Work with the right editor for your book.
Get independent-market expertise, an international and commercial perspective, honest assessments, and mindful editing of your manuscript.
As a freelance editor of fiction and non-fiction books, focused on culture and identity, I want to collaborate with you! I provide professional, common-sense editing services to help you reach today’s global readers. Versatile in American- and British-English editing, I’m interested in non-fiction projects, literary fiction, women’s contemporary fiction, thrillers, middle-grade fiction, young adult fiction, and memoirs.
A global perspective.
As a full-time freelance editor and indexer, I work with start-up and traditional publishers—including HarperCollins UK, Simon and Schuster, Grove Atlantic, Penguin Random House, Hachette, Epigram Books—academic presses, literary publications, and independent authors in such countries as Australia, Trinidad, Germany, United States, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, South Africa, and Britain. I was previously the managing editor at Epigram Books and a news editor at The New York Times, South China Morning Post, and Los Angeles Times.
I love the challenge of new projects, new stories, and new environments—I’ve worked in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and now I’m based in Manila. My family are Teochew Chinese who fled Vietnam as refugees to New Zealand, where I was born and raised. We later immigrated to California. Everyone has a story; what’s yours?
Affiliations: Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP, U.K.); and ACES: The Society for Editing (U.S.); Columbia Publishing Course at Oxford; University of California, Los Angeles; Journalism & Media Studies Centre, University of Hong Kong; Asian American Journalists Association.
How can I help you?
Manuscript assessment
An assessment starts with a conversation. I want to know about your publishing goals, your struggles, and your processes. Then you’ll get a comprehensive big-picture analysis of your work, with suggestions to improve the structure, narrative, pacing, characterization, and more.
Developmental editing
We’ll begin with a manuscript assessment that aligns with your publishing goals. But we don’t stop there. We’ll continue together to make the big structural edits that address setting, themes, character, point of view, tension, pacing, and more fun narrative aspects. Dialogue is key at this stage.
Copy editing
I’ll focus on style, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and syntax here. The edits are more minimal than developmental or line editing, but just as important. Often copy editing is done at the same time as line editing, or they are interchangeable, but this can be a service in itself if you have a clean manuscript that needs polishing.
Line editing
We’ll get into flow, style, clarity, and more. I’ll check for consistencies or redundancies; weigh your word choices; see if the transitions and scenes are working; as well as fix grammar, punctuation, spelling, and syntax. You’ll have a chance to review all changes and discuss any of the edits.
Proofreading
If your manuscript is in its final stage and even laid out in book form, it’s always worth getting it proofread professionally and by someone with fresh eyes. It’s sometimes too easy, and often all too embarrassing, to miss a typo or an omitted preposition when you’ve read your own work for the tenth time.