Small Seeds Editing

📣 Currently booking for June 2026 and beyond! 🌿

Are you an indie author or academic writer looking for an editor? I’d love to work with you!

I offer line and copy edits, which means I:
👉 Keep an eye on spelling, punctuation, and grammar
👉️ Tighten wordy passages
👉️ Enhance word choice
👉️ Flag repetition or awkwardness
👉️ Give tips to improve pacing and flow

I edit:
📚 Fantasy (high/epic, urban, historical)
📚 YA
📚 Nonfiction
📚 and much more!

I work with complete manuscripts in Word format, applying amends with Track Changes. ✍️

Want to see if we’re a good fit? I offer FREE 1,000-word sample edits. This way you can get a feel for my editing style before you decide to proceed.

✉️ DM me if you have questions or would like a free sample edit!

📸 Petals & Lace Photography Studio ✨

[Alt: Text reads: "Now booking. Summer 2026. Book editing. [email protected]" In this black-and-white photo, a white woman with brown hair is sitting on a couch, reading a book.]

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Sign up to learn more about what's been happening at Small Seeds Editing and to be the first to know about sales and promos. 🌿 Emails sent out once each season.

For those who have already signed up, thank you! The first issue of The Acorn will be winging its way into your inbox on the winter solstice. ❄

Join here: www.smallseedsediting.com/contact

✨ Small Seeds Editing is participating in Hamilton Day for the FIFTH time! To help spread some city-wide love, I’m offering 10% off all editing services until November 30.

✨ DM for promo details and to chat about your WIP!

Discount is for Hamilton-based writers only. 🙂

📸 Petals & Lace Photography 🩵

Book censorship in North America is on the rise, particularly in the US. Overwhelmingly, the challenged books feature BIPOC and LGBTQ2IA+ characters, along with sexual content and themes of racism and feminism.

Representation matters. Diversity, equity, inclusion – it all matters.

And in these times of polycrisis, with fascism staring us in the face south of the border, reading banned books is an act of resistance.

Floating, floating, floating.

Last night, I was very excited to attend a talk by British writer Robert Macfarlane on his latest book, Is a River Alive?. I had high hopes that it'd be a deeply philosophical one that would inform and inspire. And did it ever.

I was enthralled from the start, when Macfarlane began by clarifying that he uses the pronoun "who" for rivers, not the usual "that" pronoun. (For non-editors, "who" refers to people, and "that" is used for inanimate objects.) Radical! Stuff like this is right up my alley. The thoughtfulness. The subversion. The obvious reverence for language (and rivers too).

For example, instead of asking, "Which are the rivers that flow through your life?" he asked, "Who are the rivers who flow through your life?" 🤯

The way we speak of something changes our relationship to it.

He spoke of the first Canadian river to have its rights declared, to be recognized as a living, rights-bearing being. (It's the Magpie River // Muteshekau Shipu in Quebec.)

The talk reminded me so much of a book I picked up on a whim from a community library while travelling in Ecuador in 2013. The book was called Should Trees Have Standing? by Christopher Stone and it was the first time I can recall being prompted to consider if the environment should be granted personhood status in the eyes of the law.

In his love letter to rivers, Macfarlane leans into a similar question, recognizing and revering rivers as those who heal, who humble, and who are inherently relational. “Falling back in love with rivers is urgent work,” he said gently, radically, as he encouraged us to participate in a moral reimagining of rivers.

Congrats and thank you to Jason Allen: The Environmental Urbanist for guiding the interview with openness and finesse, and to the Burlington Public Library and Ian Elliot of A Different Drummer Books.

I've been working with Vlad for five years now, editing well over 20 finance articles that he's went on to publish in Forbes. I'm excited every time he pops into my inbox, as he's a lovely person who continues to teach me a lot about running a small business. And I get to witness the evolution of his writing – one of the many perks of having long-term clients. ☺️

📣 BIRTHDAY SALE! Book before January 31st and get 10% off! 📣

Looking for a copy editor? DM or email me for a FREE sample edit and let's get this party started! 🥳

Photo by the incredibly talented Lindsay Miller at Petals & Lace Photography Studio. 🩵

Questions? Get in touch or ask them below!

[Alt text: Text reads: "Birthday sale. 10% off until Jan. 31st." A white woman in a white blouse is sitting on a stool and smiling. The lighting is warm and natural.]

📣 Currently booking for mid-January and February 2025!

Are you an indie author or academic writer looking for an editor? I’d love to work with you!

I offer line and copy edits, which means I:
👉 Keep an eye on spelling, punctuation, and grammar
👉️ Tighten wordy passages
👉️ Enhance word choice
👉️ Flag repetition or awkwardness
👉️ Give tips to improve pacing and flow

I edit:
📚 Fantasy (high/epic, urban, historical)
📚 YA
📚 Nonfiction
📚 and much more!

I work with complete manuscripts in Word format, applying amends with Track Changes. ✍️

Want to see if we’re a good fit? I offer FREE 1,000-word sample edits. This way you can get a feel for my editing style before you decide to proceed.

✉️ DM me if you have questions or would like a free sample edit!

📸 Petals & Lace Photography Studio

[Alt: Text reads: "Now booking. Jan, Feb 2025. Book editing. [email protected]" A white woman with brown hair is sitting at a small kitchen table, smiling, holding a mug, and reading a book.]

✨ Small Seeds is participating in Hamilton Day for the FOURTH time! To help spread some city-wide love, I’m offering 10% off all editing services until November 30.

✨ DM for promo details and to chat about your WIP!

Discount is for Hamilton-based writers only. 🙂

Times are tough out there. 🫂 Connection is key – especially for writers, as writing is often a solo venture. But it doesn’t have to be a lonely one. Here are some ideas to help you find your writing community and practice community care.

How do you find and connect with your ?✨

Are you a writer wanting more insight into the tools editors use to get the job done? Or an editor confused about the differences between a style sheet and style guide? Well, here ya go!

A style sheet records the decisions made by a copyeditor during the editing process. I create a style sheet for every single editing project, no matter the size, and this file is open throughout the entire process. Honestly, I would go bonkers without it!

A style sheet includes everything from physical descriptions of characters to spelling preferences (e.g., -ize or -ise suffixes) to tracking a story’s timeline and location details. It’s an extensive list of how to treat, for example, italics, headings, abbreviations, numbers, units of measurement, hyphenated words, date formats, and capitalization.

Its purpose? To ensure consistency. Since it’s a record of author preferences and editorial decisions, it can be referenced again and again to verify the treatment of editorial considerations – and to ensure that the same rules are applied no matter who’s handling the manuscript.

In short, a style sheet is a record of all style decisions for a manuscript.

Style guides, or style manuals, on the other hand, exist before editing begins. With extensive sections on editorial style, grammar, usage, and spelling, a style guide serves as a general reference. They contain rules for writing.

“The style guide prescribes what to do before work commences and the style sheet says what was done at the end of the work.” – Alexis Grewan, editor

The most widely used style guide among US book publishers is The Chicago Manual of Style (18th edition coming this September). Other heavy hitters include:

👉 The Canadian Press Stylebook; Editing Canadian English (both for Canadian publications)
👉 New Oxford Style Manual (for UK publications)
👉 The Associated Press Stylebook (for newspapers and magazines)
👉 Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (used by many social scientists)
👉 Truly, the list goes on.

So while style sheets and style guides aim to ensure consistency, they also have key differences that make both essential tools for copyeditors! ✨

Yes, I've been absent on here. What have I been up to, you may ask? Well, mostly, immersing myself in your awesome stories! Over the past little bit I've had the pleasure of copyediting a high fantasy manuscript, a lovely little short story, a sci-fi epic, and many blog posts as well! I've attended quite a few Editors Canada webinars, including a couple on the art (and science) of editing genre fiction, and a comprehensive webinar on tips for preparing for Editors Canada's copy and stylistic editing certification exams. So, there's lots in the works, even if it's crickets on here!

I've also been catching rays & singing with the life-giving . ✨

What have you been working on lately?

Pictured: My dream home office 🌿