La rentrée: Refreshed and recharged

The French language has a wonderful word for the time of year when school starts, extracurricular activities ramp up, and many of us find excuses to visit our favourite stationery shop: la rentrée.

Re-entering, not returning, not back to. The potential of the future. The potential to change and to have changed. The potential to develop and to learn new things. To approach things, both professional and personal, in a different way. To see the future in a different way.

Photo of an open blank notebook lying flat on a wooden surface, with a pencil on the left and a plant on the right.

For many of us, September and October feel more like the start of a new year than does January. Some of us even prefer to start our planners in the fall, to review our professional lives (personal, too, but let’s just stick with the professional here), and plan for going forward. It’s not just returning to our work and businesses, but re-entering our professional lives, hopefully rejuvenated from some time off and with plans for and ideas about our work, our tools of our trade, our learning (our continuing professional development), and our communities. In effect, expanding our professional horizons. Not just looking at the same old horizons.

Some folks like to do a business micro retreat at this time of year and assess their way forward. Maybe some people will decide to add editing fiction to their services and will want to read lots of craft books and take at least one course. Others may decide to drop developmental editing from their services. Some of us will be looking at ramping up our hours, now that we’re free from some other commitments (e.g., caring commitments), others will be looking at cutting down on their hours, either with retirement on the horizon or moving into teaching or training, or even just because. Others may be making the jump from freelance editing to in-house editing.

Some people may even plan to get a four-footed editorial assistant to keep them company and, if that assistant is a puppy, to get them out of the house, and in that case, take it from me, uninterrupted work for a few months is unlikely.

The re-entering mentality enables us to think big, to think laterally, not just think of going back to the same old work and same old routines and same old ways of thinking.

How’s your version of la rentrée going a few weeks in, when the temperatures are dropping and the leaves are turning lovely colours in the northern hemisphere, and the temperatures are rising and the outdoors are starting to turn green in the southern hemisphere?

My Editing Globally colleagues and I expanded and relaunched our international editorial collective, thereby increasing our reach, our expertise, our experience, and the knowledge that comes from being a team. And increasing the fun while we are at it.

This blog post is based on a post previously published on the Editors Canada website on September 18, 2025.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

What is a collective?

It’s a good question, and there’s no really short answer.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a cooperative enterprise.”

It’s a group of entities, in this case professional editors, who share a common interest—providing professional editorial services—and who work together to achieve a common objective—providing inclusive, seamless, and thorough editorial services to clients around the world. 

In the case of the Editing Globally collective, we also assist and support each other in our own businesses, offering advice and skills when asked, and when confidentiality permits.

We are all independent editors with our own businesses who join forces, pooling our expertise and scheduling ability, including across time zones, to provide the services clients need and expect, be the project large or small, very urgent or ongoing.

Clients can hire us as a group for large projects. They can also hire one or two of us for smaller projects. Either way, clients receive the benefit of all of us being able to consult the others if needed.

Because of the various time zones we are in, and because of our individual working patterns, we can collectively provide a 24/7 service. 

Because of our different lived experiences, the different countries we live in and/or have lived in, we are committed to inclusivity and compassionate and sensitive relationships with our clients, wherever they are and whoever they are.

All of us, together as a group, and individually, polish your words, elevate your ideas, and respect your voice. No matter the project, no matter the subject matter, the words and the message are yours.

Another way of defining the Editing Globally collective is that we’re a group of professional editing friends, who like and respect each other and each other’s work and skills, and who combined forces to provide the best for clients. We also have some fun while doing it!

Editing Globally: Welcoming a new member

We have a new member! Well … ‘new’ might not be quite true as Martin has been working behind the scenes of Editing Globally from the outset: he developed our website and assisted us with many of the technical aspects of getting our collective up and running.

In the last few years he’s been gradually switching his focus from his IT job out in the world of full-time employment to becoming a self-employed editor and proofreader … and very successfully too as in the last nine months he has had a continuous flow of work to keep him busy.

As Etty’s husband, Martin is very familiar with the demands and delights of this profession and has worked on many projects with Etty in recent years. But his previous employment also prepared him well, with many years as a teacher, IT trainer, consultant, and project manager – all roles where he was responsible for producing clear and accurate documents. Martin’s experiences at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and running projects worldwide for an international financial systems organization make him a natural fit for the global nature of Editing Globally.

Martin also brings skills to complement the existing Editing Globally offering. He is particularly adept at anything to do with formatting, and he can design polished and professional publications from the ground up. Martin has worked across a broad range of subjects, but his specialisms in mathematics, physics, chemistry, information technology, and cybersecurity, among others, complement the already extensive range of subjects that Editing Globally can offer. His recent projects include formatting an international development report on climate risk; creating the references for a self-published book on the dangers of Brexit; proofreading, copy-editing and fact-checking many textbooks on subjects ranging from information and communications technologies for primary school to A level chemistry; fact-checking and proofreading UK football annuals; and designing from scratch a training manual on Botox and dermal fillers!

Martin is a Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), and he is also part of the team that manages the SfEP website. You can find out a bit more about him on the Editing Globally ‘Who we are’ page and read what some of his clients have said on the ‘Testimonials’ page. For more information about Martin and his skills, his website is the place to look.

We’re all very pleased to have Martin emerge from behind the scenes to join in our collective editorial adventures.

Editing Globally: The first year

It might be Valentine’s Day, but here at Editing Globally there’s another milestone to celebrate! Today marks the first anniversary of Editing Globally. It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since we launched, but in some respects, it feels like much longer too as we’ve all done so much, both separately and as part of a team, in that time. 

When we launched one year ago today, we did so with the mission statement of providing seamless and thorough editorial services by pooling our knowledge and resources. Our aim was to offer clients full support from manuscript evaluations right the way through to the finished product and to be able to take on large or very time-sensitive projects that just wouldn’t be possible for one editor to handle. 

Happily, we can report back that during the last year, we have done exactly that. We’ve worked on some great projects together, sometimes with just a couple of members taking part and other times with all five of us getting involved. The range of work we’ve taken on has been varied and interesting, too; we’ve been able to help clients with memoirs, novels, legal documents, marketing materials, blog posts, business reports, and plenty more. We’ve also learned a lot from each other. Being able to collaborate over pieces of work and see how each of us handles certain things has made all of us better editors.  

As we begin our second year of Editing Globally, we have lots of plans in the pipeline. Janet and Katherine can now provide training to other editors in a variety of subjects, including working with students, general copy-editing, fiction editing, working with independent authors, and working with publishers. There’s also a six-part blog series on working on dissertations and theses coming soon. At least three of us (Janet, Katherine, and Kelly) will be presenting at the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SFEP) conference in Lancaster in September too, after Janet and Katherine, along with friend and colleague Erin Brenner, led a very successful panel on rates at last year’s conference. And we recently started work for a large international firm, handling the proofreading of all external communications – a task that would be impossible for one editor to handle alone, not least because of the numerous time zones in which the client has offices. 

We are all looking forward to the opportunities and challenges ahead and to a year filled with interesting work, professional development, and most of all, friendship!