I’ve worked with writers all my professional life. I started out in literary agencies, first as an assistant and then as an agent, where I learned how to dig for the potential in story ideas, hone manuscripts into saleable shape and support authors through all the ups and downs of a commercial writing career.
After an intense decade in London publishing I moved to Scotland, where I did a lot of freelance work, including talking about books on the radio, reviewing for the national press, editing for independent publishers and mentoring for the Scottish Book Trust New Writers’ scheme. In 2008 I was hired, along with former 2000AD editor David Bishop, to design a new Creative Writing MA for Edinburgh Napier University.
The MA we launched was pretty unusual: we put genre fiction at the heart of the course, replaced the usual peer-critique workshops with individual mentoring, and learned how to invent new teaching methods. Described by The Times as ‘a radical departure in creative writing’ and by students as ‘a life changing experience’ the MA now has an international reputation, recruiting aspiring novelists from all over the world. I also collaborated with the wonderful Nicole Peeler at Seton Hill University near Pittsburgh, on a new transatlantic postgraduate programme in Writing Popular Fiction, the first of its kind.
I loved teaching — but after nine years of full-time academia, I was ready to do things differently. I launched this consultancy in the summer of 2017, and currently have over a hundred individual writers on my books, along with commercial publishers such as Amazon’s Little A, Lake Union and 47North imprints, Audible Originals, the brilliant crowdfunding publisher Unbound and independent publishers including Head of Zeus and September.
I spend about half my working life doing structural editing, development editing and copyediting for publishers, specialising in science fiction, fantasy, crime/thrillers, literary fiction and memoir. For the rest of the time, I have the freedom to work directly with individual writers wherever they are and whatever their circumstances; to stick with them for as little or long a time as it takes to get to where they need to be, and to focus wholly on their work and on the unique development journey of each potential book.
I live with my partner and our multi-talented canine assistant in a tiny harbour village on the Galloway coast, at the far southwestern tip of Scotland, which is a perfect spot for rambling around between manuscripts. When I’m not there, I’m usually in my trusty campervan, en route to a client.
There are some testimonials and examples below to give you a flavour of the range of work I do, but if you want to find out more, I’d love to hear from you! If you’d like to talk about your writing and see if I can help, contact me and I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.