Button Belle Monthly Review: July 2024
Welcome, fellow writers, editors, and language enthusiasts! It’s the end of another month, can you believe it? My workload this month has been much heavier than it was in June and I couldn’t be happier with the progress I’ve been making.
Let me tell you more about it!
I’m finally editing again, yippee! I’ve had the pleasure of starting work on one of two manuscripts written by a dear friend of mine. It’s been so refreshing to be back in the habit of editing again – it feels like a nice big stretch after a long rest.
On top of editing, I have had the pleasure to beta-read not one, not two, but three* manuscripts this month; they’ve been a mixture of partials and fulls but an absolute treat regardless. From crime thrillers to fantasies to YA romances, I’ve had such a rich variety of genres to read through and they’ve been incredible so far. I’m so lucky to get to work alongside so many talented writers going into this next month.
Business-wise, I’ve finally set up a full dedicated account on Twitter to promote my services and connect with fellow editors and writers alike; and I finished designing a promotional poster and my business cards. So it’s been such a productive month in that sense as well. I participated in boosting pitches during SmallPitch last week and I’m looking forward to supporting more writers in future pitches too!
*Make that four! I received a request to beta-read another partial while writing this blog post, hehe.
This month I read The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings as my first-ever buddy read with a group of friends I’ve made on Twitter. It took me a while because balancing my current full-time job and my editing has left me with not much room for reading for leisure. I finally finished it last week and it was just fantastic; it’s such an introspective read.
Immediately after I finished that book, I was invited to join a different buddy read, so I’m currently enjoying The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna. It’s such a cosy and comfortable read so far, and I’m excited to delve further into it in August.
It seems that my TBR pile just won’t stop growing, and at a pace I can’t seem to keep up with; but I welcome the challenge!
Overall, this month has been incredibly uplifting and my motivation to build on my skills and experience is higher than ever. I can’t wait to take these projects into August and hopefully get my physical promotion on the go as well (i.e. handing out business cards and posters to local businesses.)
I’ll see you next week for another instalment of Punctuation Station! If you have any problem punctuation you would like to see explained and discussed, please leave a comment at the bottom of this post – I’m running quite low on punctuation I can talk about educationally, so before I bring that segment to a close I want to provide the opportunity for you to give your suggestions and questions that I can hopefully answer!Until then:
Keep practising, keep learning, and most importantly, keep writing!