Illustrated by Danette Byatt.
About me
Or how the careerism all began. It really is a surprise to what extent work has taken over my life. Not to say that I was once a directionless art school dropout who loved books and little else? During that time, I was placed as an office assistant at a graphic-design firm through a government on-the-job-training program. I proceeded to ignore my boss’s lectures on typography and white space. Sometime later the company landed a big contract designing leasing maps for malls. I had a knack for the proofreading, evidenced by the true joy I was experiencing finding errors in six-point type at one in the morning. That was it: proofreading forever.
After completing the editing certificate through Simon Fraser University’s Writing and Publishing Program in 2003, I got a job at Self-Counsel Press, a publisher of popular self-help business and legal titles, where I was trained by Barbara Kuhne (yes, very lucky that she was the senior editor at the time). This was followed by a longer stint at Whitecap Books, where I got more experience editing cookbooks than I could ever dream of. And I continued to learn from and form friendships with many wonderful editors in the city. I made the switch to freelancing in 2011.