GEOFF EDITS
I’ll help you edit your novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, and more. As an editor, I play many roles: funhouse mirror, ketamine shaman, intelligence agent, Sunday School teacher, and deep-clean custodian all at once. For early drafts, I start by finding ways to draw out half-conscious throughlines and resonances that resonate like heat spots, or centers of gravity, that direct me where the text needs to go. For later drafts, I deep-clean your prose and make it immaculate. One of my writers has described me as “the best editor I’ve ever worked with.”
Here’s what I offer for both fiction and nonfiction. Sometimes, we might not know immediately what’s most appropriate—developmental or line edits—but we will discuss this.
HOW THIS WORKS
Tell me the word count of your project
We determine what kind of editorial feedback you want. Is this project at the gestation stage, is it getting ready for agents or editors, or is it somewhere in between? I’ll read one or a few sample pages of your project and determine whether developmental or line edits will be most helpful.
Once you’ve had a chance to digest my edits, we’ll have a phone call to discuss.
DEVELOPMENTAL
EDITS
line EDITS
Syllabus
I’ll write, in a separate document, an exhaustive analysis of your project, including things like:
Structure: Structure is the most important thing in getting published. I will look at how you structure an argument. We’ll look at a character’s change over time, and straighten out the causality of your story for a clearer backbone. I provide this for short texts, individual chapters, and the entire book as a whole.
Organizing Logic: Publishable writing will have a unity of concept within its various components, and once the noise is deleted, the piece harmonizes. Often a writer can’t see this for themself. Like an analyst, I will apprehend the symphonic structure of your writing, tell you what notes you still need to hit, suggests deleting what’s unnecessary, and reorder things so that it flows like an unclogged drain.
Character Development: For narrative works, I’ll look at your characters and do a deep dive into their motivations, their inhibitions, what drives them to action, and how does that action change them. Like tying shoelaces, I’ll draw out their strands of desire and see how they can be braided for a satisfying story.
Argumentation: As a writer and editor of art criticism for over 13 years, I have academic training in how to make an argument. I’ll point out holes in logic, fallacies, or places where you conflated things that were in fact different. As a surveyor of contemporary theory and philosophy, I might bring new thinking or research from any relevant discourse that would add to your writing.
Style Training: Everyone has a style, even if they don’t know what it is yet. As an editor, my particular gift was noticing stylistic quirks in emerging writers, and encouraging them to take risks to develop them and write a piece that sounds undeniably their own.
I’ll write, in a separate document, an exhaustive analysis of your project, including things like:
Structure: Structure is the most important thing in getting published. I will look at how you structure an argument, whether your themes are speaking back to one another, and suggest where to delete whatever isn’t contributing to the harmony of the whole. We’ll look at a character’s change over time, and straighten out the causality of your story for a clearer backbone. I provide this for short texts, individual chapters, and the entire book as a whole.
Character Development: For narrative works, I’ll look at your characters and do a deep dive into their motivations, their inhibitions, what drives them to action, and how does that action change them. Like tying shoelaces, I’ll draw out their strands of desire and see how they can be braided for a satisfying story.
Argumentation: As a writer and editor of art criticism for over 13 years, I have academic training in how to make an argument. I’ll point out holes in logic, fallacies, or places where you conflated things that were in fact different. As a surveyor of contemporary theory and philosophy, I might bring new thinking or research from any relevant discourse that would add to your writing.
Style Training: Everyone has a style, even if they don’t know what it is yet. As an editor, my particular gift was noticing stylistic quirks in emerging writers, and encouraging them to take risks to develop them and write a piece that sounds undeniably their own.
Week 3: THE RAVE AS THERAPY
The concept of “harm reduction” doesn’t pretend that drugs are somehow good for you, but accepts harm as a basic premise, and tries to reduce it wherever it can. As drugs are a center of gravity for raving, we find a kind of pessimism here: if raving is escapism or hedonism, how can we justify centering it in our lives? These contradictions are at the heart of pleasure, which we can’t call good or bad, we just know we like it. By embracing what is harmful, EVE SEDGWICK offers a queer-coded way of thinking through these contradictions by using pleasure as a guide to transforming, repairing, and healing our relationships and our institutions.
Week 4: THE RAVE AS social resistance
The rave is often called a “third space” where there’s a lot of pressure for it to meet certain needs left unfulfilled at work or home. Today, there is a nation-wide collapse of community infrastructure, and the rave remains one of the last spontaneous, vernacular, and physical communities in an age when social media has colonized most of our social interactions. How can the rave respond to this vacuum? But if we turn raving into community service, doesn’t it become profoundly unfun? Here, we explore contemporary ways of understanding social problems, andits interventions, through readings by TOBY SHORIN. We will discuss how the rave can be an alternative to institutions, and the idea of politics not as propaganda but as ways of relating with one another.
Week 5: SADOMASOCHISM AND THE COMMONS
There is a lot of discussion about who belongs at the rave. Throughout the 2010s, movements like marriage equality and Black Lives Matter coincided with landmark efforts to make the rave a space for queer and Black people. Obviously no one’s trying to turn the party into a homo-ethno state. But while EDOUARD GLISSANT might advocate for a “creolization” of the dance floor, combining waves of raving from different cultures, we need to talk about the muscle gays and the normies at Nowadays because they are a real problem. Tolerance policies don’t seem to be working, and anti-harassment measures can feel anti-queer in places ostensibly for cruising. What if the solution is more exposure, more sex, and not less? AVGI SAKETOPOULOU’S theory of “limit consent” situates the rave as a mega group-BDSM scene, where a degree of consent is waived to open possibilities of transformation by encountering the radical other in friends and lovers and strangers. Maybe you found someone hot that you totally wrote off at first? Isn’t that so much of why we go out?
Week 6: the rave as anti-capitalist leisure
The very brutality of ‘industrial’ music mimics the violence that post-industrial capitalism has wrecked, reducing our bodies to machines, abstracting us as interchangeable as our monetary value, fragmenting our communities according to income and profession. Can the rave be a site where reclaim our bodies and spaces from capitalism? We read how HENRI LEFEBVRE articulated radical leisure as a “counter-cultural” space against capital. At the rave, the body’s indulgence in all five senses rehumanizes the body from the abstractions of machine labor. Enjoyment floods and displaces the drive for power or wealth accumulation. Here, the rave space, which is “appropriated” and rented from capitalist space, can be a site for political organization, bringing together class and identity, reactionaries and progressives, in a defense of leisure against capitalism, using “poetry and music” to awaken class consciousness and give the revolution something to fight for.
RESERVE YOUR SPOT
Submit the following form for payment instructions, and once it is received, we will reserve your spot. Class fees are non-refundable. ($175 Accessibility tickets are sold out.) Space is limited.