The December blog post is traditionally my stats report, so here we go. This is the seventh December round-up for Black Cat Editorial Services, and 2025 will see the tenth anniversary of the launch of my freelance career – I should probably think of something to do to mark that milestone.

My trusty spreadsheet tells me my 2024 projects had a combined word count of 2,817,628, which is a slight decrease on 2023. I think my transition into more developmental work has made a difference here – the number of overall hours worked remains fairly steady. However, it does mean that I have smashed twenty million words as a career total so far. It’s been an absolute pleasure to work with twelve new clients in 2024, and I’ve seen my returning clients go from strength to strength.

What I’ve been working on

November: I finished off the critique of a reworked manuscript that I had previously provided a developmental edit for – it was interesting to see how the author had adapted the story and characters. I also completed the copy-edit of a darkly satirical absurdist speculative action thriller, and I’m sure I won’t see anything quite like it again (unless it gets a sequel…). My next project was the proofread of a memoir that won’t be for public consumption, and I was delighted to take on the copy-edit of the next installment of a publisher’s debut romantasy series, having worked on the first book earlier in the year.

December: I took some time off for the festive season, but prior to that, I had three very different copy-edits to complete. The first was a humorous contemporary novel; the second was a novella dealing with secrets and tensions within a family; and the third was a textbook on interpreting celestial movements. I’ll have two more copy-edits to take me into the new year: one an amusing mystery thriller and the other a modern take on Norse mythology.

What I read for fun

I was excited to start Alexandra Rowland’s Running Close to the Wind. I am a huge fan of Our Flag Means Death, and I have been looking for something to take the edge off the knowledge we won’t be getting a season three. Running Close to the Wind made me laugh out loud several times, and I enjoyed the feeling of constant mayhem, but I wished there was a little more depth to the narrator (as much as I appreciate a self-aware gremlin person).

My festive read was Tom Hindle’s The Murder Game. It’s a murder mystery set at a New Year’s Eve party, and so it seemed an appropriate choice for my sofa time during Twixmas. The short chapters and multiple perspectives really help keep the momentum going, and it’s a great way to drop in the puzzle pieces for the reader to put together. I think that fans of the genre will guess the culprit fairly early on, though.