My Secret Identity: The Editrix

Since I graduated from library school in May, I’ve been job hunting, working part-time (a situation I’ll explain in another post) and spending varying amounts of time on the best freelancing job ever – editing roleplaying game manuscripts for White Wolf Publishing.

A bit of background: I’ve been editing publications in some form or another most of my adult life. I was on the newspaper staff in high school. I helped found an undergraduate history journal in college, and I spent five years working for News & Information at Washington University, including working directly on the weekly newspaper the Record.

In 2004 I met one of my best friends, Eddy Webb, who was at that time an independent game designer and also working at WashU. I’d just recently discovered the world of pen-and-paper gaming, though I was a longtime computer gamer. Eddy had gotten the opportunity to write an RPG book for a licensed property and asked me if I wanted to edit the book. (He and I had had many grammar- and language-nerd chats in the months we’d known each other and he knew I was looking for something interesting to fill my free time.) Thus my career as a freelance editor began with the … quirky… RPG, Tomorrow Knights.

The experience was eye-opening. Editing prose is generally pretty easy – if you know the basic rules of English and have some kind of style guide, you just scan and look for errors and idiosyncrasies. Editing game rules, however, is trickier. There’s a bit of math-checking involved (does this number in this stat plus that number in that ability add up to the bonus indicated in this rule?); a bit of scenario-testing (if a character did this with this power, would it be likely to overpower other aspects of the game?); and a bit of flavor-tasting (does the supernatural effect described here fit in with the other pieces of the game world as written?). Some days it flows easier than others, but it’s always more of a challenge than any other kind of editing I’ve ever done.

Over the next few years, Eddy got more game work and often offered me the chance to edit. I got to work on his awesomely weird science fiction-noir game Midway City along with layout maestro Adam Jury. Eddy was eventually hired by White Wolf and in early 2008 (after some pestering on my part) gave me the opportunity to work for the company as a freelancer. I’d played WW’s games for about five years at that point and was familiar with their style and the semi-fantasy world of their World of Darkness game line (and to a lesser extent, their Exalted game). I had reference books and I was ready to go. My probationary job apparently went well, since I’ve been editing now for almost three years.

It’s not a thrilling job – there’s a lot of tiny nitpicks like fixing smart quotes or making sure “Willpower” is spelled out instead of abbreviated. I see a lot of really terrible purple prose (amateur romance novelists, you’ve got nothing on game writers). I’ve rewritten some manuscripts pretty heavily to remove evidence of poor English, close-minded attitudes, and concepts that are better suited to some other company’s games than White Wolf’s.

Despite all that, it’s a FUN job. Since the majority of projects I work on are set in the World of Darkness, an alternate reality that mirrors real life, I do a lot of fact-checking and research to make sure things have the ring of truth. I get to learn more about games that I enjoy playing. On one occasion I was even given the chance to write a chunk of an “in-character” religious text, drawing on my background in religious history.

While I continue the hunt for a library or education job, I’m glad I have the opportunity to keep my brain going with a deadline-driven, language- and research-heavy, deeply weird job. (Though I’m going to continue to use that Oxford comma on my blog, even if WW’s style guide won’t let me!)