I’m the owner and  sole full-time employee of Doc Holliday Wordsmithing, an editorial services business based in Richmond, Virginia. My primary background is in higher education. I have a PhD in English and Women’s Studies, and while getting my degrees and being a professor afterward, I logged about 18 years of teaching, research, writing, curriculum development, and generally doing what I could to keep the wheels spinning at the institutions where I worked.

I love academia. I love learning—both doing my own learning and playing midwife to others’ learning. I love students of all kinds, and especially college students. I even love (gasp!) administration: meetings, combining teamwork and solo work, manifesting shared goals and negotiating compromises in the face of competing goals. What I don’t love: The fact that those faculty who teach courses that involve the most time-consuming grading are often the most underappreciated and underpaid. The research machine, which too often requires college professors to produce marginally useful scholarship when their time would be better spent making significant contributions to students. Grading on weekends, when I’d rather be with my kid. The expectation that I’d be teaching more or less the same set of classes each year for 30+ years.

In 2007, I realized that tenure was looking less like a prize to be won and more like a sentence, so I left and opened an editorial services business. The Internet made that an astonishingly easy thing to do. I’ve talked to clients and potential clients all over the world, though most of my jobs have been in the U.S.  I’ve worked on academic research, fiction, how-to books, website copy, magazine articles, job and school application materials, and other genres. In some ways, working with clients has all of the benefits of teaching, without the drawbacks: I get to learn about all kinds of new topics and work with a wide range of writing and writers, and the feedback loop is much more rewarding because every client wants to produce the best document possible; no one is just hoping to pass the course. But I miss working with people in person, and I miss the long-term project of belonging to an organization and contributing to its success.

Somehow, the phrase “I want to work closer to home” sticks in my head‚ which sounds really funny when I’ve spent the past several years working in my house (or in coffee houses, or wherever I want).