This week LUV's spotlighting editor turned author Bev Katz Rosenbaum @bevrosenbaum LUV: You have worked as an editor at an established romance publisher, launched your own editorial service and written several books, both romance and young adult. What has being an editor taught you about being a writer and vice versa? Bev: Yes, as an editor, I worked at Harlequin for several years at the beginning of my career, and, more recently, at McGraw-Hill Ryerson, where I acquired short fiction for high school anthologies. I've been freelance editing for many years now. I specialize in developmental editing, or critiquing. I love coming up with concrete solutions to issues; clients love that I don't just point out problems. I work mostly with romance and young adult authors. And yes, along the way, I've published a few books--a couple romances and four novels for young people, two of which are romance-y and two of which are not. There was a long stretch between my first few books and my two most recent novels, the ones in print, which are are WHO IS TANSKY?, an MG about a middle school election not unlike the 2016 U.S. one, and I'M GOOD AND OTHER LIES, a YA about a teen and the dysfunctional family she's stuck with during Toronto's first COVID-19 lockdown. Not romances, LOL. Interestingly, the book I have on submission now--a historical YA/adult crossover--has brought me right back to my romance roots and I had an absolute blast writing it. But I'm too superstitious to say any more about it! I was so incredibly lucky at Harlequin to have amazing bosses who were great mentors. I was hired as an editorial assistant and learned so much as I worked my way up, instructed and encouraged by those amazing bosses. I think if you get that kind of guidance and you're then given the opportunity to critique large numbers of both effective and ineffective books, you just naturally develop instincts about what makes a book sing. I realized early on I could put those instincts to work as an author as well as an editor. And though it's a bit harder to have perspective on your own work, I can usually suss out what's working and not working in a manuscript of my own once I've let it rest for a bit after completion. Something else of note is that as an editor, you learn pretty quickly that there are no new ideas under the sun, just variations on ideas. And sometimes, there's just something in the zeitgeist that causes a few manuscripts on the same idea to come in at the same time. That taught me the importance of distinguishing my author self through voice. I've worked really hard to develop my voice, to make it really sharp and identifiable. Even though I often write about trauma and dysfunction and there's always a bit of jadedness to my voice, there's also always a lot of sly humour, too. Readers and reviewers often comment on my voice. As for how being an author has affected my editing work, I'd say it's made me super-sensitive to critique wording. I make special efforts to rave about all the great stuff in a manuscript--and there's always great stuff. And I'm very careful about my wording regarding areas that could benefit from rethinking.

Posted by LUV Team at 2023-09-25 19:00:31 UTC