discussion questions: 
1) Tell us about a little-known female writer (or writer of color, LGBT writer, etc) you admire and why. How did you come to know of this person's work?
2) What do you think the value is in uncovering the work of writers who are not considered to be part of the literary canon, or otherwise well-known?
3) Why was Professor Baym's quest to discover the work of unknown female authors important? Or, conversely, why was it unimportant?