I’ll start with my apologies for failing to produce a separate November round-up and squishing it in with the December edition – I have been pretty swamped for the last couple of months. As is December tradition, though, I have some stats to report.

This is the sixth (!) December round-up for Black Cat Editorial services. My 2023 projects had a combined word count of 3,278,487, which is an increase on 2022 (as I had hoped and anticipated). That means that my career total word count is rapidly approaching 20 million words – a number that would have seemed entirely ridiculous when I was starting out. My tutoring time dropped, which was expected, but it still clocked in at a solid 128 hours.

What I’ve been working on

November: I finished off several projects that I started in October. The first was the copy-edit of the second book in a cosy supernatural mystery series. The second was the proofread of the conclusion of a duology about an international assassin. The third was the copy-edit of a dystopian YA novel that has been reworked for a modern audience. I moved on to the proofread of a coming-of-age novella, and the copy-edit of a dark fantasy romance that had been almost completely rewritten since I provided a critique of it earlier in the year.

December: The beginning of the month saw me take on the proofread of a thriller about conspiracy at the top of the UK government. Alongside this, I continued the copy-edit of the dark fantasy romance – it was a beast of a novel that took me right up to Christmas. Two other projects will finish in January: one the proofread of a fictionalised memoir and the other the development edit of a YA fantasy novel.

Looking ahead

I managed to have some downtime during the festive period, but I’ll be more or less straight back to work in the new year.