It’s been a little more than a year since I started my business, which is absolutely wild. During that time I’ve worked with faculty and students across many fields, been exposed to scholarship I never knew existed, and grappled with the implications of AI in my field, all while operating a new business. It is wild to me that I’ve made it to this point. The learning curve has been steep, but I feel much more confident than I did a year ago.
For context, I have been writing and editing in academia for a long time. I finished my doctoral work in the (northern hemisphere) spring of 2025, after 7 years in my program. I knew when I started the business that I was a good editor, and wasn’t too concerned about that side of things. But running a business! That’s something I’ve never done before, and has been a journey.
I have had to learn a lot about marketing, SEO, social media, networking, web design… I’ve also learned a lot about what I hate (social media marketing) and what I enjoy (these blog posts, connecting with peers and clients 1:1, building my website). Astonishingly, it turns out one person can’t do the work of a team of 5! I’ve had to face my desire to do and be everything, and learn to choose where to put my energy. I am still learning, but I am much better at noticing where the Venn diagrams of “things I like to do” and “what seems to resonate with folks” intersect. I find content creation exhausting but I love, love, love chatting with people about their writing, and enjoy writing these longer blog posts. It feels more personal, you know?
Editing is also very cognitively taxing work, and I have had to pay very careful attention to my mental bandwidth and learn to stop when I need to. Learning to stop when my brain is too tired to continue is an ongoing process, but realizing that I’m saving myself work in the long run has helped quite a bit.
For the next year, my goals are to get to know more folks here in Australia, attend more live events, and, of course, edit more work! I would love to do more work in Aboriginal and Indigenous studies and non-Western queer and feminist studies. Additionally, if anyone’s doing any work on pirates… hit me up? I think I would die of joy.
Thanks for sticking with this ramble of a blog post. ’Til next time.
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