With Jesse Steele

If you're a surgeon and planning to write something, Betsy White should be your best friend.  Thankfully for the rest of us who lack a degree from medical school and have fingers better suited for a keyboard than precision surgery, Betsy also works in a wide variety of non-medical genres.  Betsy worked with McGraw Hill, East Carolina University School of Medicine and Recovery Communications (among others), but we're proud to have her as part of the Editorial Department staff.

JS: You've done a lot of work with medical texts. How did that happen? Do you have a background in medicine, or is it something you just came across?

BW: My husband is a physician, and when we got married he began an internship at Stanford University Hospital, and I went along. I took a temp job typing, then applied for an opening as a secretary in the Radiation Therapy department. I may have gotten the job on my Southern accent and youthful looks, although I had a good liberal-arts degree. When we moved to Virginia McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology hired me as a copyeditor, and from there I became a freelance editor for various clients including some university presses.

This happens to me a lot when I'm writing: I need an event to happen, or some characters to interact, but I can't figure out a way to make it happen naturally. I'll run through several scenarios, but toss them aside because each one feels forced or implausible. "That would never happen," I say, as my writing grinds to a halt. Meanwhile, my little slice of daily writing time is dwindling and I'm no further with my story. The solutio

With Jesse Steele

First of all, Peter Gelfan is not a magician.  You might believe so after reading some of the testimonials written about his editing work, but his abilities to pull a rabbit out of a hat or make the Statue of Liberty disappear are still unproven.  While that might make Peter a poor candidate to entertain at a child's birthday party, at the Editorial Department we are ecstatic to put the nearly two decades he has dedicated to editing, ghostwriting, and generally making good writing great to quality use on our client's manuscripts.

JS: What do you do when you’re not writing or editing?

PG: Not much. (Laughs) Photography. I’ve often thought I’ve learned more about writing from photography than I have from books about how to write. It’s the same idea. You’re taking a picture of a particular thing for a specific reason, not just snapping away. You include the elements around it that support the image and the idea. You frame and selectively focus to eliminate all the things that don’t support the picture or might distract from it.

 

JS: How did you end up as an editor? Was it your intention?